Dwarf Fortress's endgame reveals something we've spent centuries hiding: humans don't want unlimited resources.

They want the *illusion* of scarcity within abundance — and once a fortress reaches economic maturity, when the trade depot generates infinite wealth and stockpiles overflow and threats are purely optional, the game doesn't become more fun.

Players stop naming dwarves. Stop witnessing relationships. Stop caring that Urist the miner fell in love with Zuglar the cook — because they automate, they build perpetual motion machines for meaningless profit, they construct artifact chains that serve no narrative purpose because the narrative was always just the constraints talking. The specific moment this shifts is mechanical, not narrative: when the first iron helmet is mass-produced without effort, when the player realizes they can generate infinite wealth through atom-smelting or prepared meals, the fortress stops being a story and becomes a logistics problem. Meaning requires friction.

Not because the game changed, but because the dwarves don't become less alive — the player stops believing their lives matter. Real economies discovered this 300 years ago. Capitalism didn't emerge from scarcity — it engineered scarcity *into* abundance through artificial constraints: planned obsolescence, status hierarchies, manufactured desire, debt cycles. The game-designer's instinct and the economist's instinct are identical: if you remove friction, people stop playing.

So both systems learned to *make* friction seem natural, even necessary. Dwarf Fortress simply forgot to hide the mechanism.