I’m not a gamer, but Dwarf Fortress seems fascinating. The most complex and organic video game ever created, it’s the work of brothers Zach and Tarn Adams, who plan on continually and gradually improving it, like painters who expand on a single mural their whole lives. An excerpt from Jonah Weiner’s New York Times Magazine article about the game designers and their creation:

“Dwarf Fortress may not look real, but once you’re hooked, it feels vast, enveloping, alive. To control your world, you toggle between multiple menus of text commands; seemingly simple acts like planting crops and forging weapons require involved choices about soil and season and smelting and ores. A micromanager’s dream, the game gleefully blurs the distinction between painstaking labor and creative thrill.

‘Playing Dwarf Fortress is like taking the controls of a plane right as it’s taking off,’ says Chris Dahlen, editor in chief of the gaming magazine Kill Screen. And, he added, ‘flying a jet is a lot more interesting than just riding in a jet.’

Dwarf Fortress is too willfully noncommercial to have any discernible influence on gaming at large, but it is widely admired by game designers. Programmers behind The Sims 3 reportedly played Dwarf Fortress when they were making their game, and several homages to Dwarf Fortress appear in the blockbuster fantasy game World of Warcraft. Richard Garfield, who created the hit card game Magic: The Gathering, once attended a Dwarf Fortress fan meet in Seattle to introduce himself to Tarn. ‘I told him there’s nothing out there quite like it,’ Garfield recalled. He suggested ways of broadening the game’s appeal, but ‘that stuff didn’t matter to Tarn. The charm of it is that he’s making exactly the game he wants to make.’

After nine years of development, Dwarf Fortress is, from the perspective of game play, perhaps the most complex video game ever made. And yet it is still only in ‘alpha’ — the most recent release is version 0.31. By version 1.0, Tarn says, the game will include military campaigns and magic, along with scores of other additions. He showed me a four-inch stack of index cards, color-coded and arranged into umbrella categories, to keep track of his goals. ‘I like being able to hold the game in my hands,’ he says.

I asked Tarn when he thought he and Zach would reach version 1.0. ‘Twenty years from now,’ he replied. ‘That’s the number we talk about.’ He chuckled at the prospect, adding that even when that milestone arrived, Dwarf Fortress would keep growing. ‘This is going to be my life’s work.'”

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Let’s play Dwarf Fortress: