A friend from college lured Girlfriend and me into Washington D.C. proper, where we ducked into the Smithsonian American Art Museum to look at the Art of Video Games exhibit. Why, yes, we are nerds.
Without being too harsh, it was not what we had hoped for. It partly came down to a grammatical quirk. I had wanted to see art from video games, perhaps concept art, stills, and things of that nature. What I got was more an exhibit explaining how video games could be art themselves. So, you see, it was something like picking up The Art of War expecting it to contain reproductions of the Bayeux Tapestry and Guernica. Something like, but not exactly.
The problem really was that we were well ahead of the exhibit. We needed no convincing that video games were legitimately art, in the same sense that movies are. The question of whether video games deserve to be in a museum is like the question of whether a cheetah deserves to be in a zoo. It's not a matter of classification or merit. Onla a small subset of art is best experienced in a museum.
You'll hear no complaints from me if you assert that video games have narrative, evocative, salutary potential. The booklet accompanying the exhibit, according to Girlfriend (who read it), was a bit breathless about this, praising the medium's achievements with a convert's zeal.
Anyway, we weren't the intended audience, really. In this (and perhaps only this) we were more sophisticated than the mainstream museum crowd. I would have liked to see a room full of stills from Myst, instead of a large cabinet where it could be played, accompanied by a paragraph on how immersive it was.
It was a nice, nostalgic afternoon, though, of the sort I am likely to miss this year when other people go to PAX. And this is not to say that I didn't see or learn anything new. I had not known, for example, that Doom 2 was the first game to employ a "game engine." Girlfriend also pointed out the unusual number of major installments in video game history that are #2 in a series.
Speaking of the narrative potential of video games, though, I've been sucked back into Dwarf Fortress with the last few batches of updates, and more of a story has come of it than I had expected. Though it's not completed, I will share it with you.
My fortress had a vampire. Some dwarves were waking up mysteriously pale, and one was found dead in his room, completely drained of blood. So the search was on.
It was the mayor. I found out by accident that he had come to the fortress under a pseudonym. Examining his history revealed a suspiciously long list of previous residences. Most damning, he couldn't remember the last time he had drunk alcohol, which in a fortress that was practically afloat in booze, was almost proof positive that he had developed an unnatural thirst.
This was dismaying. Here was a mayor who had made himself more useful than mayors usually do. He had come to my attention by single-handedly striking down a rampaging minotaur. Nonetheless, he had to be removed. I convicted him of the murder of the dead dwarf. He was sentenced to 200 days in prison.
Here's where things get tricky. One, in Dwarf Fortress your control over the dwarves is tenuous. I could not, for example, set the mayor's sentence; that was up to the sheriff. Two, you can't just off a dwarf, generally. I couldn't sic the militia on him, but clearly the justice system wasn't going to handle him either.
I spent his jail term building a deathtrap: a mechanical series of glass spikes operated by a lever which I could order the mayor to pull. Unfortunately, when his sentence was up, the mayor didn't get straight to lever-pulling. In fact, his first act as a free dwarf was to chow down on the sheriff. Then, perhaps as an apértif, he helped himself to the fortress's most distinguished chef. This deed, at least, had witnesses. Then he proceeded to my deathtrap. Which, it became apparent, didn't work. It was a simple design error; he stood too close to the lever and the spikes didn't reach him.
At least he was occupied for the time being, diligently pulling the lever back and forth. It gave me the chance to lock him in the room, but I couldn't just keep him there. As the most charismatic dwarf in the fortress, he kept getting re-elected mayor, garnering support, I suppose, by whispering through the keyhole.
We were onto Plan C. I had the dwarves cut a hole in the ceiling directly above the vampire nee mayor, and then ordered them to fill the room with water.
I should have figured that dwarfpires don't drown. There was nothing for it; I had to let him out so the sheriff could arrest him again. The effect of opening a closet completely full of water was about what you would expect.
Justice, which had been Plan A, was now plan D as well. For the mayor's two additional murders, one of which had ten witnesses, he was sentenced to... 400 days in prison. Of course.
So I needed a Plan E. When he was tied securely in his jail cell, I removed the door and built a ballista in the jail cell opposite, so I could fire giant crossbow bolts directly at him. I had my siege engineer sharpen logs for the purpose, figuring that if a 300-pound wooden stake wouldn't fix my vampire problem, nothing would.
I hope that was wrong, because after five wooden ballista arrows, fired at a space of perhaps 15 feet, the vampire is thoroughly bruised and not much else. And that's where I stand now. I'm hoping that copper arrowheads will have more effect, because I'm running out of options.
The Middle.
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