Comment by dspillett | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dspillett | Hacker News Reader

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> I don't understand why they don't care about the fact that so many people will never experience their creation because of the unnecessary barrier they've created.

Would people care to experience it if they could? I've always assumed with this (and a number of other things in life) that being a bit of a niche interest (or in this case a lot of a niche interest) in part creates the niche interest. There have been many rogue-a-likes with more modern interfaces but they have either not attracted or not managed to keep up the interest that this one has. Perhaps it is a nostalgia thing, perhaps it is a "nerd" thing; what-ever it is it works for them and their audience and changing the game to appeal to a larger audience might both fail to do so and make the existing fans wander off (and make it less enjoyable for the developers to work on: they seem to be getting quite a kick out of their baby and its current fans and don't want to lose that).

The comparison some make with minecraft on the "being a bit niche creating a niche" thing is quite fair, and this "if you were more like that you might have a much larger audience" comments perfectly valid, but minecraft's niche being an order of magnitude or few bigger might be in part due to luck (right thing, right time, critical mass didn't hit to early or too late, ...) rather than just the relative prettiness and intuitiveness.

Caveat: I've played neither Dwarf Fortress nor Minecraft, so I may not really have a clue what I'm talking about.

You falsely attribute a niche's draw to the fact that it's niche. I find it unlikely that people would base their interest in a game on its popularity, or lack thereof. If the game is fun, people will play it. If it's not, they won't.

There might actually be more to the "if it's niche, some people are more interested in it" mentality. It's anecdotal, yes, but I know that I have an odd tendency to prefer games that aren't hyper popular. New Call of Duty or Halo? I don't care how "well made" the game is, I won't play it. A tiny, unknown RPG/Rhythm game hybrid (Sequence)? I gobble it up. All my friends start playing one game? I play another. Etc. I wonder how many people might have some unconscious tendency to gravitate toward those games which are no very popular, or if I'm just an oddball.

Maybe DF being a niche helps in some way. I don't know. But I do know that the UI is, almost objectively, not good. I know it's why I stopped playing. Once you get more than 20 dwarfs or so, managing who does what is ridiculous. (at least without external tools. I think the popularity and almost necessity of some external tools really does show that the UI can be atrocious at some points. (also note this is not a comment on the ASCII nature of the game, that's fine))

But the game being different in the ways that make it get called niche are usually why people talk about it publicly. It is certainly a major part of the discussion on most occasions when I hear of it.

While the interface puts many people off once they are there, would the game get quite as much discussion if it was much more like other games rather than being somewhat more unique (for better or worse)?

I agree that if the game is fun people will play it. The problem is getting them to try the game for long enough to know if it is fun. Popularity is obviously a factor in achieving that since lots of people associate mass marketed products with blandness, juvenility, etc.

I can think of half a dozen people amongst my immediate social circle who have expressed interest in playing Dwarf Fortress "if it wasn't for the interface". Anecdote != data, but from my experience the building blocks of the game appeal to a lot of people who are thoroughly put off by its level of inaccessibility.

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