Dwarf Fortress is a peculiar game. It is free to play, developed by two guys that very much depend on donations. It looks like the last 30 years of advancement in computer graphics just didn’t happen, using raw ASCII graphics and an user interface that would have been horrible even in the 1980s.
In Dwarf Fortress, you try to build up a colony of dwarves without giving direct commands to them. You see your dwarves (represented by ASCII characters 0x01 and 0x02 in codepage 850) from above, in a three-dimensional environment consisting of blocks of material like stone or wood. The world is dynamic and simulated with strange, but comprehensible physics. You cannot grow a tree on a stone patch. You can pour water over dirt and get mud. Water flows downwards and will result in FUN if unsupervised. I’ve written fun in capital letters to differentiate the FUN of dwarf fortress from the fun of other games. It really is different.
You can try to imagine Dwarf Fortress being a weird crossover of Minecraft, the Sims and Rogue. Why the Sims? Because each dwarf isn’t just an action figure, but a complex individual with its own beliefs, value system, preferences and aversions. Each dwarf has its own skills and abilities and interacts with other dwarves in a social manner. Dwarf Fortress has a detailed simulation of nature and a detailed simulation of dwarves, down to their individual toes and teeths. It is very possible that one dwarf detests another dwarf so much that he pushes the victim over a cliff if nobody else is around. If the victim survives, you’ll have drama (aka FUN) in your fortress for years.
How can such a game give insights about motivation? Well, let me present you one more aspect of the game: the production system. Our dwarves need food to survive. They need clothes, tools and furniture. Most need some kind of art or decoration. One thing they all can agree to is that they need alcohol. All dwarves are addicted to alcohol so much, they will go crazy without it. And crazy dwarves result in immediate FUN.
But it is our task to govern the dwarves to actually produce these products in sufficient amounts. And this is where the complex production system hits us. In order to produce alcohol, you need to have fermentable plants, a brewery and an empty pot or barrel. To obtain the plants, you can suggest to your dwarves to raise them on farm plots (remember, you cannot give commands) or go out into the wilderness and gather them. Most dwarves really don’t like being outside and will get very unhappy if they are caught in the rain or cold. Yes, the weather is simulated in great detail, too. Water, for example, freezes in the winter.
So, to only have alcohol for your colony, you need one dwarf to prepare the field, one to plant the seeds, one to harvest, one to carry the harvest into the brewery, one to actually brew – and then you discover that you have no pots, so nothing gets stored. You also need to have one dwarf to gather wood or stone and one to produce a pot out of it. This can only be done at the Craftsdwarf’s workshop, so you need to have on built, too.
Did I tell you that dwarves have preferences? If you only grow wheat, you’ll get the finest dwarven beer, but all your wine gourmet dwarves will be unhappy (on a side note: Don’t let them fool you, they drink way too much wine to be called a “gourmet” anymore). You need to produce a variety of alcoholic drinks to give everybody their favorites.
Let’s review the production system one more time. Every dwarf wants to have clothing. Their own clothing! The game simulates clothing down to the left and right sock. Each sock has a quality and can show wear. To produce a sock, you need to obtain some specific plants, process them to obtain threads, weave the threads to cloth, dye the cloth to some color (the dye is the product of another production chain) and then tailor the sock in the Clothier’s shop. The tailor is probably a dwarf that enjoys clothesmaking and is very skilled doing it. He produces socks day in, day out. Some of them are of high quality, maybe even masterpieces (there is the very rare legendary sock that has in-game songs and poems written about it). Others are poor quality, mere trash from the beginning. The tailor knows about the quality of his products and gets a little amount of happiness for each well-done sock and a little amount of unhappiness if the sock was trash.
And here is the first insight about motivation: Motivation doesn’t only come from skill and preferences, but also from good results. If a dwarf is able to produce a good result regularly, he stays happy and motivated. Give him a task where he cannot succeed, no matter the effort, and he will get unhappy. Which will ultimately result in FUN, because the dwarf will try to compensate, maybe by going on a wine gourmet rampage. In the first fortress, a happy tailor produces quality socks for everybody. In the second fortress, a very drunk, unhappy tailor wastes your precious cloths while everybody else walks barefoot and gets unhappy if their toes hurt because of it.
So, motivation is not primarily about performing a task, but achieving a result. A result like crafting a product or, in our case as software developers, releasing a new version of the software with additional features.
Have your dwarves, I mean, your team, produce good results regularly. This is one thing that agile software development processes (and particularly SCRUM) get right: There is a public result at the end of each iteration – if the developers are skilled enough. With lesser skilled developers, you essentially signal them a failure every other week. They are probably trying very hard, but cannot come up with a good enough sock each sprint yet. Make the sprints longer or change your definition of a good result to something more attainable.
Without a clear result, something to hold onto, motivation will fade, too. That’s because uncertainty is stressful for most people. They will compensate for this stress by doing all kind of work, but not the necessary one. If you take a look at the work they do – it gives them measurable results. It may not contribute to the big result at the end of the cycle in any meaningful way, but it contributed to their motivation during the journey.
As a manager, you cannot give your developers direct orders. Or at least, you shouldn’t. If you use suggestions and a setup that facilitates self-organization of the team so that their preferences and needs align with or at least support the goal of the project, you’ll get a highly motivated team that doesn’t fear recurring result examinations, but looks forward to them – because they validate their efforts and give greater meaning to their work. Work that in itself already aligns with their own skills and preferences.
To sum it up: Dwarf Fortress taught me that direct orders are not the way to motivate teams. Creating an environment that anticipates public results often and making sure that the team is skilled enough to meet the expectations (or adjusting the expectations) are key factors to ongoing motivation.
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