Game-a-Day Journal Archive

Play with TrinaryLife

Chris Crawford posted this a few days ago

I found it last night while rereading some of his writings, realized that I could pull it off in a few hours by building on top of PlayInFire, and decided to do it for today’s Game-a-Day.

It’s not really a game

I don’t care. In fact, some days, I prefer it this way! The purpose of my daily work certainly is not to act as an echo chamber for known conventions - quite the opposite. (If you’re new to my blog - welcome! - try playing JoyOfDishes or Judgment for a better sense of just how much concern I have for fitting my daily research into existing definitions of “game”…)

Found Game-at-Request

Today’s project is no different than any Game-at-Request that I fulfill, except that I stumbled upon this one and volunteered myself for the task. The possibility to work on something that Chris was pondering on appealed to me.

In case Chris Crawford is an unfamiliar name, I’ll now do my best to summarize what drew me to work on this problem.

“Excalibur is a game of leadership.”

Watch this video with Crawford, filmed the year I was born. Special thanks to my awesome friend Nathan Yun for first making me aware of this classic recording. Excerpt:

“I set a goal, I want a game to achieve a certain effect, I want to somehow communicate a message to my audience. That message then dictates the topics and the style of the game. The nature of the graphics, the feel, the texture of the game, that I’m trying to build into it. That’s what I spend most of my time worrying about.”

“Excalibur is a game of leadership. The concept… I wanted to express to people the ideas behind von Clausewitz’s statement that ‘War is the extension of policy to other means.’ That is, I was a little tired of war games that glorify war. So I wanted to show that war is something that sometimes cannot be avoided, but must never be entered into in a cavalier manner. And so really I was trying to teach concepts of leadership, so in the game Excalibur, I make you as King Author, I give you the task of unifying Britain. Now, unification is entirely different from conquest, that is, you have to convince people of your authority, you have to convince them to follow you… and that involves more than merely brute force.”

Revolutionary decades before the revolution

Then there’s The Art of Computer Game Design, a book well ahead of its time (note that the link is to the full online text). Although I don’t necessarily agree with every detail in it, he understood with striking clarity the potential of this new medium only 5-10 years after its conception, and more than a quarter century of industry-wide development has passed without much to show toward meaningful advancement besides glitter, gimmicks, and the fluke diamond in the rough. (Even then, those diamonds are mostly appreciated for shallow violence, in the case of GTA: San Andreas, or cash-in nostalgia value, like Super Paper Mario, in spite of the deeper messages and cultural significance buried in both of these games).

One of my favorite tidbits from Crawford’s book:

“But we cannot relegate computer games to the cesspit of pop culture solely on the evidence of the current crop of games. The industry is too young and the situation is too dynamic for us to dismiss computer games so easily. We must consider the potential, not the actuality. We must address the fundamental aspects of computer games to achieve a conclusion that will withstand the ravages of time and change.”

I believe that this message is as true to day as it ever was. (That belief is a major part of why I’m writing games every night while everyone else is sleeping.)

A generation ahead

When today’s top game industry writers - like Ian Bogost and James Paul Gee - go on about the potential for videogames to better the world, they come across to the 2008 audience as shocking, revolutionary, or out there. They’re both brilliant, I recommend buying up everything written by these guys, and yet, Crawford was thinking about the meaning of games (in only a slightly different way) a good 25 years ahead of them.

As an example, James Paul Gee’s What Videogames Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (2003) is built around the revelation that there might be such a thing as “videogame literacy” - a concept expounded upon rather clearly and concisely in Crawford’s last speech as a game designer in 1992 (that’s part #4 of 5 - see also Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 5). Crawford isn’t listed in the index of Gee’s book, I don’t remember any reference to his work when I read this book years ago, and yet a chapter of the book could easily have been written around Crawford’s work (note that Bogost does recognize and credit Crawford). It isn’t that Gee stole anything from Crawford - simply that it took the rest of us combined another 11 years to catch up with Crawford’s thinking, and prior to that no one really understood what the heck the man was going on about.

This is not in any way intended as a negative statement about either Bogost or Gee - it’s simply an effort to bring history and the value of Crawford’s (ongoing) contributions into perspective.

The present

Chris has dived deep into the interactive story end - pivoting on the realization that verbs and character motivations, not canned events, are fundamental to generating dynamic fiction. After many years spent working on StoryTron, it’s due for release to the public some time in 2008. X-Box 360 and PS3 gamers might not get it - literally or conceptually - but nor are they intended to; it’s targeted to the rest of the population, or at the very least, a different group of minds with a different way of seeing the world.

For the most part Chris has moved away from visual systems mechanics, in much the way that I have been moving away from text and storytelling over the years. In contrast to his direciton, the rabbit hole I have been digging into as of late is one of input remapping, abstract systems, mechanics metaphors, interactive axiomatic illustrations, cognitive conditioning, experiential discovery modules, and the like. When I found the call, it caught my attention since it’s a thought Chris had about things closer to “my end” of the spectrum; I was curious to see it in action, but to do that meant either (A.) doing it myself (or B.) waiting for someone else to do it, and the former won out over not knowing how long the wait might be.

Visionary thinking led Chris to formulate the politically significant message in Balance of Power in 1985 (a message I respectfully parodied in purpose and style for the ending of JenniLand, my first “Game-at-Request”), and visionary thinking led Chris to found the Game Developer’s Conference in 1987. I’m still quite eager to find out what else he has to teach us, whether through seeds for thought spread throughout his writing, StoryTron, algorithm descriptions like the one I built into this project, or otherwise.

The ending of JenniLand, a game I created with a deeply anti-drug message presented procedurally through the game’s power-up system

Epilogue (to be continued…?)

As requested on his site, I did e-mail Chris with a link to my implementation of the rules. He seemed happy with it, and indicated that he’ll be posting a link to it from his page some time soon.

I’m glad that I was in a position to help.

Forms in TrinaryLife are holographic.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 5th, 2008 at 1:05 am and is filed under Abstract, Free Flash Games, Game-at-Request, Math. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.