In part one, we get some coffee going and start in the swamp.

In February of 2011 Tarn and Zach Adams, creators of Dwarf Fortress, agreed to an interview I’d proposed for an article in PORK Magazine. They were kind enough to take a ferry boat to Seattle’s Pioneer Square and, as you’ll hear, they took their coffee black. This is the raw audio which I recorded for the article.
 

 
The two pieces of music heard in this interview are interpretations of Tarn Adams’ in-game music arranged for piano by Sirocco.
 

Part Two: Embracing Defeat

In the second half, Tarn teaches me to love the loss.

In addition to articulating the differences between Dwarf Fortress and other games, which prove both numerous and vast, Tarn and Zach forecast the future of their lifelong commitments to it.
 

 
The two pieces of music heard in this interview are interpretations of Tarn Adams’ in-game music arranged for piano by Sirocco.

“Rat kings are phenomena said to arise when a number of rats become intertwined at their tails, which become stuck together with blood, dirt, ice, excrement or simply knotted. The animals reputedly grow together while joined at the tails.”

(from Rat King at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_king_%28folklore%29 )

In an alternate universe, deleting spam and removing spambots could elicit the same, simple pleasure of pulling weeds or removing pests, but of course it doesn’t because we can’t love the hostile ingenuity of advertisers like we can love it in plants and small animals.

Thanks for passing this along, but somewhere along the line, one of the people forwarding this thing broke it. The error is supposed to be in the subject line (the instructions): “Find the error, its impossible” was the original subject line, missing the apostrophe in “it’s”. The Snopes article I read on this also mentions that the instructional line isn’t actually a compound sentence, and therefore shouldn’t be joined with a comma.  It should be a semicolon or two wholly separate sentences.

…but, I guess, now I’m left with only a few other options:

• There’s no period punctuating either the subject line or the instructions contained in the message body.
• An entire sentence in all-caps is always wrong, except on traffic signs, Caligraphs, and military communications.
• GMT +00:00 is not a real time measurement on any clock.
• According to the W3C, subsequent “FWD”s are redundant and unnecessary. This email contains four of them.
• The timestamps are punctuated incorrectly. They should have periods between the letters, ie: a.m. / p.m. etc.
• The problems with this sentence are numerous and self-evident:

Forward  this to at least 5 people with the title 'Find  the error,
its impossible', and when you click  'Send', the answer will be right
in front of  your  eyes!

• Near the bottom of this email, you’ll find this: “Do you have a slow PC? Try free scan!” (presumably missing an “a” or an “our”).
• We’re told that 80% of UCDS students can’t find the error (the kind of non-citation which is, invariably, bullshit when found in a forward). The only “UCDS” I could find was a defunct elementary school modeled on for-profit university systems like VoTech and Arts Academies. Maybe the original post meant to say, “UCSD” for the University of San Diego? We’ll never know.
• There’s no punctuation in “Sent via DROID on Verizon Wireless”. I’d point out that it’s merely the second half of a complete sentence, but I don’t want to be, you know, picky about this.

But, lastly, the most important error contained in this forward is this one:

• In our terse little instructions, the only morsel of guidance we can possibly utilize in our quest for the truth, there’s no provision of any kind that the error we’re meant to seek is even contained in the body of the email itself. The original email’s device intended to distract us with a perfect sequence of numbers while a punctuation error (or two, or maybe three) lurked nearby, hoping to escape our notice. But now, we’re given a forward that’s been infected by dozens if not hundreds of cell phone clients and copy-paste format glitches, there are dozens if not hundreds of possible errors including inconsistent spaces in the number sequence itself. There’s been an awful inversion of the one true sentence, and it’s this: although it doesn’t say much, it does say “the error”, meaning that there is only one, and we should be looking for it;  the other, smaller mistakes don’t matter and I should be looking for The Error. Of course, The Error, hidden in plainer sight than any subject line or even our own faces in our mirrors, is that all human endeavor is folly. Through hard work, sacrifice, toil and triumphant brilliance, we’ve created an infinitely complex system of unfathomable capability, totally unprecedented in the history of this universe or any other, and we use it to waste our own time using broken puzzles with no solutions. The forward itself is The Error. I won’t be repeating this mistake.

With love,
Richard

PS: Here’s the Snopes article.
http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/trivia/finderror.asp

//=// Original email text continues below //==//

Sent via DROID on Verizon Wireless

-----Original message-----

    From: █████████@aol.com
    To: █████████@bresnan.net, █████████@hotmail.com, █████████@alltel.blackberry.com, █████████@hotmail.com, █████████@aol.com
    Sent: Fri, Aug 5, 2011 18:00:21 GMT+00:00
    Subject: Fwd: Find the error, it's impossible

    -----Original Message-----
    From: █████████@aol.com
    To: █████████@gmail.com; █████████@Hotmail.com; █████████@hotmail.com; █████████@Hotmail.com; █████████@aol.com
    Sent: Fri, Aug 5, 2011 8:35 am
    Subject: Fwd: Find the error, it's impossible

    -----Original Message-----
    From: █████████@gmail.com
    To: █████████@aol.com; █████████@simacgc.com; █████████@yahoo.com; █████████@gmail.com; █████████@bresnan.net
    Sent: Tue, Aug 2, 2011 8:15 am
    Subject: Fwd: Fw: Fw: Find the error, it's impossible

    ---------- Forwarded message ----------
    From:  █████████.net
    Date: Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 3:38 PM
    Subject: Fw: Fw: Fw: Find the error, it's impossible
    To: █████████@live.com
    Cc: █████████@shaw.ca

    THIS DROVE  ME CRAZY!! Even more than I already AM!  Smile!!

    Find the  error, its impossible

    1 2 3 4 5  6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19  20

    Did you  know that 80% of UCDS students could not find  the error above?

    Forward  this to at least 5 people with the title 'Find  the error,
    its impossible', and when you click  'Send', the answer will be right
    in front of  your  eyes!

    ________________________________

    ________________________________

    No virus found in this incoming message.
    Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
    Version: 8.5.449 / Virus Database: 271.1.1/3796 - Release Date:
    07/29/11 06:34:00

    ________________________________
    I am using the Free version of SPAMfighter.
    SPAMfighter has removed 1080 of my spam emails to date.

    Do you have a slow PC? Try free scan!

A tuna struggles its entire life for revenge, finally finding its way into the famous sushi bar. When the fish finally sees the famous sushi chef, it cries out: “You killed my father!”

The chef says, “That’s my business, fish.”

The tuna thinks for a moment (amazed that a human can speak English) and says “Very well. Then I challenge you to a game of Go. If I win, you must stop being a chef forever. And maybe work at an Aquarium.”

“And if I win?” asks the chef, assembling the board for their game.

The fish replies, “Then I will die honorably as food for your customers.”

So they sit and begin to play. This tuna has played Go all its life, and in a few turns the tuna has the chef beaten.

“Looks like I win,” says the fish. The chef nods and plunges his knife into the tuna’s belly.

“But I won!” says the tuna.

“So did you father,” says the chef.

Appendix: The game “Go” is kind of like chess. When I first heard the joke, the person telling it used chess, but it really should be Go instead, and I think that all jokes should have a small appendix, like this.

GO at Wipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_%28game%29

At the airport, we shared a minute together before departing, and I promised her that I wouldn’t obsess over reviews of the game, or forum posts or comments on the game’s trailer – not, at least, until I got back home. We kissed, and I took off my belt and shoes for the TSA.

A few days later, in Crestline Ohio, I was asking my sister’s wife if she knew any good songs about pasta as we endeavored to boil about a hundred pounds of both bowtie and spaghetti noodles. We listened to them on a youtubing laptop as the steam filled the room. Somehow, I burned a few noodles at the bottom of an unstirred pot – laughing at myself for finding a way to screw up the most simple process in all of cooking. This, I thought, was not unlike my ability to screw up the release of Cart Life: I’d forgotten to include a file which is necessary to run the game. Both fixable, but embarrassing and mutually serving to confirm the same kind of ineptitude: high ambitions, poor fundamentals.

There were several pasta options for attendees at the community center where the party was held: A Pasta Bar, even. As he smilingly beheld the sight, my brother-in-law remarked that “A long line of crockpots is a beautiful thing.” And the food kept coming – all carefully prepared and beautiful and varied: cookies, candies, a baby carriage made entirely from fruit with grapefruit wheels, cake, soda, etc. etc. etc.

The attendees seemed very much to enjoy their time together, and thankfully among them were my nieces: girls who had yet to grow tired of my repetitive jokes and were also too young to have heard them already from somebody else. As things wound down and the attendees filed out, I helped to restore the community center to cleanliness. Miles of foil were unrolled over the rims of a hundred glass dishes. Cookies and cake were boxed together. Balloons were untied, decorations untaped from walls and ceiling fans. When line of progress reached the pasta bar, though, the faces of my hosts grew thin and downcast. They knew, of course, that it couldn’t all be kept – there would be waste made, after all. Our cheif of tasks remarked that the nearest food bank wouldn’t take it, besides being unfeasibly distant anyway. There wouldn’t be room in the already overfull refrigerator at home. Nobody had room for a hundred pounds of pasta noodles.

These women, my own sisters, are among the least wasteful people I know. Not only are their personal philosophies adamantly allegiant to preservation of all kinds, but they save all they can because they simply can’t afford to be wasteful. This was a sad and sorry thing for them, but no choice could be made. I was chosen to perform the task and did so dutifully.

I’d already grown familiar with this pasta bulk. I paid for it, unwrapped it, boiled it, transferred it to the crockpots, carried it to the car and then from the car to the food table. I ate some with the other guests. And now, for the final time, I lifted this creation of noodles (it was a bit heavy), and dumped it into the hugely black death emptiness of a city trash can lined with a black plastic bag. I admit the sound made me laugh – so evocative and final and silly was the small noise it made. To say that it sounded “real” would be stupid, but what I mean to communicate to you is that the sound made all of these abstractions tangible and visceral in a single instant: the process of carefully making something to be eaten and enjoyed but, ultimately, being declined, and then thrown away and forgotten was an abstract and depressing and difficult thing for me to calculate (especially in the face of a warm and friendly meal shared with my sisters, their daughters, and their many friends). But the sound of a hundred pounds of noodles hitting the bottom of a city trash can and disrupting the black plastic liner on the way down, the fleshy slap punctuating the end and the total silence thereafter… There was something about that sound.

When I came home, having remedied the most imperative of Cart Life’s infinite flaws on airport wi-fi access, I was thinking about the parallels. I walked up a long staircase wondering why anyone would presume to make entertainment in an age where the bounty of masterpieces  is rich, catered to your tastes, and most importantly: inexhaustible? A whole lifetime, I’m sure, could be lived quite cheaply on the digital entertainment produced in a single year. Youtube, alone, has amassed more minutes of uploaded footage than exist in a human lifetime, thousands of times over.  Do you even know how many songs about pasta exist in the world? Not even including covers, there are hundreds of pounds of pasta songs.

Maybe it’s the flawed and clown-like destiny of the 21st-century artist to make hundreds of pounds of art, all garbage bound, in hopes of improve their recipes or discovering new ones. In much of the time I’d spent on Cart Life, I felt as though there were no other way to communicate what I’d hope to say, but, in the last few months of it, more enticing dishes were brought to the table – better food offered by better cooks to the same attendees. The photograph I sneaked of my private pasta funeral service kept making itself vivid in my mind, and the funny fart-sound punchline became representative of all human endeavor. Oh, it’s all going to end – why bother to try? Why be wasteful? Why be ungrateful for what’s already on the table?

I unlocked the door, and greeted my cat. On the table behind him sat a bottle of stale champagne, nearly full.

Among my earliest memories, I fancied myself quite the insufferable little intellectual artist. Proudly presenting a scribbular masterwork for worldwide refigerator showcase to my mother (the curator of the worldwide refrigerator showcase), she responded in this way: “Beautiful! Good job, sweety!” For this praise I beamed (toothlessly, I’m sure), but my esteem popped and my pride wounded by the closing question of her appraisal: “What’s it supposed to be?”

I realize, of course, that nearly everyone has had this experience as a child. The more slow-to-learn among us have had to overcome this hard lesson in high school English class. For those supremely resistant to the cruelty of human indifference, as we all know, private Art Schools have made a profitable industry of prolonging the very same curriculum. If I’d only have known, as that giddy aspiring scribbler, how generous this woman was being. The far worse thing, and also much more common (and honest), is to have your best work ignored rather than questioned or insulted. Later, in high school English, I’d have been brought to grateful tears if a stranger showed any real interest in my writing – no matter how coarse they may have been in responding to it. Pasta hated in the mouth is far better than pasta untasted, in the trash.

Fueled by these thoughts, I drank the champagne (stale and horrible) and began to fix more bugs in Cart Life because, even though I know there are an infinite number of bugs to fix, and that largely people will have forgotten about that game by now and moved on to equally interesting but more seaworthy games or books or movies or youtube videos, it’s still worth my time. The central virtue of digital art is that it won’t spoil or grow mold or flake away or die. I’m not the chef and Cart Life is no pasta. Rather, I am the pasta, and Cart Life is the memory of a party – able to be relived at any time by anyone, anywhere. Even long after the slap of noodles has hit the bottom of the trash can, people can relive what once was.

In the harsh light of that possibility, who wouldn’t feel the urgent need to Work Harder? Who wouldn’t want to make a better dish for the long line of crock pots, stretching out into infinity? Here’s the food I’ve brought: please enjoy it now that I’ve taken out the burnt noodles.

Above: The Pasta / Mike Eats The Pasta

http://www.richardhofmeier.com/cartlife

Trying to summate the work of such a prolific and experimental artist with about 500 words is tough, so I focused on what I presume to be his intentions. Here’s a taste of the Cactus profile:

Cactus is mainly interested in stimulating you: he wants to provoke the visceral sensations of comfort, ease, fun, frustration, fear, disgust, nausea, shame, contempt, respect, finality and irony. Cactus is a video game artist, of course, and his games stimulate their audience members by means of subverting earned expectations.

Read the whole thing (on page 15) here.

Fantasy World Generator

Dwarf Fortress foretells the future to those willing to learn the language.

PORK magazine / March April Issue #1

PORK is a vibrant and relevant arts and culture magazine, new to the world, and filled with such things as taco reviews by rock stars and blistering manifesto declarations by the future rulers of this very planet. Also, there’s a centerfold. My interview with Tarn and Zach Adams, creators of Dwarf Fortress, is on page 21.

Gutter Comfort

How Snakes of Avalon became the flawed hero of indie adventure games.

The AGS Blog / April 13

About 800 words or so comparing the independently made freeware adventure game “Snakes of Avalon” to the larger environment of indie games in general.

A Story the Player Tells

An interview with Jake Elliot, creator of Balloon Diaspora

Hardy Developer’s Journal / April 14

Mr. Jake Elliot permitted a few of my snooty interview questions, all of which are about another great, independently made freeware video game: his Balloon Diaspora.