I play this. It's definitely a game where having a rationality-focused outlook is helpful, and my impression is that it's useful for learning rationality as well.
Dwarf Fortress is in some ways a ridiculously complicated game, and it's also an alpha and thus buggy. It's not always easy to determine what's a poorly-communicated feature and what's a bug. Experimentation (or ‼SCIENCE‼, as it's often called on the forums) is useful in figuring out the difference. Quirks tend to be more emergent than arbitrary, so while there's a degree of password-guessing, doing so is not nearly as useful as it is in some games. Also, the traits that the quirks emerge from are not always immediately obvious (and in rare cases, not communicated at all without third-party software), so part of the process is figuring out which things are even relevant factors at all.
It also supports a wide range of play styles, including ones that involve doing very little experimentation at all. I don't recommend it, though, for anyone who has significant trouble imagining things in three dimensions or parsing dense fields of symbols.
I strongly recomend the lazy newb pack to anyone who's interested in the game - it bundles the basic software with several extremely useful third-party utilities, including Dwarf Therapist, which is essentially necessary to play a fort with more than 40 or 50 dwarves in it.
Wow! I can see the potential for many wasted hours there. VERY tempting.
Seeing some recent comments on my links comment, I think this thread might be warranted.
This is a thread for discussing specific works of fiction; books, movies, TV shows, webcomics, fanfictions, whatever. It's purpose is to provide a rationality perspective on shows that are not necessarily aimed at rationalists (but by the correlation of target audience I predict many of them might be anyway...)
To keep this organized, please follow these guidlines when posting; Top level coments shuld with NO exception (I'll make a single meta comment where discussion about this thread itself can go) fit into one of the following templates:
For a single work, the top level comment should consist of the full title, a link to where the work can be found online if applicable, and the TV tropes page for it OR a short description ONLY if there is no TV tropes page for it.
For certain authors that have written a lot of books popular on LW, such as for example Vernor Vinge, discussion of each one might tend to dominate the thread, therefore there should be one post for ALL the works of such authors, and they can be made entire own threads if discussion grows to big for that. The format for these comments is: Authors name, link to their wikipedia page (or homepage if they don't have a wikipedia page), and a short bibliography to make it easier to avoid making separate top level comments for their books.
Also, pleas refrain from discussing things written by Eliezer or otherwise already having a discussion space on LW, for similar reasons you should avoid discussing a certain institute and because it'd be redundant.
If this thread grows large and popular, I'm thinking this might become a monthly thing, hence the (April) part.