I don’t know the man except by reputation, but I’m going to have to vote for ‘jackass.’ He’s got an interview with Gamasutra this week entitled “Video games are dead: A chat with Storytronics Guru Chris Crawford.” Here are some selected gems:
“What I meant by that was that the creative life has gone out of the industry. And an industry that has no creative spark to it is just marking time to die.”
“I haven’t even seen any new ideas pop up. The industry is so completely inbred that the people working in it aren’t even capable of coming up with new ideas anymore.”
“But I think that it is reasonable to expect that an industry that hasn’t produced any innovation in at least a decade is unlikely to change its spots.”
I believe that the reason Chris spews this kind of virulent crap from his mouth is because his real legacy is insignificant in comparison to his reputation gained as a result of having originated GDC, which, while kind of cool I guess, is ultimately irrelevant as far as anything he has to say these days goes. He started GDC, and had it remained in his hands, it’d still be run out of his living room with a couple dozen participants rather than 10,000+. I think he’s insecure about his position in the industry and as a result feels the need to slam that which he’s not participating in.
The idea that games like Guitar Hero, Ico, the Sims, Ultima Online, Katamari Damacy, GTA III, and so on were not innovative is just ridiculous. There are a thousand other examples as well, ranging from intense stuff happening in the text MMO/MUD scene to AAA games like the above. If you believe there’s no innovation happening in games, not only aren’t you paying attention, but the real problem is probably that you have lost the spark, not that games have lost the spark.
I also think that Chris is engaging in nostalgia when he claims that there was some mythical period in the history of games when most games were innovative. Ok, perhaps that was the case when video games were just beginning, but when the field is completely wide open any swamp donkey can drop a load and be the first one to take a poo in that spot. I’ve been playing video games since 1980 and I can’t recall this magical time Chris seems to recall. In the history of the established games industry, I see very little difference in terms of what Chris wants to call innovation. Most games at any particular period of time have always been derivative. Innovation happened regardless. It’s still happening.
Chris Crawford, you are a bitter guy, and you know what: Storytron has already happened. It happened right around the same time you started on it it, 14 years ago. It’s called a MUSH. Hey, guess what? You’ve been working on something derivative for the last 14 years, but you haven’t even managed to commercialize it yet. 14 years!! Would you like to wager that when you do ‘release’ it, it’s not going to blow anyone away?
Jackass.
–matt
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June 14th, 2006 at 10:15 pm
Zell
I don’t know much about Chris Crawford but I think the phenomenon you refer to is pretty fundamental. Many of us auto-obsolete and lock ourselves into assumptions and limit our perceptions and hell, eventually need to simply breed so our kids can grow up and properly disdain where we’re coming from and genuinely reinvent things from scratch…
So good to see you can still effortlessly mix unapologetic annoyance with cutting instinctive perception.
June 14th, 2006 at 10:37 pm
Scott
Chris is a decent author and I really liked Eastern Front 1941 back in the day (it was a Russian Front hex wargame that played on the Atari 400). But yeah, he’s bitter now, though I suspect a lot of it is simply “cranky old man waves can, plays to gallery”. Give controversial sound bites for the first half of the interview, hype your product the second. Quid pro quo!
Crawford has been working on variations of Storytron for the past 15 years. One of them (Trust and Betrayal) was a published game. But yeah, he seems to believe that breaking down conversations into tokens is somehow revolutionary and groundbreaking.
June 14th, 2006 at 10:46 pm
Scott
(Editing comments would be nice. Now everyone can see my fractured syntax as it appears originally!)
Also, it’s more than a little ironic that we’re talking about this shortly after Raph discussed how the UO team implemented a similar hand-crafted system into UO. http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/09/why-dont-our-npcs/
June 15th, 2006 at 9:09 am
Sean
I don’t think that personally attacking Chris is going to change what he said. I’d feel a lot better if you took a less defensive approach to his points. It seems like you are taking it personally, which I don’t think you should. Crawford is a brilliant, but yes bitter, man - but none of that matters. His points do have some merit, if perhaps a little exaggerated.
The game industry IS inbred. I’ve been there. Creativity is definitely a distant characteristic of a majority of commercial games. And there really is only a handful of capable designers who can work in multiple genres, much less ones that can invent new ones - and the game industry is currently in state where getting more of these guys to the positions they need to be in is an impossible proposition. Truly, the best way to succeed in the game industry is to either not be in it, or to be Will Wright.
There is innovation happening in the industry, but almost without exception, it is happening in SPITE of the industry, not because of it. The industry could very easily be changed to support innovation and innovative designers, but instead you are punished for it. I won’t say there’s no innovation out there, or even that they has to be, but I will say that they could be more innovation and we’d be better off for it.
Crawford’s work on whatever the hell it’s called these days really is revolutionary and amazing - but from a structural level. It won’t produce decent games by itself because he’s working on something far lower level than you would need. The things he’s defining and discovering probably won’t be useful or common place within his lifetime - and even then, only after someone else has left a mark on it by bringing up a layer or two. It’s like he’s defining the transport layer of story and it is up to someone else to do the protocol and application layers. At least that was my impression a half dozen years ago when I was reading about it for the first time. He’s a crumudgeon, but he’s earned it my eyes.
Oh, and Guitar Hero is a near identical clone to a seven year old Japanese game called Guitar Freaks. I personally smack anybody who calls it innovative with a rolled up newspaper.
June 15th, 2006 at 12:06 pm
Matt
You’re right Sean, attacking him isn’t going to change what he said. I hope it doesn’t, because what he said is just incorrect. If he wants to launch an attack on the entire games industry, that’s his perogative, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to return the favor.
Further, you aren’t punished for innovation in “the games industry.” You may be punished for it in part of it, but the solution there seems obvious: Move to a different part of it. Three Rings or our company, for instance, are as much a part of the games industry as Blizzard. The latter, of course, has nearly infinitely more influence, but expecting innovation out of the mainstream is asking too much in any media format. The big players fulfill the needs of the masses and occasionally pull out something incredibly cool/innovative and massively successful (the Sims, for instance), and the smaller players innovate more frequently but perhaps in less impactful ways. (We pioneered an entire business model in the last 10 years, though few noticed until the Koreans took it up bigtime.)
Nobody earns being a curmudgeon. You either do something useful, or you’re just a crank with a good story in your past. I have no inherent objection to being a crank, but I do object to a crank that’s given a microphone to attack something I’m a part of.
The fact is, fun games continue to be made, and that is what matters as far as I’m concerned. And hey man, don’t rip on Guitar Hero lest I feel forced to lay the gauntlet down and challenge you!
–matt
June 15th, 2006 at 3:16 pm
mjh
I go with jackass, myself.
You can’t see something if you’re not looking for it, and boy is he not looking.
June 15th, 2006 at 5:28 pm
Sean
I respectfully disagree that Iron Realms or Three Rings are as much a part of the industry as Blizzard. You guys squarely fit into the “indie development” section. I, personally, was part of a company that was bought up by big name publisher who’s name begins with A - part of the corporate game industry. I assure you that if innovation happened there (and it didn’t) it would’ve been something to see indeed. If you are in the Kentia Hall at the E3 or occupy a booth stuck in the back, behind Sony’s Booth, made out of tin foil and tinker toys, then I don’t think you should take anything said about the industry as a whole personally.
I had a much larger rant here, but decided to keep it to myself. I have way too many nasty things to say about the industry - from personal experience - that I would be here all night.
If we understood game design better, maybe there’d be some merit to the argument that having fun is enough to be valid. But game design is still largely defined by how the designer “feels”, and game design is rewarded almost exclusively on popularity. We actually know LESS about game design now than ten years ago, if that were possible, largely because simple popularity has outpaced intellectualism. There’s just too many unanswered questions and unchallenged theories to say that the game industry is doing it’s job. We can’t even tell if it could do its job better because we don’t know what “better” would entail.
So yeah, I think the industry needs to be taken to task for inbreeding and innovation, if for no other reason that keeping the debate alive is perhaps the only reason why games like Katamari Damacy are given a chance in the first place. As long as we worship innovation above all else, the industry will always keep a place for it somewhere. But the second we say “nah, we’ve got enough innovation” or “hey, this stuff is way too innovative”, the game industry will start to agree.
As for Guitar Hero, it’s a fine game. I’m just saying it is a fine game by virtue of plagiarism.
June 16th, 2006 at 3:29 am
Matt
Sean wrote:
I respectfully disagree that Iron Realms or Three Rings are as much a part of the industry as Blizzard. You guys squarely fit into the “indie development” section. I, personally, was part of a company that was bought up by big name publisher who’s name begins with A - part of the corporate game industry.
Oh, I take no offence. I think it’s largely just a semantical disagreement. To me, ipso facto, if you make games, you’re part of the games industry. The EAs and Sonys of the world are, to me, the mainstream part of the industry.
–matt
July 5th, 2006 at 3:48 pm
Aamalaa
‘…If you believe there’s no innovation happening in games, not only aren’t you paying attention, but the real problem is probably that you have lost the spark, not that games have lost the spark.’
Matt, absolutely.
Was about to type the words ‘Looking Glass Studios’ and ‘Ion Storm Austin’, oopsy…butterfingers. Regardless, please don’t forget the modders out there. I tend to look to modders these days for something-analogous-to-punk bedsit innovation, or at least to give original content a longer shelf-life. And if these fine people didn’t think that their pet game was worthy then we’d get no mods. We’d have no Thief2X or Morrowind better bodies or what have you.
July 5th, 2006 at 4:19 pm
Matt
You’re right about the modders, Aamalaa. I need to resolve to try out more mods.
–matt