Mentao: Sorry, but I must ask: what is Dwarf Fortress?
No worries! I'm happy to answer questions about it.
Short answer: Dwarf Fortress is an amazing city builder / simulation / rogue-like, with the worst UI I have ever done battle with. It is glorious and joyful and also rage-inducing in its original state. There are many, many community tools that make it actually very fun to play - it's technically in 'alpha', but has fewer bugs than some full game's full releases and the developer is very mod-friendly. It uses random generators and very complex AI, so the stories of many player forts are as-or-more complex when compared to regular video game plots.
It's like a combination of Majesty, Sim City and Cthulu.
That's why I use it for this test. I haven't run into another game that was even a quarter as complex as Dwarf Fortress, so if trying to play GameA is even a quarter as frustrating, I might as well be playing DF. So then I stop playing GameA and move onto something else.
Relevant links:
New York Times article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/magazine/the-brilliance-of-dwarf-fortress.html?_r=0 Museum of Modern Art included it in an exhibit:
http://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2012/11/29/video-games-14-in-the-collection-for-starters Community pack for convenience:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=59026.0 TVTropes list of forts-turned-into-stories / community forts:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Community/DwarfFortress Awesome Ars Technica article:
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/04/challenge-accepted-dwarf-fortress-pros-show-ars-up-with-insane-10-hour-forts/