X2: ASCII

When I was a kid, my dad introduced me to the game Dwarf Fortress, which features ASCII as its main source of graphics. To some, this art direction may seem overly simple and opaque, difficult to navigate through when all of your dwarves are simple smiley faces.

In this image, we can see a lovely barn or stables in the middle of a field. A bridge crosses a coursing river just beside it. Through ASCII, this scene is relayed to the player, and each individual letter corresponds to a very specific component of the game, such as trees, bushes, downward slopes, walls, and solid rock.

To new players, this game seems very difficult, featuring many symbols to adjust to. ASCII used in this way is not intuitive, as modern graphics are. A cow is represented by a "c", a dwarf is a smiley face, and water takes the form of a blue tilde. These graphics are almost necessary, however, in order to allow for the random generation of each new world. This can be reflected in the game Minecraft, which perhaps took some inspiration from Dwarf Fortress.

The ASCII art, to me, represents one of the core philosophies of Dwarf Fortress and its fanbase: playing it well is an earned privilege. Not only is it difficult to adjust to the graphics, but the gameplay itself is a nightmare of sprawling menus and text, with no real explanation as to what anything does.

Despite all of these challenges, Dwarf Fortress has cultivated what I would consider to be one of the most creative and welcoming fanbases I've ever seen. From such a simple game with barebones graphics, the player is forced to create each location in their own mind, which in my opinion easily trumps the designs and concepts of any game developer.