УДК 122
CONTINGENCY AS AN ONTOLOGICAL PRINCIPLE OF THE SWARF FORTRESS VIRTUAL WORLD
Ilya S. Gomonov1, Roman V. Tamilin2
1 Siberian Federal University, Krasnoyarsk, Russia.
gomonov.ilya00@mail.ru, orcid.org/0009-0008-3395-5926
2 Krasnoyarsk V.I. Surikov Art Museum, Krasnoyarsk, Russian Federation.
rvtamilin@gmail.com, orcid.org/0009-0009-0490-844X
Abstract. The article explores the ontological structure of the virtual world of the Dwarf Fortress game through the prism of the philosophy of speculative realism, in particular the concept of contingency by Quentin Meillassoux. It is proved that Dwarf Fortress does not just use procedural generation and emergent gameplay, but implements contingency as a fundamental principle of its world. This principle manifests itself on three levels: 1) as an absolute accident of procedural genesis, creating a “virtual fossil”; 2) as a hyperhaeos of simulation systems, where laws generate unpredictable states; 3) as a player’s experience of becoming a curator of uncontrolled flows of events in the “unfree space” of the platform. The game appears not only as entertainment, but as a laboratory of non-dogmatic metaphysical thinking, modeling a world in which “only contingency is necessary.”
Keywords: contingency, speculative realism, Meillassoux, video game ontology, Dwarf Fortress, emergence, procedural generation, simulation, hyperchaos.
For citation: Gomonov I.S., Tamilin R.V. Contingency as an ontological principle of the Dwarf Fortress virtual world // Game Laboratory, 2026, 1 (1), рр. 14-19. [in Russian]. EDN: UFUVYL
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