Chris Crawford on games
polycounter lvl 18
Interview
Man, what a douchebag. He must totally have his head up his ass to not see what is going on. The best selling PC game of all time was based on social gameplay!
If he thinks the game industry is going to be the same in 20 years, I think he has another thing coming.
Take any flash game website and you'll see that the number of games being produced with "weird ideas" is about a hundred times greater than in the 80's. Not only that, but the games being made have deeper gameplay and better graphics than back then.
Man, what a douchebag. He must totally have his head up his ass to not see what is going on. The best selling PC game of all time was based on social gameplay!
If he thinks the game industry is going to be the same in 20 years, I think he has another thing coming.
Take any flash game website and you'll see that the number of games being produced with "weird ideas" is about a hundred times greater than in the 80's. Not only that, but the games being made have deeper gameplay and better graphics than back then.
Replies
Anyway, the gaming industry has plenty of innovation, even if the majority is still copying. But hey, we don't go complaining that books are written with letters, do we?
On the otherhand I am completely interested in interactive storytelling.
Lets see, is Hollywood more innovative than the games industry? Obviously not.
Are the dynamics of making and selling games going to stay the same for 20 years? Not with Steam and Xbox live arcade and really solid middleware, not to mention a whole group of people who are just maturing their skillset enough to make videogames on their own.
Is Interactive Fiction (IF) new, and did Chris Crawford come up with it? No. He's just a douchebag trying to get credit from others' work.
Is the idea of AI actors in a freeform open environment new? No. Look at Shen Mu, or even Half Life. Obviously they are hard at work to create solid interactive NPCs, and unlike Mr. Crawford here, they are actually DOING SOMETHING instead of screwing around with some code.
My take on the game industry is that it is finally coming up with core gameplay types, such as shooting or platforming or managing resources. These will be used in a lot the same way that camera rules are used in Hollywood. The fundimentals of filming and editing have been well understood for decades and haven't changed. It's how you use the techniques that matters.
To say that IF won't appeal to gamers is total insulting bullshit, and it denies the roots of IF as part of videogames.
I don't really see anything that he says that has anything to do with reality. He should at least have a little respect for the industry that made his career.
I'd be all ears.
What really changed are the budgets, you can't afford nowadays to screwup with the costs fullgames have, or you can kiss it all goodbye.
And still, there's _slow_ innovation, if one game has a new feature that stands out positively it will be ripped off and implemented by everyone in the industry. I think it's rather cool that i can chose from 10 games that have a feature i really like, rather than being damned to play a crappy game that's the only one who has this 1 incredibly cool idea that forces me to see it through...
And im curious about the Omen too, snakes on planes seems terribly original too tho, hmm.
This doesn't apply to user interfaces in the RTS market but fortunately Total Annihilation wasn't a bad game.
Lets see, is Hollywood more innovative than the games industry? Obviously not.
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Propably not more innovative when it comes to how they narrate a story. But the bandwidth of stories told in movies is so much larger than the stories told in games so far. Maybe he's talking about this, I haven't read the interview though
What a wanker.
He's a hack, trying to make himself relevant again.
"Storytronics" please.
Go to hell Chis Crawford you suck!
And i do agree that the industry suffers from lack of social skills (mostly, and to stay ontopic), but i think it was always like that, which is what drew individuals to lock themselves up in a room in the first place.
Thank god, we have focus group testing, and people in suits telling us what's fun for the people out there.