I'm really surprised that the author didn't get into one of the main ways a fortress fails. It's humming along smoothly and then suddenly the population doubles in size when a group of settlers (VC cash) arrives and the whole place goes to hell from disorganization and growing pains.
Jamie Zawinski describes it as how a few people who want to work to make a company successful eventually attract a whole bunch of people who want to work for a successful company.
Would love to hear honest story telling from really successful startup including FB, Dropbox and even some of the smaller players on this.
Would it make sense to just go full hacker culture like FB from the beginning without any serious management layer and goes small team instead of big team?
Best you're going to get is a Rashomon-style retelling. Anybody early on has retold the story so many times - pitching new hires, onboarding the next wave of employees, and then the next wave, and then the next wave - that they probably don't really remember the real thing very clearly anymore.
Then there's also the pressure to agree to a similar narrative, not necessarily in a bad way, just like any couple has agreed on a how they met story, they've been telling it for so long and had the arguments about "did that happen?" that the story has been set. Who knows what happened.
You'd have to assemble a collage of The Official Story, some of the weirder first interviews the group gave in the press, early non-hires who interviewed and caught a glimpse of a weird snapshot, the inevitable disgruntled folk (who may not inevitably wrong).
A bit of duplicated effort due to inadequate communication is far better than subgroups being forced to use outside systems that they can't modify to automate common tasks.
Fun analogy. One of my favorite mechanics in Dwarf Fortress is stress. Dwarves have thoughts which are contingent upon outside influences (fatigue, other dwarves, etc.) [1]. Failure to keep your dwarves happy results in a loss of productivity. Left untreated, your dwarves can eventually go insane and destroy everything you've built [2].
Fortunately, I've never seen this manifest in a startup before my own eyes (at least in an extreme way), but I'm sure someone else has a story to share.
"Fortunately, I've never seen this manifest in a startup before my own eyes (at least in an extreme way)"
That's because, however tough the entrepreneurship may seem, the businesses are part of the larger society which is collectively protected to a high degree from many society-devastating causes. I've mentioned this before¹: "The world around you and your loved ones is relatively safe thanks to multitude of operating services that make sure that the individuals roaming free are not that crazy, not that malevolent, not that contagious, and in short will not have that much of a negative impact on society at large (which includes you)." Of course, the environment of the Dwarf Fortress does not promise you that kind of protection.
What's great about this analogy is that Unicorns are officially Bad News for dwarfs, and will frequently gore and trample everyone in your fortress to death.
Dwarf Fortress is not particularly difficult once you figure out the obtuse interface. It's only a little bit more difficult than Minecraft without the boss fights. I got bored in a few months. Admittedly, much of this was the tendency of the game to slow my machine to a dead crawl. Once you're proficient at avoiding the pitfalls, the only really interesting thing to do is to keep growing the fortress. Sadly, the performance cliff is steep.
There is of course a certain extent to which you can adjust how difficult the game will be for you, such as where you embark or just restricting your playstyle, but ultimately coming up with goals is necessary to keep enjoying the game. I never last very long myself...
The problem with embark locations is that they mostly just increase the size of the initial difficulty cliff. The game still settles down to more or less the same amount of challenge once you've dug in. Maybe your migrant waves are smaller after wading through the river full of zombie hippos, but once the survivors get indoors they're as safe as anywhere else.
I'd guess that the average Dwarf Fortress erm, Fortress, and the average startup fail at about the same rate. For, basically, the same reasons: too many unknowns, random events and morale.
OT, but for those of use who know kids into Minecraft, is DF a good thing for them to graduate to? KSP maybe better? Seems like there's a family of games here that have a progression of sophistication.
I would lean toward Kerbal Space Program. It has a lot of depth and a fun style, and apparently some educational value as well [1][2].
You know, the obtuse interface and ASCII graphics of Dwarf Fortress don't bother me but they do hold me back from recommending it. I grew up on the Ultima series, MUDs and old-school roguelikes so my standards here are a bit dated. For a kid growing up in the age of Dark Souls III, a game like Dwarf Fortress might be relentlessly difficult to get into.
There is a serious sociopathic bent to both DF and its community. I wouldn't recommend it to your kids unless you had played it enough to know what you are getting them in to. Maybe start by reading http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=91093.0
Having played both Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft, I think that there are a lot of different people who enjoy many different things about Minecraft. Dwarf Fortress doesn't fulfill all the same roles, so depending on your preferences, you might like it more or less. I don't really see it as progression personally, although they do share a subset of their audiences.
The appeal Dwarf Fortress has over Minecraft is its depth, detail, and propensity for interactive story telling. If you just want to futz around and build things, Minecraft is probably much better.
Just add mods. Feed The Beast has nice modpacks and I loved watching direwolf20.
Dwarf Fortress is fun, but different. It feels more like a narrative generator to me.
Edit: unsure why this is downvoted. People don't 'graduate' to games, each one appeals to people for different reasons. If you want your kids to play a more educational game, minecraft with mods is that game.
I would give KSP a shot, since it has direct lessons to learn about physics, aerodynamics, celestial mechanics, etc that many aerospace engineers don't have intuition about. The simulation is good enough that I learned a ton about celestial mechanics as a PhD student in aerospace.
Thanks, but yeah, someone else mentioned it and the playvid I checked out made it look a little more battle-oriented than what I think is relevant, like a hybrid of The Sims and StarCraft.
Kerbal Space Program is fantastic, I'll always recommend that. It might be worth checking out Gnomoria too; it's a lot easier to get started with (IMO) than Dwarf Fortress, but still provides a lot of mechanical depth.
There are actually a surprising number of detailed graphics mods you can get for Dwarf Fortress (although not wanting to fiddle with modding the game is entirely understandable).
Would you say DF could be a graduation up from KSP, or am I just barking up the wrong tree thinking they're related more than they are (never played MC, DF or KSP)?
