No, I said that he his stuff is hard to produce because it´s very difficult to design and the path is far from clear, that’s why there are not many developers following that. But as someone who even the slightest interest in interactive design, knowing who Crawford is should be a must.
And whatever at your second point, if someone had to do it, he did, give him his deserved credit at least.
Fascinating…
Nasir programmed a bunch of Final Fantasies, took the money and ran. What an a accomplishment… At least Crawford has been teaching and inspiring people.
Hey, that’s a very good point. Chris Crawford is one of my heroes…but so is Nasir Gebelli, maybe even to a greater extent. Do you have any links to your stories on that stuff?
I guess you are trying to be sarcastic, but I don’t think it is working. Yes, I do in fact think than Nasir shipping a bunch of games is more of an accomplishment than not shipping anything recently except some essays.
Real artists ship.
No, real product developers ship. Artists don’t care whether their work is appreciated or even finished, they express themselves for the sake of self-fulfilment.
Unless you’re operating with some commercial definition of art and artists that I’m unfamiliar with.
I hope Mr. Crawford doesn’t feel embittered. He’s inspired a lot of people, including me, with his games and writing. The Art of Computer Game Design, Chris Crawford on Game Design and Chris Crawford on Interactive Narrative helped authenticate and develop a lot of the ideas I had about games as a medium and art form. I’m sure there are many other great contributors that could have done the same had I discovered them first, but I don’t see why we should compare and rank people’s accomplishments as long as the metric (namely the relative size of their contribution to the development of an entire medium) is completely subjective.
I am sure that if you read up a little bit you’ll find out something about art, and how artists work. Good luck with that.
Mind blown, man. I’m not looking to pick a fight, but your one-dimensional definition of what an artist is and does strikes me as rather funny. I’m sure you don’t mind, as you seem like the rather steadfast and sophisticated fellow with a distinguished sense of humour.
That made me laugh, well done.
Wow, your observation skills are amazing, you should write about it in your weblog.
I guess we’ll have to disagree. In my philosophy, artists produce works. If you’re not actually creating a work of some kind (where “work” can refer to things like a performance, we’re not limiting this to physical goods), then you’re not – to me – an artist, even if you’re a genius inside your own head.
In any event, this is sort of tangential to my main point, which was my reaction to Acosta’s dismissal of Nasir having created a “bunch of Final Fantasies” as somehow making his body of work less significant than Crawford’s. Which seems to me to be a completely backwards attitude, even on its face.
You can dismiss every single accomplishment in human history with “if he hadn’t done it, someone else would have.”
The fact is, he did do it. He gets the credit.
I’ve met Chris a few times, mostly at the earlier GDCs (not the living room ones; the hotel ones). He’s an interesting dude. All the criticisms here may be true, but I’m glad there are people at the fringes trying to do interesting things–and failing–instead of being focused solely on shipping and moving product. We can talk about games as art, but people criticizing him for experimenting seem to be taking the position that games are commerce.
Chris is definitely an interesting guy who deserves credit as one of the pioneers of this industry.
That said, as another old guy who has interacted with Chris and played his games back in the day, I also think he’s easily the most overrated of those pioneers and has an embarrassingly overwrought and self-aggrandizing perception of himself.
I wish he had remained productive and was more prolific in his contributions over the past 20 years, but delusional rants like the article that spawned this thread make it apparent why he wasn’t.
I think it’s worth contrasting Chris with Sid Meier. Sid’s been around roughly as long. The earliest Sid Meier game I can recall playing was F-15 Strike Eagle for the Atari 800, and Mobygames mentions him for games from 1982. The earliest Chris Crawford game I can recall is Legionnaire (also for the Atari 800), from 1982. Unlike Chris, Sid’s games have always been fun, and Sid’s always been aware that he was making games for players first and foremost. And while he’s only sporadically active these days, he’s definitely active. My understanding is that Civ Revolution was his design, unlike Civ III through V. I know credits don’t always tell the whole truth - I worked at a company where the guy who got design credit showed up at the office 2 times a week - but I think it’s accurate in this case.
No question Sid has an ego, what with his name plastered on so many of his titles starting with Railroad Tycoon. But it’s not on the scale of Chris’s, even though he has more cause. Further, when he’s had something to say publicly about game design theory, generally it’s been pretty damned intelligent. The most well-known and succinct quote being “games are about interesting decisions.”
Personally I’m delighted that he’s willing and able to spend his time experimenting! More power to him, especially when he could have just retired and lounged by the pool. Nobody doubts his intentions or his work ethic.
I think what rankles is his all-or-nothing attitude. If he somehow managed to create single-celled life in a test tube, he’d destroy it because it wasn’t the supercreature he’d planned on making.
This is a disastrous attitude for an aesthetic experimenter to have, since often “failures” are more fruitful and interesting than successes. Often where you end up is more interesting than where you intended to go.
It’s also an attitude that brings out unpleasant personality traits. Crawford can be very dismissive of people and projects that don’t live up to his impossible standards. This has led him to be needlessly hard on other people; it has also led him to be needlessly hard on himself. Take his statement that he will either finish Morte d’Arthur or his life will be an abject failure. What an absurd and unhealthy thing to say!
I hope that one thing turning 60 teaches him is that nobody – absolutely nobody – makes it all the way up the path to perfection. The important thing is to appreciate what you find along the way.
This simply is not true. The vast majority of “industry conferences” are pay for play, where a significant number of the speakers have paid to be on stage (usually via company sponsorships). The GDC is one of the few that separates and clearly marks Sponsored Sessions, and we take a lot of heat for it from sponsors, I can assure you. I’m not saying Chris is to be solely credited for this, 25 years later, but he did set the direction for the conference and it has largely survived intact even under the pressures of massive growth. MFI/CMP/UBM/whatever-they-call-themselves-this-week also deserve credit for not fucking it up when they purchased it, and others deserve credit as well, but Chris did start something markedly different from most “industry conferences” and helped set a tone of open information sharing the sets the GDC and the game industry as a whole apart to this day.
Chris
Right back atcha.
The vast majority of “industry conferences” are pay for play, where a significant number of the speakers have paid to be on stage (usually via company sponsorships). The GDC is one of the few that separates and clearly marks Sponsored Sessions,
The non-game industry ones I have been at do exactly this too. At a guess I’d say it has averaged a 50/50 split between company reps and relatively ordinary people invited to speak by the conference organizers because they have been doing something interesting, and it’s always very clear which is which.
So, I stand by my comment.
Just as a clarification, Sid has no ego. I think he had it surgically removed. The name stuff is all business. He’s the nicest guy you will ever meet, he does not take himself too seriously, and listens to anyone and everyone patiently and thoughtfully.
And he’s not sporadically active, he works like a fiend. He is always filling the lead designer/lead gameplay programmer role on one of our projects.
Walks on water, loaves of bread and fish, Lazarus and all that.
I am biased.
Still, true story.
Ego surgically removed.
Every Firaxis employee I’ve ever talked from the former CEO to the name designers has said exactly the same thing. He also comes across as being very humble in every talk and interview I’ve ever read.
It is the reason I didn’t include him in my list (Crawford, Bunten, Wright) of prominent 80s designer with big egos. It is interesting question what would have happened if Crawford, and Sid had ego swap back in the 80s. My best guess is that Chris wouldn’t have looked back at 60 and called his life a failure.
This is both question-begging as well as conflating commerce and art.
The fact that all the industry can afford to fund is (effectively) evolutionary stuff doesn’t mean that if somebody spent ten years and came up with something revolutionary, it would be a failure. It just means it hasn’t happened, and it wouldn’t be funded by the game industry.
In fact, a Chris Crawford product is more plausible now than it was ten years ago, since we have a viable indie game market now, where I don’t think anything you’ve said applies.
Markets will change, sure. But if somebody can actually invest ten years and come out the other end having “solved” (i.e. made some major progress) the problem of interactive/emergent storytelling, or the other difficult AI problem of making believable characters when the player has significant freedom, that would be awesome.
Because the game industry isn’t going to do it.
I’m not bashing the game industry. (I’m in it.) It’s a hard problem, and those commercial constraints loom large. But the existing evolutionary industry model has done nothing to solve those things. Taking the second one (since it’s been a while since i thought about interactive storytelling, although I did a little research on that to), yes, the graphics and animation for characters like Alyx or Elena Fisher or whatever have improved, but believable interactivity? They’re as much on rails as they ever have been. The most “advanced” characters I’ve seen remain those in the (free; indie) “text adventures” of Emily Short, and they’re still mostly just flexible branching conversations with a limited amount of state. LMNO attempted to tackle this problem and apparently didn’t have much luck. Facade was a long-term indie/academic project which tackled both character interaction in the face player agency and interactive plot… and was IMO basically a failure. (Full disclosure: I am both a friend of Emily Short, and I did a teensy bit of paid consulting work on the LMNO AI.)
So, yes, I think just about the best thing Crawford could have done was go indie and try to just solve the problems. We need people trying that stuff, even if it has yet to produce commercially viable results, because just because something has never happened doesn’t mean it never will (it may be a useful rule of thumb, but it’s not a law that applies to 100% of endeavors, and research is absolutely not one of those endeavors).
Certainly, most areas of gaming do not need that kind of research; evolutionary steps produce good results. But having followed and thought about and worked on some of these issues for twenty years, I don’t think that’s true for everything, and these AI-related problems are amongst those for which it’s not true. (Although they may just be impossible to improve past the current asymptote without solving strong AI, which would suck.)
I believe Crawford first 8-bit game was either SCRAM or Energy Czar and they both came out in late '79, early 1980.