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It's incredible how many people keep missing the man's point. Almost making it for him. His point is the gaming industry is still completely filled with mindles

It's incredible how many people keep missing the man's point. Almost making it for him. His point is the gaming industry is still completely filled with mindless NPCs and simple boolean interactions. He calls out God of War in another article as an extreme disappointment. The fact that everyone here is saying his ideas have continued, but keep naming the same two or three games made by only a couple gaming companies, in a niche genre proves how right he is. If you want any form of deep interactivity play a deep strategy game, anything else besides that in game design is still about as interactive as pacman. His point is that after 35 years and literal orders of magnitude improvement in processing power, the average game is still modeled using incredibly simplistic logic and makes for empty interactions. And take a look at most any top selling game and it's true. Your average squirrel in the park has more interesting behavior or interaction than most game characters. It's essentially just been "better graphics, bigger explosions" for three decades now. None of that precludes dynamic interactions. He's essentially arguing for Probabilistic Programming without using the term. And saying it should be at the heart of all games, no just deep strategy games. Actually a step further he says it should be at the heart of any interactive software The second link below gives a pretty good overview of his thoughts on interactivity and how to model human and system behavior. Lesson 7 (how to express ideas mathily) while simple, was mildly interesting. Some of the others are better, but are harder to read standalone, build on prior items. Essentially it's a summarized course of how to model the essentials of human behavior in a system. Not ground breaking, but at the same time, way more advanced than anything you see in the vast majority of games. If I were writing a simple game, I'd skim link 2 for ideas I could steal and easily apply to up he interest factor. You definitely could build some interesting mechanics with these ideas. [1] http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/game-design/crawfords-laws-of-software.html http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/game-design/crawfords-laws... [2] http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/course-description-2018/index.html http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/course-description-2018/in... [3] http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/course-description-2018/how-to-express-ideas-mathil.html http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/course-description-2018/ho...

morelisp 6y ago
He doesn't just reject the mainstream AAA titles like God of War though, but everything from heavy-physics-model IF like Hadean Lands to heavy-character-model IF like Blue Lacuna to consims like Europa Universalis to emotionally-driven immersive sims like Gone Home to... well, anything that isn't a verb selector triggering algorithmic character reactions. I can't remember where I read it, but a critique of his work from... 5? years ago, was essentially "the dragon is already dead, but Crawford can't accept it because his sword didn't slay it." Generously, at some point he lost sight of the goal in favor of the tool. Less generously, he saw the holodeck, wanted specifically that, and came up with the tripartite dragon as the dog to wag.
blueblob 6y ago
Boolean interactions are piecewise functions as well. He seems to be arguing to use functions for modeling and considering the whole process or interactions between the functions but has not described an actual approach to doing so in this article. How is picking a set of booleans really all that functionally different from from drawing a surface over the intersection of all of his functions and just treating them as booleans on each surface of that hypercube? I don't find it particularly groundbreaking to use a set of ad-hoc functions as interactions. He seems so focused on the idea of functions and complexity that he's missing much of the point of why people play games and solely focused on strategy games. In my opinion, a lot of the best games are the simplest games because I play them to take my mind off of other things. It's not about having a lot of complexity, it's about having interesting complexity. This was written with such self-aggrandizement that it is not super enjoyable to read. It is easy to see why the ideas of someone who projects themselves as a genius is having trouble relating to people who may not believe him to be one. The usefulness of ideas seems to have some respect to how well they fit into the way other people want to use them. He's not focusing on how other people would use them but rather on how he wants them to be used. He seems to have missed the transition from systems-oriented design to human-oriented design.
yoz-y 6y ago
> He's essentially arguing for Probabilistic Programming without using the term. And saying it should be at the heart of all games, no just deep strategy games. Actually a step further he says it should be at the heart of any interactive software I haven't grasped this at all from the article but let's assume that's what he said. In that case I think he's 100% wrong. Many games are fun precisely because they are clear cut and straightforward with no probabilities or randomness. Best competitive games avoid random components altogether.
solipsism 6y ago
You'd think after so many decades he'd have made some progress on the problem himself.
deleted 6y ago
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morelisp 6y ago

He doesn't just reject the mainstream AAA titles like God of War though, but everything from heavy-physics-model IF like Hadean Lands to heavy-character-model IF like Blue Lacuna to consims like Europa Universalis to emotionally-driven immersive sims like Gone Home to... well, anything that isn't a verb selector triggering algorithmic character reactions. I can't remember where I read it, but a critique of his work from... 5? years ago, was essentially "the dragon is already dead, but Crawford can't accept it because his sword didn't slay it." Generously, at some point he lost sight of the goal in favor of the tool. Less generously, he saw the holodeck, wanted specifically that, and came up with the tripartite dragon as the dog to wag.

blueblob 6y ago

Boolean interactions are piecewise functions as well. He seems to be arguing to use functions for modeling and considering the whole process or interactions between the functions but has not described an actual approach to doing so in this article. How is picking a set of booleans really all that functionally different from from drawing a surface over the intersection of all of his functions and just treating them as booleans on each surface of that hypercube? I don't find it particularly groundbreaking to use a set of ad-hoc functions as interactions. He seems so focused on the idea of functions and complexity that he's missing much of the point of why people play games and solely focused on strategy games. In my opinion, a lot of the best games are the simplest games because I play them to take my mind off of other things. It's not about having a lot of complexity, it's about having interesting complexity. This was written with such self-aggrandizement that it is not super enjoyable to read. It is easy to see why the ideas of someone who projects themselves as a genius is having trouble relating to people who may not believe him to be one. The usefulness of ideas seems to have some respect to how well they fit into the way other people want to use them. He's not focusing on how other people would use them but rather on how he wants them to be used. He seems to have missed the transition from systems-oriented design to human-oriented design.

yoz-y 6y ago

> He's essentially arguing for Probabilistic Programming without using the term. And saying it should be at the heart of all games, no just deep strategy games. Actually a step further he says it should be at the heart of any interactive software I haven't grasped this at all from the article but let's assume that's what he said. In that case I think he's 100% wrong. Many games are fun precisely because they are clear cut and straightforward with no probabilities or randomness. Best competitive games avoid random components altogether.

solipsism 6y ago

You'd think after so many decades he'd have made some progress on the problem himself.

deleted 6y ago

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