Game Design: Theory & Practice- P11 pps

Dan refused, just said flat out, “That will not happen.” And Global Conquest was the same way. It was not so much about shooting as about teamwork. My conquer-the-world game, Guns & Butter, was really more about macro- economics. In fact, during development, it was called Macro-Economic Conquest.I think it’s reasonably successful as a game to teach about how history really devel - ops, but that’s all. It was certainly one of my poorest games, no question. It really didn’t have that much creativity. There were some cute ideas, but where that game had cute ideas, Siboot had thunderclaps of genius. For example, Guns & Butter had this nifty little algorithm for generating continents. I also developed a wonderful algorithm for giving names to states and provinces, and I’m very proud of that algo - rithm; it’s very clever. But this is mere cleverness, not creative genius. Guns & Butter has some interesting ideas about balancing complex systems. But you think it did not work? No, it didn’t work, largely because I completely blew the handling of trade and alliances. That was a disaster. I think if I’d given that game another six months it probably would have worked out just fine, but I rushed it. Balance of the Planet seems to be an extremely educationally oriented game. Was that your intent? Oh, absolutely. I had no intent whatso- ever to make something that was fun. My feeling was, “OK, there are all of those shoot-’em-ups and so forth, and I’m not going to try to compete with those things. I’m going to do a game that taps into another area of humanity. So I’m going to do pure sim - ulation, and I’m going to make that simulation very realistic and very educational as well.” We knew Earth Day 1990 was coming up, and we thought, “We’re going to release this thing in time for Earth Day.” And I felt that would be one of my contributions. Again, Vietnam generation, Earth Day, and all that jazz. Balance of Power was about the Vietnam War, and Balance of the Planet was about Earth Day. 278 Chapter 14: Interview: Chris Crawford Balance of the Planet TEAMFLY Team-Fly ® Will Wright’s SimEarth came out just shortly after Balance of the Planet. It’s interesting to compare the two. Of course his is more of a toy, and yours is much more goal oriented. SimEarth was not one of Will’s better efforts. He’s done brilliant stuff, but I think he didn’t have a clear purpose with SimEarth. It was kind of, “OK, here’s this planet, and here are these geological processes, and here are these life forms, and ”There was no design focus to it. He seems to have said, “Let’s take SimCity and do it to the whole Earth.” That kind of extrapolatory approach to design never works well. And it didn’t work well for him. It was certainly more successful than Balance of the Planet, because it was a lot better looking and had plenty of cute features. But it was not as educational as Balance of the Planet. SimEarth had a lot of interesting systems in it but it was difficult to understand what was going on. It was more that all of the different systems, they sort of didn’t add up to anything. He had all of these simplifications, but they weren’t purposeful simplifi- cations. They were simplifications to make the internal systems accessible, but they didn’t really add up to anything. The model for the way living systems develop did- n’t seem to make any sense to me, even though it was easy to see its results. I’ve heard Balance of the Planet criticized for not being a lot of fun. Do you see fun as the sine qua non of game design? That’s exactly the problem. Many people do see fun as the sine qua non. That’s one way that the game design industry has gone down the wrong path. Basically, computer games and video games are now one, and in fact they’re all video games in the sense of cute shoot-’em-ups, lots of graphics, splendiferousness, and emphasis on fun in the childish sense. I see no reason why computer games needed to constrain themselves in this fashion. It’s rather like somebody say - ing, “I went to go see the movie Das Boot, but it wasn’t any fun, so it’s a crummy Chapter 14: Interview: Chris Crawford 279 Balance of the Planet movie.” Well, I’m sorry, but Das Boot was not meant to be fun. I think we could agree that Saving Private Ryan is not a fun movie, but it is a damn good one. And the same thing goes for Schindler’s List. And, sure, there are plenty of fun movies. Star Wars was lots of fun. But Hollywood doesn’t constrain itself the way the games industry does. I suppose that was the whole thrust of my efforts all through the ’80s and into the early ’90s, to help the games industry become a broad-based entertain - ment industry, rather than a kiddie, fun industry. I failed at that. It is now most definitely not an entertainment industry, and never will be. They’ve painted them - selves into a corner from which they can never extricate themselves. It’s rather like comics. It’s a shame to see the medium of comics used brilliantly by people like Spiegelman and McCloud, yet it is relegated to the comic book stores where the kids chewing bubble gum come. Not enough adults take graphic novels seriously. Some progress is evident, but it’s a slow, slow process. I’m not sure they’ll ever pull themselves out of that dump. So you think the games industry has reached that same point of stagnation? Yes. Only they’re not even trying to get out; they haven’t even realized yet that there’s a problem. So I guess that’s what led to your leaving the games industry and starting work on the Erasmatron. Well, there were two factors in that. Yes, I had been steadily drifting away from the games industry. The hallmark of that was the “Dragon Speech” I gave. That lec- ture was I’ll just tell you how it ended. In the lecture, I’d been talking about “the dragon” as the metaphor for this artistic goal. And, right at the end of the speech, in essence I stopped talking with the audience and had a conversation directly with the dragon. I said, “And now that I have finally devoted myself heart and soul to the task of pursuing the dragon, all of a sudden, there he is, I can see him brightly and clearly.” I began talking to the dragon, and that was intense. I can’t remember it exactly, but I said something like, “You’re mighty, you’re powerful, you’re beauti - ful, but you’re oh so ugly. Yes, yes, you frighten me” and then I screamed, “You hurt me! I’ve felt your claws ripping through my soul!” I wasn’t lecturing any more, this was much more acting. I let out that line “you hurt me” with great passion, and it frightened the audience. They weren’t used to that level of passion in the technical lectures that they were familiar with. And then I said, “I’m not good enough to face you, I’m not experienced enough, so I’m going to do it now. I’ve got to go face to face with you, eyeball to eyeball, and I’m going to do it now, here.” I reached over and I pulled out a sword and I kind of hunkered down and shouted in a battle cry, “For truth, for beauty, for art, charge!” I went galloping down the center aisle of the lecture hall, and I never came back. 280 Chapter 14: Interview: Chris Crawford This was at the Computer Game Developer’s Conference? Yes. A lot of people thought, “Well, Chris gave his swan song, he’ll never come back.” But in fact I came back the next year, and I had every intention of continuing to lend my expertise. “I’m going off in this other direction, but you guys need my help, and I will still be there.” Unfortunately, a whole ugly incident with the confer - ence board members put an end to that. What was so hurtful was not just the behavior of the board members, but also the attitude of the community, which was, “Hey, this is Silicon Valley, you just gotta fight to get yours. If they play hardball, what’s the big deal?” My reaction was, “I just don’t want to be a part of this nasty community.” It was so bitter an experience, that moving to Oregon was an impera - tive. I had to get out of Silicon Valley. And it’s funny, every time I go down there now, I can see the Silicon Valley greed all around me. It really bothers me. So that drove you into working on the Erasmatron? I had been evolving in that direction. But what made it a negative move was A, the industry was editorially going in directions I did not like, and B, the industry was going in moral and social directions that I did not like. So how did the Erasmatron project come about? I set out to do interactive storytelling. I said, “I’m going to go back, and I’m going to do my King Arthur game now.” Because I had done a King Arthur game at Atari that I was proud of, that had a lot of good ideas, but I felt it did not do justice to the legends, so I felt that I owed something to those legends. I started all over to do a completely new approach. That led me up to the storytelling engine. However, everything was hand-coded and it was enormously difficult. We had gone the rounds to all the big companies trying to interest them in it and nobody was interested. Just about that time, I ran into a lady named Edith Bjornson, who was with the Markle Foundation. She suggested that I take the technology in a different direction, as an enabling technology to permit non-technical people to create their own story-worlds. I very much liked the idea. So Markle funded me, and the fundamen - tal strategy of the project was expressed in the slogan “Unleash a tidal wave of creativity.” Thus, I was building three pieces of software. The Erasmatron, which is the editing software for the engine, the engine, which actually ran everything, and finally the front end, which delivered it to the user. It was a huge project and I had to do it in two years. Unfortunately the problem turned out to be much bigger than I anticipated. What I got working after two years was nice, and indeed technically adequate, but I don’t think it was commercially adequate. Chapter 14: Interview: Chris Crawford 281 How do you mean? It takes too much effort to create a sufficiently entertaining end result. Laura Mixon worked on Shattertown Sky for nearly eighteen months. But Shattertown just didn’t work. It was not entertaining, it was not even finished. There were places where it would just stop. Yet she worked longer and harder on it than she was expected to. There wasn’t any failure on her part. The failure on my part was under - estimating the magnitude of the task. I thought that a year would be sufficient. Well, first, she didn’t get fully operational software for at least six months. And second, the tool she had was so weak that she spent a lot of time doing busy work. The con - clusion was that the Erasmatron needed to be souped-up, and there were a few embellishments to the engine that came out of that. But they were actually compara - tively minor. Most of the work I have been doing since that, on the Erasmatron 2, has been to make the whole process of creating a story-world easier. So you haven’t concluded that making a story-world is just an inherently hard task? You’ve found ways to make it easier? Well, there’s no question in my mind that creating a story-world with Erasmatron 2 is immensely easier than with Erasmatron 1. Erasmatron 2 dramati- cally cleans up the process of creating a story-world, cutting the time required roughly in half. You see, with Erasmatron 1, we were shooting in the dark. I had no idea of what the process of creation would look like. I don’t feel bad that Erasmatron 1 was a bad design, in fact it was much better than the original design document. I’d made quite a few improvements, but they weren’t enough. I think that, using Erasmatron 2, people can create excellent story-worlds with an adequate commitment of time, which I consider to be at least six months and probably a year, but I haven’t proved that. That is what’s stopping the whole project: I need proof. Is that something you’re hoping to provide with the Le Morte D’Arthur project? I don’t know. I’ve had some kind of writer’s block with that project and I don’t understand why. I think one factor is a sense of demoralization. I’ve put nine years into this project, and so far it’s been a failure. With the exception of the Markle funding, nobody’s interested. There are always a few pots bubbling. Right now there are three separate groups who have expressed interest in this. So it’s not as if I ever reach a point where I can say “it’s dead.” There’s always something going on, and there’s always the hope that it will go somewhere, but these things never go anywhere. I’m definitely getting discouraged. What would an ideal Erasmatron storytelling experience be like? I’ll describe it in two ways, tactical and strategic. Tactical being what the audi - ence experiences moment to moment, and strategic being the overall experience. Tactically, the audience will see a static image on the screen representing whatever 282 Chapter 14: Interview: Chris Crawford has just happened. It will show the face of the person who just did whatever hap - pened, as well as anybody else who’s on the same stage. It will have some text explaining what has happened. The other thing I want to use is something like a comics technique. That is, comics show action between frames very well. So it might require two frames. But I want to use the artistic styles that have developed in the comics. In Scott McCloud’s book, Understanding Comics, he has that triangle that represents the amount of abstraction. With the smiley face in one corner and the photo-realistic face in the other. Right. My guess is we would want to move on that triangle far away from the photo-realism corner. We’d want to be somewhere much closer to abstraction and representation. So I think we’re talking about a more abstract type of display. And then there will be your menu of choices, expressed as complete sentences. This is what the player is permitted to say or do. Strategically, the big difference is that all story-worlds have a very meandering character to them. “Barroom Brawl” doesn’t, because it’s a single scene. “Corporate Meeting” is a single scene and even it mean- ders a bit. We have figured out how to cope with that problem. I had thought that plot points would do enough, but Laura and I have now come up with a scheme. I don’t want to describe this as a new discovery; rather this is a concept that has been slowly brewing for several years now. We’re putting flesh on its bones and I think it will work. The idea is that there is something like a core plot that is beyond the control of the player. However, the player does control lots of interactions that will not just influence but ultimately determine the final outcome of the plot. For example, con - sider a murder mystery, such as Shattertown. Basically at some point, time is going to run out, and either the clans are going to go to war or Sky will unmask the mur - derer or Sky will get caught by the murderer. That ending has been established, and events will force that ending. The thing is, what ending you get depends critically on all the things you have done up to that point. Same way with Le Morte D’Arthur. The basic design says, very clearly, that the end game is going to have Mordred revolt. No matter what happens, Mordred is going to revolt at some point. And when he does, all the other actors are going to choose up sides. Some of them will go with Mordred, and some will stay with you. There will be a big battle, and the side with the bigger battalions wins. The decision to go with Mordred or stay with you will be based on all the things you’ve done up to that point. I’ve come up with another concept for Le Morte D’Arthur that I’m tempted to go with, which would incorporate some of the elements of the current Le Morte D’Arthur. In this one, you’re not playing as Arthur, you’re playing as Merlin, and you’re a transplant from the future. Your task is to modernize Arthurian society and thereby prevent the Dark Ages from happening. You’re trying to build up this soci - ety and get it operating on a more efficient basis and teach them a little bit about Chapter 14: Interview: Chris Crawford 283 sanitation and education and so forth. Along the way all the nobles are developing their resentments against you, and they try various plots to discredit or kill you. And, once again, Mordred revolts. The end result feels more purposeful, less meandering. So the player is led in a direction more than in the current version. We’re not asking you to be creative or come up with new social innovations, we’ll simply present you at various points with opportunities to initiate new innova - tions, to say, “All right, do you think it’s time to teach these people sanitation, or do you think it’s time to teach them how to use the stirrup?” And each one takes time. And there’s still this steady plot that develops as you help this society pull itself up by its bootstraps. But there’s still an awful lot of interaction going on. What we’re developing here is a concept of “semi-plot” or “pseudo-plot” or a “skeletal plot” that can proceed in the way that a plot is supposed to. You still have a plot, but it doesn’t hijack the whole story and dominate it as it does in a conventional story. So the player has more involvement than they would reading a book, but not total freedom either. Yes. The idea is that you want to use dramatic constraints, not artificial con- straints. This is a drama. It’s got to evolve by certain rules. We’re going to apply those rules here. It should not incur resentment on the player’s part that he can’t pick his nose while talking to Arthur. That’s not dramatically reasonable. Some argue that, if you don’t give the player full freedom to be creative, it just doesn’t work. I disagree with that entirely. So long as you give him all dramatically reason - able options, or even most of them, you’re doing fine. So you’re quick not to call your Erasmatron system a game of any kind. Why is that? The differentiation is two-fold. The first reason is marketing. Right now, com - puter games mean Quake, Command & Conquer, or something like that. The associations with that term are all about shoot-’em-ups, resource management, and those associations are very clearly defined in the public’s mind. If I call this a game, they’re going to apply associations that are misleading. Moreover, the term “game,” if you look it up in the dictionary, has more column inches than most words. I com - pared it with words like “do” and “eat” and “have” and I found that it’s bigger. Because that word is a semantic imperialist, it just goes everywhere. It can be used for many many different meanings, all completely different. But then there’s sort of a switcheroo that happens. You can apply the word “game” to a whole bunch of products and activities, but then as soon as people associate it with a computer they say “computer game!” and all the semantic meaning collapses down to this little bitty point. Maybe I should call it a web game, get the whole thing on the web. Or if 284 Chapter 14: Interview: Chris Crawford I do it on the Mac maybe I can call it an iGame. But I don’t dare call it a computer game or a video game. Why do you think facial expressions are so important for storytelling? Because facial expression is one of the fundamental forms of human com - munication. It’s funny, other people think graphics where I’m thinking commu - nication. What goes on between user and computer is primarily a matter of communi- cation. I am deeply desirous of optimizing that com- munication. That means designing the computer display to most closely match the receptive powers of the human mind. And the two things that we are very good at are facial recognition and linguistic comprehension. Accordingly, those are the two things that computers should emphasize. Computer games have neither and that appalls me. Facial expression and linguistic comprehension are the two most important areas of development for the time being. Nowadays you can get excellent 3D facial models, although the expressions on them are still crappy. This is largely because the people who design them aren’t artists, they’re engineers, and they’ve come up with these anatomically correct heads. Every cartoonist in the world knows that you never ever, draw a face the way it really is. For this type of thing we’ve got to use cartoon faces and not real faces. When I was playing with the Erasmaganza, sometimes it would present me with three different actions to choose from, and I wouldn’t want to do any of them. In that way, it feels a bit like an old adventure game with a branching dialog tree. Do you see that as a problem? The real issue is not “Gee, you only get three things.” The real issue here is that you’re not permitted to say dramatically reasonable things, and that’s a flaw in the design of the story-world. Both of the demo story-worlds have that problem, because they’re very tiny story-worlds. If you want to get away from that you must Chapter 14: Interview: Chris Crawford 285 The Corporate Meeting story-world in the Erasmatron have a much larger story-world. “Brawl” has about fifty or sixty verbs and “Meet - ing” has about a hundred. I used to think that five hundred verbs was the threshold for entertainment value. I now think it’s more like a thousand verbs. But “Meeting” just doesn’t give you very many options because it’s so tiny. As to whether the user will ever be satisfied with the finite number of options he’s given, I don’t see a problem there at all. Certainly you’re not permitted nuance in such an arrangement. But you should have all dramatically reasonable options. Besides, if we gave you some system where you could apply nuance so that you could say, “I’m going to say this with a slightly sarcastic tone of voice,” the infra - structures for that would be ghastly. It would make the game very tedious. So I feel that the only way to do this effectively is to confine it to a menu structure. In fact, there are some games that have implemented nuance as their primary modality of interaction. In these games you’re interacting with someone and you’ve got these sliders: one is for forcefulness, one is for humor, and another is for charm. But that’s all you get. You respond to someone with this much forcefulness, this much charm, and that much humor. I’ve been tempted for quite some time to build something like that into the Erasmatron. But the problem is, first, coming up with some generality, and second, keeping the interface clean and usable. Right now, with the simple menu you need merely look, see, and press. I think that’s important for a mass medium. The sliders for tone are for game aficionados. The system that Siboot uses to construct sentences with icons and the inverse parser is an interesting one. Why did you opt not to use a system like that for the Erasmatron? Because the vast number of sentences in Siboot are self- completing. In Siboot, you could click on just one icon and often the rest of the sentence would fill itself in because that’s the only option avail - able. The way to do that nowadays, by the way, is with pop-up menus. I could do this with the Erasmatron. For 286 Chapter 14: Interview: Chris Crawford Trust & Betrayal: The Legacy of Siboot example, suppose you had a conventional menu item that said, “I’ll give you my horse in return for that six-gun.” The words “horse” and “six-gun” could be in pop-up menus providing other options for the trade. This would require some expansion of the Erasmatron system, but nothing very serious. The only reason I haven’t done it yet is my unwillingness to add complexity. I believe that the system has all the complexity it needs and then some. It’s always easy to add complexity to the design, but I’m thinking in terms of simplification. Have you had a chance to play The Sims? It seems that a lot of people succeed in using that game as a sort of tool for interactive storytelling. The Sims is not an attempt to produce interactive storytelling. I had some e-mail with Will Wright about The Sims, and he acknowledges that it isn’t an interactive storytelling platform, but he pointed out that many people use it that way. The Sims is exactly what it claims to be, a simulation, not a drama. No drama simulates the real world. In Shakespeare’s play, in the middle of Henry V’s speech to the soldiers at Agincourt, he doesn’t say, “Just a minute, guys, I have to take a pee.” However, in The Sims, he does. Once, when I was playing The Sims, a little girl couldn’t get to sleep because there were spooks coming and frightening her. The spooks are a very nice touch, by the way. They kept her awake all night long, and she wandered all around until she fell asleep, because a sim who stays up too long is overcome with drowsiness. She happened to fall asleep on the floor of her parents’ bedroom. Morn- ing came, mommy woke up, stretched, got up out of bed, and walked to the bathroom, stepping over the inert body of her daughter! This is a good simulation of the physical processes of daily living. It is an atrocious simulation of the emotional processes of daily living. Will built an excellent physical simulator. But it has no people content. It’s a direct violation of my “people not things” argument in that it focuses on the things aspect of life, on all the mechanical details. Going to the bathroom is a major mod - ule in that program, whereas emotional processes simply aren’t there. I don’t want to criticize a brilliant product: Will set out with a clear goal and he achieved it, and that’s wonderful. But he didn’t set out to do what I’m doing and, lo and behold, he didn’t achieve it. I refuse to criticize The Sims, because as a design it is magnificent. It has a clear purpose and it achieves that purpose brilliantly. It’s just a different product, and it’s not interactive storytelling. So what makes you want to pursue interactive storytelling? It’s a hell of a lot more relevant. Furthermore, I think it’s a hell of a lot more interesting than game design. The design problems of computer games nowadays bore me, because they’re not very involved problems. They tend to be very small models, quite easy to calculate. I continue to be appalled at the low level of intelli - gence in a lot of these games. The computer opponent is really stupid, and that’s Chapter 14: Interview: Chris Crawford 287 [...]... of the game will be, mini-bios of the team who hope to work on the game, and some broad description of the gameplay These documents are not much use in the game s actual development, though they can be a springboard for creation of other documents, such as the design document or the art bible Since concept documents do 294 Chapter 15: Game Development Documentation not apply very much to the game s... it to an action game setting, but with a more thought-provoking game- world than was found in other first-person shooters of its day Most recently, Myth went off in entirely new gameplay directions, immersing players in epic battles of strategic combat as no other game had What is most important to note, however, is that in none of these games does the technology come to dominate the gameplay, as is... dominate the gameplay, as is so often the case when a game uses cutting-edge technology Instead, in Jones’ games, technology and game design work together to accentuate each other’s strengths and create uniquely compelling experiences All the way back to his second game, Pathways into Darkness, Jason Jones’ games have exploited technology to create new gameplay experiences Use of Technology Myth is a good... smart to just clone the success of RTS games Instead, it would appear, he examined the games differently and questioned how they could be altered and improved on a more fundamental level What if, instead of the 2D graphics technology that all of the games to date had used, a game used a truly 3D engine? With the sole exception of his first game, Minotaur, Jones’ games to date had all been 3D, so it made... the game- world than is actually communicated to the player through the gameplay Other aspects of the universe may only be hinted at By having a complete plan for the game s backstory, even if the player does not directly learn all of it, the story’s writer will have a much better chance at keeping the game s narrative consistent and plausible A story bible, then, is a good place to document a game s... history of the game- world, detailing the major events that have led the world to the state it is in when the player starts his game Similarly, the document could include narratives for the different major characters the player encounters in the game Topics discussed would include the character’s childhood, how he rose to whatever position he has in the game, and what motivates the Chapter 15: Game Development... contained within the game s script A Chapter 15: Game Development Documentation AM FL Y game s script may be written by a variety of people: a designer, an artist, the game s producer, or someone whose only role on the project is to write the script, someone who was specifically hired for his dialog writing skills The script may take on different forms depending on what type of game events the dialog... dialog they will need to use in their game The game s script is also where one might find the text of what the character reads in a mission briefing or in a book they might find Any text that is contained in the game, from signs and posters on the walls to the commands issued to the player from an off-screen commander, is all contained in the game s script As games try to incorporate more and more... include have become necessary The most important thing to remember 300 Chapter 15: Game Development Documentation when working on the script for your game is that people are usually playing your game not for the dialog, but for the gameplay If they had wanted to watch a movie, they would have done so Instead they booted up your game They may enjoy hearing some clever dialog while they are playing, but they... creation of modern computer games, and it is the designer’s job to make sure those documents are created and used effectively The necessity of game development documentation is a side effect of the increasing size of game development teams In the early days of game development, when a development team consisted of one multi-talented individual, documenting the functionality of the game was less important . web game, get the whole thing on the web. Or if 284 Chapter 14: Interview: Chris Crawford I do it on the Mac maybe I can call it an iGame. But I don’t dare call it a computer game or a video game. Why. poorest games, no question. It really didn’t have that much creativity. There were some cute ideas, but where that game had cute ideas, Siboot had thunderclaps of genius. For example, Guns &. non of game design? That’s exactly the problem. Many people do see fun as the sine qua non. That’s one way that the game design industry has gone down the wrong path. Basically, computer games