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Long read: The beauty and drama of video games and their clouds

"It's a little bit hard to work out without knowing the altitude of that dragon..."

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Listen to The Queen, a brilliant story about Dwarf Fortress

"It's a little after midnight..."

If, like many of us, you're far too lazy or impatient to learn Dwarf Fortress , the gloriously complex failure simulation by Bay 12 Games, you might want to just listen to Ste Curran telling you about it instead. Curran's a writer and game designer and part of the One Life Left crew, and he's made an audio version of his Dwarf Fortress piece The Queen available here.

Dwarf Fortress is fabulously daunting, but it's also incomplete and riddled with bugs. The Queen tells the story of one of these bugs and Curran's sinister approach to squashing it. It's brilliant.

The Queen was originally performed at Reads Like a Seven, an irregular series of games-related readings organised by Simon Parkin, who you may have heard of. Curran's offering the piece for free on his website, and if enough people are moved to buy the high-quality audio file for a pound, he may do more of them.