Sounds like Chris Crawford has become the Ted Nelson of gaming.
He may have started it, but Ernest Adams did most of the work to make it what it is today. He took it from 525 attendees to 12,000 over the span of 4 years.
Chris Crawford saw social interaction as the thing that was missing from computer gaming – and he was pretty much right. The tragedy is that he’s been sweating blood for the last decade or two to simulate it procedurally, when all he had to do was wait for Facebook and the Wii to give actual human interaction to developers basically for free.
I never liked Balance Of Power. Crawford got me with his game Excalibur for the Atari 800 released through the APX. I must have played that thing for 1000 hours. It came out in 1984. There was some very intricate modeling of relationships between characters in that game that I really loved.
I love Ernest dearly, but that is not an accurate history of the conference. However, I’m not going to replay the Compuserve threads from back then here.
Chris
Uhmmmmmmn. No.
Sorry. And I agree with Chris, not the place to rehash that. Catch me at a bar.
Chris Crawford is a game personality giant. I think it is difficult for those who were not there to understand just how influential he was to many of us and his impact on his peers.
I was there for his “Dragon” speech , it was and remains the most important moment in my professional life, bar none. The spectacle of someone at the top of the business literally storm out to pursue something he clearly loved was inspirational.
Sure he has said and done some dumbass things and made ill informed comments about other peoples work, but I look past it to what he means to me. I hope his jar of beads lasts a long time, that old dog has a few more great things left to do I suspect.
No. If he hadn’t done it, somebody else would have. It is just an industry conference, like every industry has.
That’s a truly awesome analogy.
If Chris hasn’t had the impact he wished to have, you can blame the fact that he hasn’t shipped anything in, what, 18 years? His Mobygames Bio – which is old – talks about his current project having been nine years in the making.
This isn’t an industry where you revolutionize things by sweating over a technology or concept until you realize your ideal execution. That takes far too long, and other innovations and changes in the marketplace will continuously force you to reset your development plans to react to them. Either that, or ship something that’s an advance over the industry 10 years prior, but ignores many external learnings of the past decade.
In the gaming industry, you revolutionize by creating a concept that’s viable to build in a reasonable time period. Your 1.0 may not be your dream app, but if the foundation is good and the market responds, you can then increment and bring your revolution into the world in steps, with advances every few years as you ship a new title. This will take longer to get from A to B than if you take a direct path, but in the meantime, you can use the market as a research tool, incorporate outside innovation, react to external forces, and ship products that put food on the table and keep your concepts in the public eye.
Even Derek eventually shipped Battlecruiser.
Crawford is far more ambitious than Smart. Too ambitious, in fact, to be able to ever ship anything himself. (That was part of the point of my AI post above.)
Being an old fart, I played many of Chris’s games including Balance of Power. To be honest the only game I really enjoy of Chris’s was Patton vs Rommel which was a one of the most playable wargame of the early computer game era. It was nice simple but reasonable deep game, in time when folks like Gary Grisby were making more complex games, it was breath of fresh air and gave hope that beer and pretzel computer wargame were possible.
I also subscribed to Chris’s Computer Game Design Journal which was an interesting, if not always coherent (the man does ramble) and met him at several of his early talks. To be honest I think one of Chris’s biggest problems is that he forget that is difficult to learn new stuff if your mouth is always moving. I can’t imagine what a pain in the butt it would have been to be his publisher on project that wasn’t going well. So I mostly agree with Humaton characterization.
all of these mere facts mean nothing to him. There is One True Path, and the rest of us who explore the vast lands not on his Path are the ones wasting our time.
I also spent a lot of time experimenting with one of Chris’s early attempts of interactive story telling SiBoot. (Wiki tells me I was one of 5,000 to have bought it). Like many of Chris’s efforts it was more interesting than fun. Balance of Power was only fun in the puzzle/challenge aspect of the game and Siboot didn’t even have that. However, the ambitious nature of using procedural AI to try and simulate human-like emotions was pretty cool. Ultimately it failed to produce interesting stories or be much of a game, unless you had a desperate need to relive the clique politics of Jr. High girls.
In effect, it was mix of the diplomatic AI of Civ IV and Civ V, with primitive facial gestures being the only human feedback and so if you hate diplomacy in Civ V you would have hated SiBoot. But there weren’t many Mac games back in 1987 and I hadn’t bought a PC yet so I spent many hours with it…
Failure is too strong a word to describe Chris Crawford’s life or his influence. Obviously his legacy is much less than his ego imagined 20 years or ago. I also think that is legacy is much less than somebody like Dani Bunten who also last shipped a game more than 20 years ago, but I see influence of her games like, Mule, Seven Cities of Gold, and Command HQ in many of today’s game. It also struck me that Dan(i), Chris, and Will Wright were pretty competitive back in the mid 80s.
I do think of Chris, whenever I pick up one of Paradox’s remarkably ambitious games. Like a Chris Crawford game, I found them Paradox’s games a lot more interesting than fun, the one thing that Paradox has going for it is an embrace of the modding community. I wonder if Crawford would have been more successful if he put his ego aside and let people help.
It’s interesting to me that so many people here say BoP was his defining game. My favourite of his is Guns and Butter - a very interesting and playable design with some great ideas behind it.
I remember playing Guns and Butter, but even with the help of Google I can’t remember a thing about it…I guess it didn’t leave much of an impression.
The essence of it is, you have a labour force, and you have to get them to make weapons and food. If you make enough weapons to conquer your neighbours, your labour force grows rapidly. If you invest in enough food, your labour force grows rapidly. But… merely balance in the middle, and aggressively growing or aggressively attacking neighbours will swamp you. OTOH, if you lean too far toward butter while your neighbours all invest in guns, you get conquered. Getting the balance right is both difficult and interesting.
Really guys, not knowing Chris Crawford? not knowing anything of his influence? His line of work always was one of the most interesting in gaming, and if he didn’t found the perfect execution it´s because it´s damn hard to follow that. It´s too bad he is pretty much alone on this, but what was the alternative? Wright showed us what happen when you join a big company and make something successful (sequels, sequels, sequels!) or try to make something really innovative (compromise, compromise, compromise!). He is one of the great personalities in the industry, even if he has not released anything in the last years, his work and conferences are there.
By the way, Balancer of Power may be his most well known game, but you should listen some people here, Guns and Butter is a really interesting game, Siboot is, well, very interesting in its own particular way (and unique, only Façade has kinda followed that direction), and Patton Vs Rommel is a really clever wargame. I always liked Balance of the Planet (that’s why I’m interested in Fate of the World, but it seems Balance of the Planet was more customizable). His games may be worse or better in a pure “gameplay sense”, but they are always interesting.
I agree that he should have dropped that attitude of “leave me alone, I can do this!” but, I wish him the best of lucks and will keep track on his project.
No. If he hadn’t done it, somebody else would have. It is just an industry conference, like every industry has.
Bullshit, the GDC is not an “industry conference”, it´s a creators conference, which is not as common, and it wouldn’t be the way it is without Chris’s influence and passion on the idea that something like this should exist.
I wonder if some of the comments brushing someone like Chris aside(more or less) are simply related to what age you started getting into computers? Also he certainly brushed people up the wrong way which probably left it’s mark around the industry?
If you are simply a gamer, then maybe not knowing much about him, or not even having played any of his games is no big deal. It was a while ago.
But if you are a developer, or a wannabe(like me), then I can’t think of many sources of information on game design that are better than his collected essays on his blog/site. Sure his games are old, but design in any field faces certain universal problems and Chris has been a reasonably unique and powerful intellect fully focused on many of these issues for the better part of 30 years. You really have nothing to lose learning from the man, heck you might even work out how to make your games better, even if you don’t follow the ideals Chris set out to prove.
In the same breath, you admit his stuff is hard to follow (and probably with little payoff for those who do) and yet express disbelief that people don’t pay attention to him?
Bullshit, the GDC is not an “industry conference”, it´s a creators conference, which is not as common, and it wouldn’t be the way it is without Chris’s influence and passion on the idea that something like this should exist.
No. I’ve attended enough of these sorts of things (GDC included) to know. It is functionally the exact same. The one difference is the subject matter, which is the same difference every conference has. One guy putting his unique stamp on something does not then have it turn out looking and acting like everything else. Therefore, his unique stamp didn’t actually do anything.
I’ll be honest here and say that I’ve read a lot of his writings and I even tried to read his book. I find his arrogance off putting. I can’t get past it and the message is lost as a result. It’s a shame because there’s probably some good info and food for thought in there but he cocks up the delivery. For me, anyway.
I have said what I needed to in my weblog articles on Crawford, but I wanted to reiterate something here. This is a guy whose core competency is talking about himself. I find him infuriating not just because of that, but because he manages to pair this with minimizing the accomplishments of developers who actually ship code The example that comes to mind is his “where is he now?” speech referencing Nasir Gebelli. At the time Crawford gave that speech, Gebelli was shipping software.
Unlike Chris.
The idea that somehow these seminal ideas in gaming originated with Chris Crawford has a very simple source: Chris Crawford. And I do not think that source is trustworthy on this particular issue.