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End of an Era

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Re: End of an Era

#41

Post by gyomu »

tompark wrote: post #40
socalgal2 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People come up with complex shared narratives in multiplayer sandbox games like Minecraft/Roblox/Kenshi/etc. all the time. That sounds no different from comming up with narratives on a playground. That's not a designed narrative, that's people making up a narrative where none exists. Hey, the jungle gym in our secret base! The swings are space ship! The ground is lava! I think we can all imagine what he wanted to b…

I'm glad you're trying to explain the difference. I've been in too many conversations where this topic comes up, and it's very disheartening to me. Gamers insist there are plenty of great narrative games, and every example they give is basically a branching story with bunch of flags that gate which branches can be taken. If I give the Holodeck as a counter-example, well that's just too pie-in-the-sky. These conversat…

The complex emergent narratives people love in Dwarf Fortress or Caves of Qud aren’t branching stories though?

If the argument is “let’s build games that tell character stories as complex as Last of Us with the world building techniques of Dwarf Fortress”, it might be worth considering why 1) it wouldn’t be feasible and/or 2) it wouldn’t lead to a game that’s as fun/compelling as a more narratively linear counterpart.

The narrative in Last of Us is compelling because it’s tight and focused and authored by the authors to be told in a very specific way.

The “emergent narrative out of raw world simulation” argument sounds like filming thousands of hours of security camera footage and expecting Citizen Kane to come out of it.

I mean again, I would be pretty receptive to a “this game had the right idea, we should push it further” argument, but the “I’m a visionary game designer who hasn’t shipped a game that embodies my vision AND the thousands of other game designers are clueless, but everyone will see how clever I was in 3 centuries” argument rings pretty hollow.

For what it’s worth, Chris Crawford’s tool (http://storytron.com/) is a branching story editor, and one that seems much less powerful than what is used in the industry (eg articy).

Re: End of an Era

#42

Post by ahefner »

AndrewDucker wrote: post #2

This feels quite sad. Someone who clearly wanted to make a difference, but mostly seems to have not just made games . He made game tools, but then didn't actually use them to make games. And then he blamed everyone else for not being ready for what he was making. Giving up after only one released work just seems like such a shame.

He definitely made games. Chris Crawford was one of the first known names in game design, a few years ahead of contemporaries like Sid Meier whom I expect you'd still recognize. Crawford seemed to alternate between computer war games, with reliable prospects for commercial success in the 80s, and more experimental fare about managing nuclear reactors, geopolitics, and such - difference being he seemed to get bored by the whole thing and completely disembarked in pursuit of whatever it was he intended to achieve via Erasmatron, Storytron, etc. It's fascinating to read his writings over that period. It seemed a sort of tragic paradox overshadowing all of it that, if he was so bored of mechanistic, algorithmic, and predictable computer game mechanics, maybe stop pursuing computer games as your chosen medium? It may have been a blind alley in the end, but someone had to explore it.

Nevertheless, it is quite sad - however, it's difficult for me to relate to the experiences of someone who lived through that first wave of personal computing and played a notable part in it - perhaps through that lens, anything was possible.

Re: End of an Era

#43

Post by nkrisc »

tangus wrote: post #21
anyfoo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That quote about JavaScript is... huh. I do not understand how you can even begin coming to the conclusion of "JavaScript [is] utterly broken, incapable of executing the simplest programs without errors" when obviously, JavaScript (which I do not like, by the way) is productively used on a large scale (even back then), and constantly under scrutiny from programmers, computer scientists, language designers... it's jus…

>I do not understand how you can even begin coming to the conclusion of ... Obviously he's not serious, he's playing the part of the out of touch old man.

It is a rather common mindset among beginner programmers though, particularly younger ones.

Re: End of an Era

#44

Post by spacecadet »

I empathize with him. I always wanted to make indy games, going back to modding and being part of modding teams for doom, qwake, and half-life... In 2007 when the first iPhone came out, I immediately snagged one and dove into the jailbreaking and app building, eventually releasing 2 games into the app store, One did better financially, one was objectively a better game. Either way, I quit a stable job to focus on that and after 14 months I was unemployed again.

I explored tabletop games after that, modding, expanding, and even building prototypes using 3DP.

When AI exploded 2 years ago I was curious how much of a game it could build and I had recently learned about the existence of Pygame. Ended up building a zero-player 2D space sim. It's stupid, but I appreciate it and there is some art in it.

https://github.com/derekburgess/simcraft

Then recently, a coworker asked if I had tried Codex yet. I hadn't, and while riding in a car had the idea of using Codex on my phone to make a game that I could then deploy on my phone and play. Wanted to explore something meta, so I made an AI dungeon master in the style of Zork. It got out of hand and you cant deploy it on a phone- but I did deploy it remotely on my home workstation and then played over ssh from my phone ;P

https://github.com/derekburgess/dungen

I appreciate games for their randomness and have always leaned into games that incorporate generative sandbox experiences.

Re: End of an Era

#45

Post by lproven »

anyfoo wrote: post #14
cossatot wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is evident in his description of programming in his later years: Time and time again I would send my friend Dave Walker an email declaring that Javascript (or something else) was utterly broken, incapable of executing the simplest program without errors. Dave would ask to see the source code and I would present it to him with detailed notes proving that my code was perfect and Javascript was broken. He’d call me…

That quote about JavaScript is... huh. I do not understand how you can even begin coming to the conclusion of "JavaScript [is] utterly broken, incapable of executing the simplest programs without errors" when obviously, JavaScript (which I do not like, by the way) is productively used on a large scale (even back then), and constantly under scrutiny from programmers, computer scientists, language designers... it's jus…

> I do not understand how you can even begin coming to the conclusion

Tell us again when you're 74.

I'm still nearly 2 decades from it, but I am a profoundly different human to the one I was 20 years ago, or 20 years before that.

Re: End of an Era

#46

Post by marcinzm »

socalgal2 wrote: post #29
gyomu wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People come up with complex shared narratives in multiplayer sandbox games like Minecraft/Roblox/Kenshi/etc. all the time. In the single player realm, there are games like Dwarf Fortress, Caves of Qud, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, etc. Point is, the landscape of what "narrative" means in video games today is broad and deep. If none of those are even remotely like what Crawford thinks is "right" - and he's not able to d…

> People come up with complex shared narratives in multiplayer sandbox games like Minecraft/Roblox/Kenshi/etc. all the time. That sounds no different from comming up with narratives on a playground. That's not a designed narrative, that's people making up a narrative where none exists. Hey, the jungle gym in our secret base! The swings are space ship! The ground is lava! I think we can all imagine what he wanted to b…

That describes Dwarf Fortress. I guess you don't have an text interface to talk to people but that feels like a no true Scotsman requirement.

The difference is that Dwarf Fortress is not fully opaque to the player. You see a large part of the world so can see the consequences of your actions. And that is what makes it fun.

An opaque world simulator is frustrating and tedious. Eventually someone just min-maxes a way to break it which makes it just a tedious cookie clicker. That's why D&D has a game master that modifies the world's design to align with the players so that everyone has a good time. That is the key difference. An illusion of rigid structure, which requires some actual structure, with opaque flexibility. A simulator is not a fun game. A world where god cheats to make you have more fun time is a fun game. A pre-defined narrative or narrative tress is one such cheat, but not the only one.

Re: End of an Era

#47

Post by lordfrito »

tompark wrote: post #33

Chris Crawford's tools for interactive storytelling may have failed, but he was a huge inspiration for me in my game dev career, and I still harbor aspirations in "interactive storytelling" due to his influence. I first attended CGDC in 1994. It was two years after his Dragon Speech (which I knew nothing about), but the highlight of the conference was his talk about the challenges of story-based games. The part I rem…

In many ways Chris is ending things just as his dream is about to come to fruition. His vision was just 40 years ahead of the technology. If only he could stay engaged another 10 years. The best times are ahead of us

Re: End of an Era

#48

Post by whoisyc »

lxdesk wrote: post #11

Crawford's work is worthy of study, as is the causation for why he experienced external failure. It embodies the "simulationist" aesthetic of game design: given enough modelled parameters, something emergent and interesting will happen. This was a trend of the 20th century: computers were new and interesting, and simulations did work when you asked them to solve physics problems and plan logistics. Why wouldn't it wo…

> He was likewise confident that a shooting game would be less thoughtful than a turn-based strategy game because the moment-to-moment decisions were less complex

Sounds like a classic example of Moravec’s paradox:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox

It’s not that a shooting (or action, or heck talk to competitive fighting game players) game has less decisions for the player to make, it’s that the decisions being made are all subconscious decisions about movements and difficult to put into words.

Re: End of an Era

#49

Post by cubefox »

lordfrito wrote: post #47
tompark wrote: post #33

Chris Crawford's tools for interactive storytelling may have failed, but he was a huge inspiration for me in my game dev career, and I still harbor aspirations in "interactive storytelling" due to his influence. I first attended CGDC in 1994. It was two years after his Dragon Speech (which I knew nothing about), but the highlight of the conference was his talk about the challenges of story-based games. The part I rem…

In many ways Chris is ending things just as his dream is about to come to fruition. His vision was just 40 years ahead of the technology. If only he could stay engaged another 10 years. The best times are ahead of us

A few months ago someone here reported on making text adventures with language models. If I remember correctly, a problem is that it is not trivial to control the AI in a way that players can't cheat on puzzles.

Re: End of an Era

#50

Post by blizdiddy »

tompark wrote: post #40
socalgal2 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People come up with complex shared narratives in multiplayer sandbox games like Minecraft/Roblox/Kenshi/etc. all the time. That sounds no different from comming up with narratives on a playground. That's not a designed narrative, that's people making up a narrative where none exists. Hey, the jungle gym in our secret base! The swings are space ship! The ground is lava! I think we can all imagine what he wanted to b…

I'm glad you're trying to explain the difference. I've been in too many conversations where this topic comes up, and it's very disheartening to me. Gamers insist there are plenty of great narrative games, and every example they give is basically a branching story with bunch of flags that gate which branches can be taken. If I give the Holodeck as a counter-example, well that's just too pie-in-the-sky. These conversat…

You haven’t played dwarf fortress or caves of qud and it shows. Great example of armchair designers insisting they know better than all the gamers and game creators immersed in the art.
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