Dwarf Fortress creator says we can learn something from simply walling up dwarf nobles to maintain an equal society—but notes you have to abolish the dwarf cops, too: ‘Another lesson to be had there’

While the legendarily absurd complexity of fantasy simulation in Dwarf Fortress provides countless perils for dwarven health and happiness, the most insidious threat to any mountain hall emerges from within: Nobility. As a fortress flourishes, it inevitably draws the attention of dwarven nobles who’ll needlessly burrow themselves into industries they’re not qualified to direct, issuing demands and mandates without any care for whether they’re feasible or sustainable for the rest of dwarven society.

Sounds unbelievable, I know. But there are ways to manage the menace of nobility—like simply walling them off in an unpleasant corner and letting the rest of society live and labor as need, preference, urgency, and capacity allow. In an interview with PC Gamer at Gamescom, Dwarf Fortress co-creator Tarn Adams said there’s probably something to be learned there.

While Dwarf Fortress players are capable of pursuing an egalitarian dwarven utopia, its simulation doesn’t yet allow for dwarves to engage with their own political ideologies—but Adams said he’s had distant plans to tinker with systems for simulating civilizational law codes, and maybe even some light philosophizing.

“I think there’s room for that kind of thing. I read a lot of law codes. I read the Tang law code; Romans had crazy case law, and I read a bunch of commentary about that,” Adams said. “And it’s funny: I’m not sure about the modern systems, but in the Chinese one from 1500 years ago, it says ‘if you know it’s wrong, but it doesn’t fit any of these 2000 things, you just hit the person 10 times and call it a day.'”

It might sound like a crude solution, but for Adams, it helped conceptualize how a simulated law code could essentially function like a series of conditional statements in computer logic.

“That feels like an if-else-if-else-if-else-if-else-if—and then you have your final else in your law code. I’m like, I can do that. I can model a civil law code,” Adams said. “When it comes to case law, it’s more like a scripting language that interprets itself. I can also get into that now, especially now that [Dwarf Fortress shifted to Lua scripting.] That’s more complicated, but manageable—as long as you’ve got safety valves to escape from a process completely breaking down.”

As for what that process breaking down might look like, Adams said you might have “cases being argued by dwarven barristers or something, but then there’d be a dog wandering into the room and biting somebody. And then the goblins come.”

I suspect surviving Roman law commentaries don’t offer any immediate guidance there, but in the meantime, Adams reckons that Dwarf Fortress can offer some political wisdom of its own. Being able to literally wall off the vampiric influence of a mountain hall’s noble class, he said, is a model that might offer some applicable lessons in our own lives.

“Has been tried, could be tried again. It sounds like a fine thing. Where’d EA go? It’s been purchased. So we didn’t have a wall there,” Adams said. “Could have had a wall. Didn’t have a wall. Many such cases. It seems simple to me, but it’s complicated somehow.”

Adams did note, however—as I have in my own experiments with ushering in dwarven utopia by subjecting the upper classes to a living entombment—that the influence of dwarven nobility persists as long as there’s an armed entity enforcing its demands. If your fortress maintains a fortress guard, they’ll continue punishing dwarves who violate mandates issued by nobles under wall-arrest.

“If you put a wall around your nobles, their demands still somehow get into the aether, and your little justice system will still punish dwarves,” Adams said. “So you have to not assign a captain of the guard either. Another lesson to be had there.”