Author and computer game designer; designed several notable games for the 80s and early nineties. An interview with Chris Crawford: http://www.dadgum.com/halcyon/BOOK/CRAWFORD.HTM Chris Crawford's web site: http://www.erasmatazz.com His Amazon reviews: http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A36U0SVO1LH7ZE/ref=cm_pdp_reviews_see_all/002-9331745-7740036 ---- Back in the day when Macintoshes were cutesy luggable computers with black-and-white screens, ChrisCrawford designed a number of really great concepts disguised as games. They included: * BalanceOfPower: Cold war brinksmanship, where you played either the SovietUnion or the UnitedStates, trying to increase your geopolitical influence without sparking a nuclear war. If war broke out, everybody lost, and there wasn't even a cool picture of a nuclear explosion, just a dark screen telling you "Everybody's dead now, so you don't deserve to see a pretty picture." If you wanted mind-grinding complexity, you could play in multi-polar mode and make decisions like whether or not to yell at India for invading Pakistan. * Trust and Betrayal - The Legacy Of Siboot: You played one of eight psychic alien races in some odd contest. The actual fights took place it night, in your dreams, but since your tactics depended on the state of your assets, most of the real action took place in the day, where you went around to the others trying to get them to betray a third party for you. Every player had its own personality, and the game used an iconic language which was remarkably easy to learn. : You went around to your neighbors and you 'talked' to them using this iconic language. Part of the game was like Clue, where each character knew something about other characters. You negotiated the information out of each player by buttering them up, flattering, threatening, or expressing admiration. If you flattered the wrong character at the wrong time she would get mad at you. : At night you met your opponent in a dream and you played a game of "RockPaperScissors" for points. It was all quite trippy. * BalanceOfThePlanet: environmental management * GunsAndButter: macroeconomic competition * PattonVsRommel: WWII wargame These days, ChrisCrawford works quite a bit with InteractiveFiction. Someone more knowledgeable about his current work can surely fill it in here. --Actually, he refers to his project as interactive storytelling, probably to emphasize that interactive storyworlds needn't involve puzzles or text parsers. Kef X-Schecter (FurryKef) ---- ChrisCrawford worked at Atari in the early 80's. He wrote a couple of games for the 8-bit Atari personal computers, including: * ''SCRAM'' (a nuclear reactor simulation). This game was uncredited, as Crawford was a staff programmer at Atari at the time. * ''Eastern Front 1941'' (a WWII strategic wargame concerning the German invasion of Russia). This latter game was developed via the AtariProgramExchange, so Crawford was credited. Many consider ''Eastern Front 1941'' to be the forerunner of the modern computer wargame (especially the turn-based variety), though crude by modern standards it was years beyond any prior war simulations for computers. It was this game that solidified Crawford's reputation and made him somewhat of a star. An interesting personal narrative of the development of Eastern Front is available here: http://www3.sympatico.ca/maury/other_stuff/eastern_front.html (maybe not so interesting if you haven't played the game). ---- ChrisCrawford was also responsible for the Atari 400/800 cartridge game, StarRaiders. The game was an astonishingly good space shoot-em-up, and it left you wondering how he programmed it. He answered that question in his co-authored book, DeReAtari. -- EricJablow * ...in the sense that he and his co-authors discuss programming for the Atari in general, and mention StarRaiders a few times, not in the sense that it includes an in depth discussion of that game in particular. Book available online, see bottom of page. ---- --BalanceOfPower is a classic example of bad game design. It has tons of cool stuff, great ideas, had good graphics, but was no fun. Anti-fun even, as playing it left you less happy then when you started. Chris has had pile of great ideas and made a lot of cool stuff. But his games were rarely if ever any fun, and a game that is not fun is a bad game. ''Hmm... I spent many a happy hour in my childhood playing BalanceOfPower. It's still one of my favorite strategy games. So this may be more a matter of personal taste.'' I would agree that BalanceOfPower wasn't a well-designed game. If nothing else, the mechanics of seemed really opaque: If you helped fund an insurrection somewhere, did that help your position in any way other than giving you points? It was always hard to tell. That said, BalanceOfPower was a fairly innovative concept -- I don't remember any other computer game that tried to simulate cold-war brinksmanship -- and I yearn for new ideas, now that 99% of all video games are the same old Quake clone with bigger guns and bloodier explosions. As an interesting side note, I read the book ChrisCrawford wrote about BalanceOfPower, and one of the things he wrote was "If you want to learn about the Soviet mentality, play as the USSR. You'll start feeling quite paranoid, with the whole globe allied against you, and you with just a few countries (Cuba, North Korea, etc.) on your side." ''The point of playing BalanceOfPower was not to win or lose--it was to learn about diplomacy. Winning or losing or fairness wasn't important. When I was a teenager, playing BoP gave me some insight as to why national leaders did what they did.'' That is exactly why it was a bad game. The point of the software was to educate the user, not to entertain the user. If you sell something as a game the buyer expects it will be fun. BoP claimed to be a game but was really a (good) educational program. If it was also lots of fun that would of course be fine, but Chris went for educational over fun. ''But it ''was'' fun! I'm not sure how objectively this point can be argued, though.'' If it was fun for one, the value is one, if it also educated the same one, the value was two. Chris may have valued education over fun, but he used fun to educate. Not a bad plan at all. The value for all is still there for all, whether by ones or twos. Fun indeed can be an enhancer! The same can be said for our jobs. We can get more from them than a paycheck. (Education, Experience, the feeling of accomplishment) I don't know Chris personally (though I did talk to him on the phone a month ago, since I'm remaking Trust and Betrayal), but I know that he thinks the idea that a game has to be fun is bull. Would you say Schindler's List is a crappy movie because it's not ''fun''? He'll happily admit that one of his other games, Balance of the Planet, was hardly any fun at all. However, I do think Balance of Power is a fun game. That ''you'' think it is not fun does not make it a bad design, and certainly not a classic example of bad design. The game sold for ''millions'' of dollars, something pretty unheard of at the time. Apparently, other people thought it was fun, too. But even if it's no fun at all, to say the design is bad because it didn't achieve something it never set out to achieve in the first place is ridiculous. - Kef X-Schecter (FurryKef) The boardgame ''Twilight Struggle'', from GMT Games, explicitly credits BalanceOfPower as its inspiration. The difference is that a player wins if his opponent starts a nuclear war. Somehow, I prefer ChrisCrawford's attitude. --EricJablow ---- In addition, Crawford has authored the following books: * ''TheArtOfInteractiveDesign'' (ISBN: 1886411840) * ''ChrisCrawfordOnInteractiveStorytelling'' (ISBN: 0321278909) * ''ChrisCrawfordOnGameDesign'' (ISBN: 0131460994) * plus 3 others listed on his web site, http://www.erasmatazz.com * Plus although not mentioned in his web site, he's first listed coauthor of ''De Re Atari : A Guide to Effective Programming (400/800 Home Computer)'', 1981, By Chris Crawford, Lane Winner, Jim Cox, Amy Chen, Jim Dunion, Kathleen Pitta, Bob Fraser, and Gus Makrea ** online at http://www.atariarchives.org/dere/ (with permission of author) ** or http://www.runtime.demon.co.uk/Systems/Atari/Books/DeReAtari/Title.html ** It appears to not have an ISBN And a few others which are OutOfPrint. ---- CategoryGameDesigner CategoryAuthor