Peter Clenny - Dwarves as Art - Final Portfolio Revision

This is a masterfully crafted ASCII video game. All craftsdwarfship is of the highest quality. It menaces with spikes of passion and labor. On the item is an image of dwarves. The dwarves are burning.

In recent years, as video games have become more popular in the mainstream, debate over their status as a form of art on par with film and literature has increased drastically. Ultimately this comes down to the individual's idea of what defines something as art, so this blogpost wouldn't make much sense without my own opinion on what it means for something to be art.

To me, art is something that is made with passion: a creation made from a desire to create, rather than a desire to make money. This doesn't mean that art can't be made for money; many of the world's greatest works of art (such as the works of Michelangelo or Picasso) were created to put food on their makers' tables, but even though they sold their skills they still put everything they had into those works.

The argument I intend to make here is that certain games such as Dwarf Fortress are more worthy of being labeled as art than certain among their mainstream AAA brethren (like whatever this fiscal quarter's iteration of Call of Duty is) because they are made more out of passion than greed.
However, it's important to remember that these are only examples. I'm not saying that all AAA games are made solely out of greed or that all indie games are made with passion; my stance on the subject is that every game is made with a blend of the two, and if "artiness" is passion versus greed, assuming we can determine the creator's passion for their work by how much of their time and effort they devote to it or from the amount of cost-inefficient features, we should be able to determine how "arty" something is by comparing and contrasting those traits to something else.

From a quick analysis of Dwarf Fortress and a randomly selected Call of Duty title:

Dwarf Fortress
- Free
- Tarn Adams, the game's creator, works on it full time and lives entirely off donations from fans
- Has been in constant development for 8 years
- Free

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3
- ~$60 at release
- 4 instances of paid downloadable content
- Developers all moved on to other projects after the game was no longer profitable

Honestly, just the fact that Dwarf Fortress is free shows that it's a work of passion. Why else would you make something that you don't get paid for?

There's also the matter of complexity: passionate creations are more likely to be more complex since there's no reason to shave off as much cost as possible. Dwarf Fortress is one of the most complex games ever, yet as of this writing its creator estimates that it's still only about 40% done!
In Call of Duty, the players roam around one of a fairly small number of predefined areas and complete objectives to score points; in Dwarf Fortress, the game procedurally generates an entire planet!

The world is simulated down to what layers of stone make up the different regions and what species of plant and animal live there, and it even uses simulations of erosion to determine the course of rivers and weather simulations to determine how much rainfall an area gets, determining whether it's a desert, rainforest, or anything in between.

Generation of geological features is only the first step: once the world is finished, the game procedurally generates a number of civilizations and powerful "megabeasts" before placing them in the world. It then simulates the interactions between these various entities; civilizations will expand their territory and go to war with each other if they have differing moral values, megabeasts will wander the wilds and be slain by mighty heroes (or, more often than not, particularly lucky peasants), and all sorts of other things will happen that work together to knit the tapestry of history.

Entire dynasties rise and fall, legendary heroes are born and die, kingdoms go to war and conquer or are conquered themselves, and all this is just to set things up for the real game. The vast majority of these simulations won't even have any impact at all on your experience while playing; some unimportant shepherd living on the other side of an impassable mountain range getting eaten by a dragon won't have any effect on your fortress, but the game simulates it anyway because it adds to the flavor of the world.

You're not likely to see that kind of complexity in a game made more to make money than simply to be; it's just not cost-effective. Granted, some AAA games are more complex than others, but as I mentioned above passion and price come in different mixes.
As an example, Metal Gear Solid 2 was made to make money, but from its complexity you can see that a lot of passion went into it as well. A developer who only cares about making money wouldn't bother including a parrot that starts mimicking the enemy alert sound effect if you get caught nearby enough times. That's the kind of addition you only make because you want to and, as I mentioned before, "Art" is best defined as something you make because you want to.