games

That's an interesting point. Effectively what you're saying is that as long as the simulation is completely and totally insane and unpredictable that the horrible things that occur within it lose their morbidity and get replaced with complete and total fascination with what this insane machine that continually produce unpredictable results might produce next. You are completely distracted.

Yup. You nailed it. It's all so weird and silly you can't take it seriously. Plus, the world is so chaotically hyperlethal - You might be mining for bauxite or whatever and the mineshaft collapses in to an underground cavern and then the next fifteen hours of gameplay are "The First Spider War: Dark years of horror and privation before things got really bad". And all you were trying to do with that game was make a screw-pump that moved beer between two levels of your fortress, but now your engineers are trying to divert the lava pipe in to spider hell before all your dorfs succumb to cave spider venom.

I haven't played in years, but from what I remember over the course of a few games, with things going horribly wrong in FUN ways, I stopped feeling like i'd failed when bad things happened to my dorfs and it was just like "Okay, the elephant thing was pretty fucked up, but the fortress survived and if we can just hold the zombies at bay until spring we'll get more colonists and then the elves will bring wood and..." and I just started rolling with it, trying to hold things together, reveling in my dorf's victories and building them very fancy tombs when they were torn apart by macaques or something. Actually, come to think of it, being able to bury the little weirdos probably did help. Like there was some closure or something idk.