Tarn Adams

Tarn Adams (born 1978) is an American game developer and mathematician — he holds a Stanford PhD — who, with his older brother Zach, founded Bay 12 Games and created Dwarf Fortress. Begun as a side project in 2002 and released free in 2006, the game’s absurdly deep procedural simulation earned it a cult following, a place in the Museum of Modern Art’s 2012 games exhibition, an acknowledged influence on Minecraft and Terraria, and — after its 2022 Steam release — a spot among the platform’s top sellers.

The AIs are now the lava

Speaking to PC Gamer in March 2025, Adams vented about an industry buried in layoffs, funding droughts, and hype — “Every one of these events you go to, it’s: AI, Blockchain, VR, etc.” He described generative AI as “the lava” now rising under game developers: Dwarf Fortress once set a floor-is-lava standard of handmade depth other designers scrambled to reach, and now automation is the thing everyone is scrambling to stay above.

His core complaint is not that AI might someday make great games — “If you could press a button and make my game, well, hell, that’s very interesting” — but that in the present, mediocre machine output is displacing human workers anyway. Tools that write a wrong, low-quality essay at the push of a button still cost people their livelihoods, an arrangement he bluntly called a horrible society to live in.

Adams’ position carries unusual weight because Dwarf Fortress is itself a monument to what generative systems can be: its worlds, histories, and characters are all procedurally generated. The distinction he draws is between generation as a handcrafted design discipline — two brothers writing every rule themselves over twenty years — and generation as a mass-produced substitute for the people who do that work.