My thoughts exactly. Eve, Ingress, Dwarf Fortress, Diplomacy. All games I'd prefer to experience through surreal long-form journalism and retelling rather than through actual play.

Eve costs too much. Dwarf Fortress requires too much cognitive power up-front, to start having fun playing it. Diplomacy... I'd love to play it, but it's hard to find someone in the area.

So there it is. Ingress. Free. Easy to start. Too easy to incorporate in your daily life. You start doing groceries in the other shop; it's few minutes more of walking, but you pass by five portals on the route. You stop reading Facebook on the tram, you hack portals instead - you'll need all that inventory later. You go out to buy a beer. It'll be only five minutes, you think. Ok, ten, because you need to retake that two portals on your way. You come home an hour later, after flipping the entire neighbourhood.

All those games you mentioned are addictive like hell. Out of them, Ingress has the lowest barrier to entry. It's so small that you can tunnel through it by accident. At some point you just start playing and can't stop. There, you're sucked in for life.

I disagree about DF. I just grabbed a tutorial and started playing. The real curve starts later in the game when the crappy UI is no longer enough to drive 80+ dwarves.

I think I'll take another shot at it. First time around, I got lost in the complexity and gave up after a day spent on exploring available actions and values to track.

Yeah, I can imagine how playing DF by exploring the actions might suck. There are lots of them and most don't make sense, especially in the beginning of the game.

The value of the tutorials is that they show the smallest working set of actions and how they interact.

It's me always trying to learn everything with minimum amount of tutorials required. Orbiter and KSP have beaten me in the same way - I had to read up a bit before being able have any kind of a meaningful gameplay.

For what its worth I can relate to that. Recently my wife said "I'm going to go out and buy us some cake".

Two hours later she returned, happily bearing cake, and said "Yeah I got distracted hacking portals". She'd walked something like six miles.

She's certainly keen, and enjoys it, though I've never really seen the point of it myself.

You and parent should both try playing Diplomacy by email! Great fun, and can take as little as half an hour a week or so.

Thankfully, doesn't work for me. It's just grinding.

If you think Dwarf Fortress is cool, check out Rimworld[1]. It's still in alpha, but it's already a playable game. It's basically a sci-fi Dwarf Fortress (and it has a way better UI).

[1] http://rimworldgame.com/

Sci-fi is for plus, UI is for plus, but I wonder will it have even remotely the amount of complexity (and thus possibilities) of DF?

I think it's definitely on the right path. You can see the developers daily changelog[1] and there's also a great modding community already started[2].

[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_rCdGYp3nbSUXFG4Ky96RZW1...

[2] http://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?board=15.0

I think that Diplomacy is, for many of us, that game we intend to play some day, but probably won't. It takes exactly 7 people, runs a long time, and has a reputation for ruining friendships (even though, IMO, meta-gaming considered harmful). But it has a lot of depth and I'd love to get the right opportunity (and have the time).

I played Diplomacy once, with a group of strangers. I wasn't a fan, and feel no urge to play again:

1. I really hate the map. 90% of the map is devoted to ocean and Russia, and the interesting bits are crammed into the remaining 10%. It's incredibly easy to misread the map and fuck up a move. Perhaps this is intentional, but it drives me nuts.

2. I didn't know any of the people, so I couldn't judge how honest or deceitful they were being. Maybe this would be better with friends whose tells I know better.

3. Sweet god, you're right, it takes forever - and yet you're feeling rushed the entire time, since you have to make sure you talk to at least the people you're nominally allied with for the next N turns, as well as hearing out potential new allies, and trying to make new ones of your own.

I guess I'm just too casual of a gamer for something like this, but if you think you're interested in playing Diplomacy, I very highly recommend that you try to find someone in your area to play with - there are probably six other people just like you wishing they had someone else to play with.

You can play with 6 people without much difference than 7. You can set your turns to be short. I played one Friday evening with 30 minute turns, and a four-year game-span. It was quite pleasant. No, we didn't get to the end of the game (we picked a winner on who controlled the most places, I lost by 1 on the final resolved move), but really, when I've played longer games, at some point it becomes apparently who will win but it takes a couple tedious years to bring the game to completion.

As for friendships, I think one has to state clearly at the beginning of the game that one has a strong chance to turn against their allies at some point. It's a feature of the game. There are ways to manage this risk for one's sanity. :)