Crawford's work is worthy of study, as is the causation for why he experienced external failure. It embodies the "simulationist" aesthetic of game design: given enough modelled parameters, something emergent and interesting will happen. This was a trend of the 20th century: computers were new and interesting, and simulations did work when you asked them to solve physics problems and plan logistics. Why wouldn't it work for narrative?
But then you play the games, and they're all so opaque. You have no idea what's going on, and the responses to your actions are so hard to grasp. But if you do figure it out, the model usually collapses into a linear, repeatable strategy and the illusion of depth disappears. You can see this happening from the start, with Gossip. Instead of noticing that his game didn't communicate and looking for points of accessibility, he plunged further forward into computer modelling. The failure is one of verisimilitude: The model is similar to a grounded truth on paper, but it's uninteresting to behold because it doesn't lead to a coherent whole. It just reflects the designer's thoughts on "this is how the world should work", which is something that can be found in any comments section.
Often, when Crawford lectured, he would go into evo-psych theories to build his claims: that is, he was confident that the answers he already accepted about the world and society were the correct ones, and the games were a matter of illustration. He was likewise confident that a shooting game would be less thoughtful than a turn-based strategy game because the moment-to-moment decisions were less complex, and the goal should be to portray completeness in the details.
I think he's aware of some of this, but he's a stubborn guy.
This is evident in his description of programming in his later years:
Time and time again I would send my friend Dave Walker an email declaring that Javascript (or something else) was utterly broken, incapable of executing the simplest program without errors. Dave would ask to see the source code and I would present it to him with detailed notes proving that my code was perfect and Javascript was broken. He’d call me, we’d discuss it, and eventually he’d say something like, “Where did you terminate the loop beginning at line 563?” There would be a long silence, followed by the tiniest “Oh” from me. I’d thank him for his help and hang up. A week later, I’d be fuming again about another fundamental flaw in Javascript.
Many of us are stubborn and will work hard and long, without much positive external feedback, under the assumption that our vision is correct and the audience, if one even exists, is wrong. Much fundamental progress has been made this way: Faraday, Einstein, Jobs, etc. But of course many times one simply is wrong and refusing to see it means throwing years away, and whatever else with it (money, relationships, etc.). It's a hard balance, especially for the monomaniacal without much interest in balance. Finding out how to make solid (public, peer-reviewed, evidence-based, whatever) incremental progress towards the paradigm shift seems to be the way if one can manage.
That quote about JavaScript is... huh. I do not understand how you can even begin coming to the conclusion of "JavaScript [is] utterly broken, incapable of executing the simplest programs without errors" when obviously, JavaScript (which I do not like, by the way) is productively used on a large scale (even back then), and constantly under scrutiny from programmers, computer scientists, language designers... it's just baffling.
It reminds me of when I was around 10 years old or so, maybe slightly older, and playing around with Turbo C (or maybe Turbo C++) on DOS. I must have gotten something very basic about pointers (which were new to me at the time) wrong, probably having declared a char* pointer but not actually allocated any memory, leaving it entirely uninitialized, and my string manipulation failed in weird and interesting ways (since this was on DOS without memory protection, you wouldn't get a program crash like a segmentation fault very easily, instead you'd often see "more interesting" corruption).
Hilariously, at the time I concluded that the string functions of Turbo C(++) must be broken and moved away "string.h" so I wouldn't use it. But even then I shortly after realized how insane I was: Borland could never sell Turbo C(++) if the functions behind the string.h API were actually broken, and it became clear that my code must be buggy instead. And remember, I was 10 years old or so, otherwise I don't think I would have come to that weird conclusion in the first place.
Nowadays, I do live in this very tiny niche where I actually encounter not only compiler bugs, but actual hardware/CPU bugs, but even then I need a lot of experiments and evidence for myself that that's what I'm actually hitting...
It’s a quality I’ve run into with a couple people: young or old, once they’ve ossified into thinking they are Better and Smarter than everyone else, they stop being curious and simply start mandating their wild “truths”
I’m sure we’ve all done it at one time or another, but repeated as habit without learning seems to speak of a certain kind of personality.
> He was likewise confident that a shooting game would be less thoughtful than a turn-based strategy game because the moment-to-moment decisions were less complex
Sounds like a classic example of Moravec’s paradox:
It’s not that a shooting (or action, or heck talk to competitive fighting game players) game has less decisions for the player to make, it’s that the decisions being made are all subconscious decisions about movements and difficult to put into words.
I was not familiar with Chris Crawford other than vaguely being aware of the name. Reading this post and others on the website (like https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035048/http://www.erasma...), it’s hard to not get the overall picture of “person says everyone else is doing it wrong, without having done it right themselves”.
What I mean by that is that there are game designers like Jonathan Blow who have their own theories on what is a great game and are extremely critical of the industry not following those theories, and then have released games that succeed at demonstrating those theories. In Jonathan Blow’s case, you can disagree with the man, but you can’t disagree with the fact that The Witness is a wildly original, successful game (1M+ copies sold) that has a cult following.
That does not seem to be the case for Crawford’s work. Lots of theories, lots of indictment for the industry doing it wrong, but no actual demonstration of what “doing it right” would mean.
Saying that no one gets it and civilization won’t be ready for many centuries (as the article I linked above does) feels like kind of a cheap rhetorical cop out.
For what it’s worth, I disagree with his indictment of the video game landscape as being narratively poor. Lots of video games with great interactive narratives out there, and there are many players who have been deeply moved by such games (of course, which games that might be varies from person to person).
I think a good antidote when one finds themselves in those thinking patterns is to listen to what others have to say, and not dismiss them as not getting it because they don’t follow your particular (unproven) theories.
> I disagree with his indictment of the video game landscape as being narratively poor.
I think he would say they are narratively poor by his defintion that the narrative must be generated by the game/player combo and not just pre-programmed. People love "The Last of Us" for it's narrative but that narritive is something that can arguably be conveyed via book or movie. Crawford wanted something where the narrative itself was generated.
And no, he wouldn't count the choices players make in the average game. Whether to get go west or east. Whether to get the a sword first or the arrow. He wanted the story and character dialog to change. Few if any games do that. Of course today with LLMs it's likely some games will soon / have already done it to some degree and will do better in the future.
Going back to his older work, you'd need to feed a context to the LLM about each characters motivations and then update that context based on player actions so that as the game progresses the way each NPC interacts with the player, and other NPCs, changes in a way that's consistent with each character's intrisict motivations and their interactions with others.
People come up with complex shared narratives in multiplayer sandbox games like Minecraft/Roblox/Kenshi/etc. all the time.
In the single player realm, there are games like Dwarf Fortress, Caves of Qud, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, etc.
Point is, the landscape of what "narrative" means in video games today is broad and deep. If none of those are even remotely like what Crawford thinks is "right" - and he's not able to design a game that meets his standards himself - I'd argue his definition of "right" might just not be workable in the first place.
There's a kind of people who want video games to have all of the possibility, depth, and meaning of real life. A game where you could do anything, be anyone, but still have consequences matter and be far reaching (like "Roy: A Life Well Lived" in Rick & Morty). Well, that exists, it's called real life, but you're not going to recreate it on a computer screen.
I played it as a cold war kid and was fascinated by it. Mid 80's, post War-Games, this game blew my mind. It simulated the world.
The lesson I remember was that conflict in the Cold War was not zero-sum. One side would win and one side would lose. There were (in this game) no win-win outcomes. But - and this is the key point - the value of each win or loss was unequally felt. For the US to back down in Indonesia was disappointing. To back down in West Germany was fatal.
Oh - and also the notion of graduated escalation & de-escalation. Playing the game well requried using escalation wisely. Sometimes you escalate (a bit) to see how they respond & judge the value of a conflict to your opponent. Sometimes you escalate (a lot) to signal to your opponent that a given conflict is very serious to you.
I don't know if I ever had _fun_ playing the game - but of the hundreds of games I played as a kid this one stuck with me.
All this with something like 64k of memory - brilliant!
> The lesson I remember was that conflict in the Cold War was not zero-sum. One side
would win and one side would lose. There were (in this game) no win-win outcomes.
But -and this is the key point - the value of each win or loss was unequally felt. For the
US to back down in Indonesia was disappointing. To back down in West Germany was
fatal.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but it's not clear to me how this describes something obviously non-zero sum. Independent losses can have different values in a zero-sum hand game; what matters is whether each win is proportional to the corresponding loss. If the USSR winning in West Germany was only a small win, that would demonstrate it was non-zero sum due to the size of the loss there for the US, but I don't think the magnitude of the outcome in Indonesia would relate to that at all.
Chris Crawford's tools for interactive storytelling may have failed, but he was a huge inspiration for me in my game dev career, and I still harbor aspirations in "interactive storytelling" due to his influence.
I first attended CGDC in 1994. It was two years after his Dragon Speech (which I knew nothing about), but the highlight of the conference was his talk about the challenges of story-based games. The part I remember is how he modeled stories as branching trees with fan-out, foldback, tree-of-death, etc (he covers this in the "Architecture" chapter of this book "The Art of Interactive Design"). I didn't really follow Crawford's work on Erasmatron or later, but by the late 90's it sounded like his story model had changed from a tree to a graph network structure, like a finite state machine. While it was an improvement, I was a bit skeptical that this model was enough. Nevertheless, I spent a lot of time thinking about the problem. You see, he'd already infected me with his dream of interactive storytelling.
By the time I moved to California and took a job at EA/Maxis on The Sims 2.0 team, I had decided that true interactive storytelling (as I saw it) was not possible until game AI was sophisticated enough to enable autonomous NPC chatbots. So I put that dream aside while I pursued a career in software development.
Here we are, over a quarter of a century later, and that AI technology is here now. For those of us who have been waiting for this moment, it is almost miraculous. It might be the end of an era for Chris Crawford, but it is just the beginning of the AI-based interactive storytelling era.
In many ways Chris is ending things just as his dream is about to come to fruition. His vision was just 40 years ahead of the technology. If only he could stay engaged another 10 years. The best times are ahead of us
A few months ago someone here reported on making text adventures with language models. If I remember correctly, a problem is that it is not trivial to control the AI in a way that players can't cheat on puzzles.
I'm "only" in my 50s now, but I am in my 50s now. For a couple of decades I've had this grand vision about how to build the perfect algorithmic trading system. The practical expression of this has come in fits and starts.
During the Pandemic, I finally devoted some time to building a bespoke server and hosting it co-located facility near a high-quality market data provider. I chose to do this before the software was ready in order to "light a fire under my a$$" and help motivate me to move things along. By the end of 2021 I had written, tested, and deployed a set of specialized clients written in rust to consume the market data and perform basic parsing of the real-time information. I stored the transformed output of these processes in log files as a temporary data sink that could represent the data "someday" moving downstream in a custom stream processing platform that would perform trades via an online broker.
And then, it stalled. There always seemed to be good reasons why I couldn't commit to one implementation strategy or another. Would I pass the data downstreeam via pipes? With Kafka? Via shared memory? Would the parsed input be represented via protobuf records? A custom binary format? Apache Arrow/Parquet format? Would the algorithms be expressed in custom rust code? Using Pandas(numpy)/Polars? Would I focus on my imagined "insights" into how prices move or make the transition to Machine Learning by trying to produce "special sauce" custom features that could be fed into models of various types? In the meantime, I have only collected a high volume of daily log files.
There has been some progress, of course. Last year, with LLMs as my pair programmer, I added vector processing to the ingest components, which made them run even more efficiently. I certainly enjoy the sporadic work I dedicate to working on the system. But there always seems to be a fog of possibilities ahead of me obscuring my view towards a broker API getting called.
My family and closest friends look upon this as the "hot rod in his garage" which I sometimes work on and which will probably never get finished.
Have you worked in the industry? Would love to help ya with all of the "easy" infra parts that you're talking about, but indeed that secret sauce that decides what to actually trade is the part I can offer zero help in :-)
I should. Yet what I'm trying to express in my comment is that the part of the system that would analyze the data and then make trades is not only unfinished, is still unstarted. So I have continually polished the ingest portion but felt "stuck" when contemplating how to get the system as-a-whole into a testable state.
The broker API I plan to use features the ability to "paper trade" in a simulated account. So I'm not so worried about switching the thing on one day and immediately blowing my account.
I do trade manually in a broker account but as fun and instructive as that is, it doesn't represent the kinds of high-speed analysis and execution my system would make once it was completed.
He definitely made games. Chris Crawford was one of the first known names in game design, a few years ahead of contemporaries like Sid Meier whom I expect you'd still recognize. Crawford seemed to alternate between computer war games, with reliable prospects for commercial success in the 80s, and more experimental fare about managing nuclear reactors, geopolitics, and such - difference being he seemed to get bored by the whole thing and completely disembarked in pursuit of whatever it was he intended to achieve via Erasmatron, Storytron, etc. It's fascinating to read his writings over that period. It seemed a sort of tragic paradox overshadowing all of it that, if he was so bored of mechanistic, algorithmic, and predictable computer game mechanics, maybe stop pursuing computer games as your chosen medium? It may have been a blind alley in the end, but someone had to explore it.
Nevertheless, it is quite sad - however, it's difficult for me to relate to the experiences of someone who lived through that first wave of personal computing and played a notable part in it - perhaps through that lens, anything was possible.
The posts author and site operator is Chris Crawford [0]. He said so in the post but Wikipedia confirms that he was mostly active from 1980s to 1990s with at least 15 titles to his name, not including other tools that he built and not including game design books that he authored or wrote for.
A whole person -- flattened into little bits gleaned from some text, glued together with assumptions and world-building -- dismissed as "blaming" and "giving up" "after one game"
The YouTube link in the other post has a top comment of "The best speech in all of gaming history delivered by what must be considered the Socrates of gaming.", to give you a sense of there may be more depth to this person than "giving up after 1 game".
If nothing else, it indicates the crowd perceives more depth, which will be enough to make you ponder if you missed something.
I suggest re-reading the article with a different set of assumptions -- when faced with a contradiction, first, check your premises -- it's likely the guy worried about declining programming skills and pointing out the ease at which he was dismissing JavaScript due to simple errors, is being self-aware and sarcastic.
Once you're freed via engaging with your own thinking, instead of rushing to do public judgement, it is a quite beautiful meditation of working on something that fails to get the mindshare you hoped for, and a all-too-familiar to all of us reminder of the cognitive dissonance required to be okay with that, even when you'll never be okay.
I just saw a gen-Z kid choose to play Ms. PacMan instead of Zaxxon. This is heresy on the level of playing Buck Hunter instead of Tempest or even Galaxian. Some games we all know but some are legend.
Reminds me that Don Quixote is a different book every 10 years you read it.
I have watched the dragon speech multiple times, and it makes me feel like you should put everything in what you are doing, as everything is your magnum opus. I have huge respect for artists and artisans that work like that. It is really difficult, and often not economically viable, but there are people that just `see` something and they want it to exist.
I often think about the dragon speech, when I am doing the same 'pick up 10 things' quest in World of Warcraft that I have been doing since 2005. Thousands of times.. I have picked up hundreds of thousands of things :) and I wonder, what game would WoW be had he succeeded.
Readit News
But then you play the games, and they're all so opaque. You have no idea what's going on, and the responses to your actions are so hard to grasp. But if you do figure it out, the model usually collapses into a linear, repeatable strategy and the illusion of depth disappears. You can see this happening from the start, with Gossip. Instead of noticing that his game didn't communicate and looking for points of accessibility, he plunged further forward into computer modelling. The failure is one of verisimilitude: The model is similar to a grounded truth on paper, but it's uninteresting to behold because it doesn't lead to a coherent whole. It just reflects the designer's thoughts on "this is how the world should work", which is something that can be found in any comments section.
Often, when Crawford lectured, he would go into evo-psych theories to build his claims: that is, he was confident that the answers he already accepted about the world and society were the correct ones, and the games were a matter of illustration. He was likewise confident that a shooting game would be less thoughtful than a turn-based strategy game because the moment-to-moment decisions were less complex, and the goal should be to portray completeness in the details.
I think he's aware of some of this, but he's a stubborn guy.
Time and time again I would send my friend Dave Walker an email declaring that Javascript (or something else) was utterly broken, incapable of executing the simplest program without errors. Dave would ask to see the source code and I would present it to him with detailed notes proving that my code was perfect and Javascript was broken. He’d call me, we’d discuss it, and eventually he’d say something like, “Where did you terminate the loop beginning at line 563?” There would be a long silence, followed by the tiniest “Oh” from me. I’d thank him for his help and hang up. A week later, I’d be fuming again about another fundamental flaw in Javascript.
Many of us are stubborn and will work hard and long, without much positive external feedback, under the assumption that our vision is correct and the audience, if one even exists, is wrong. Much fundamental progress has been made this way: Faraday, Einstein, Jobs, etc. But of course many times one simply is wrong and refusing to see it means throwing years away, and whatever else with it (money, relationships, etc.). It's a hard balance, especially for the monomaniacal without much interest in balance. Finding out how to make solid (public, peer-reviewed, evidence-based, whatever) incremental progress towards the paradigm shift seems to be the way if one can manage.
It reminds me of when I was around 10 years old or so, maybe slightly older, and playing around with Turbo C (or maybe Turbo C++) on DOS. I must have gotten something very basic about pointers (which were new to me at the time) wrong, probably having declared a char* pointer but not actually allocated any memory, leaving it entirely uninitialized, and my string manipulation failed in weird and interesting ways (since this was on DOS without memory protection, you wouldn't get a program crash like a segmentation fault very easily, instead you'd often see "more interesting" corruption).
Hilariously, at the time I concluded that the string functions of Turbo C(++) must be broken and moved away "string.h" so I wouldn't use it. But even then I shortly after realized how insane I was: Borland could never sell Turbo C(++) if the functions behind the string.h API were actually broken, and it became clear that my code must be buggy instead. And remember, I was 10 years old or so, otherwise I don't think I would have come to that weird conclusion in the first place.
Nowadays, I do live in this very tiny niche where I actually encounter not only compiler bugs, but actual hardware/CPU bugs, but even then I need a lot of experiments and evidence for myself that that's what I'm actually hitting...
I’m sure we’ve all done it at one time or another, but repeated as habit without learning seems to speak of a certain kind of personality.
Sounds like a classic example of Moravec’s paradox:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
It’s not that a shooting (or action, or heck talk to competitive fighting game players) game has less decisions for the player to make, it’s that the decisions being made are all subconscious decisions about movements and difficult to put into words.
What I mean by that is that there are game designers like Jonathan Blow who have their own theories on what is a great game and are extremely critical of the industry not following those theories, and then have released games that succeed at demonstrating those theories. In Jonathan Blow’s case, you can disagree with the man, but you can’t disagree with the fact that The Witness is a wildly original, successful game (1M+ copies sold) that has a cult following.
That does not seem to be the case for Crawford’s work. Lots of theories, lots of indictment for the industry doing it wrong, but no actual demonstration of what “doing it right” would mean.
Saying that no one gets it and civilization won’t be ready for many centuries (as the article I linked above does) feels like kind of a cheap rhetorical cop out.
For what it’s worth, I disagree with his indictment of the video game landscape as being narratively poor. Lots of video games with great interactive narratives out there, and there are many players who have been deeply moved by such games (of course, which games that might be varies from person to person).
I think a good antidote when one finds themselves in those thinking patterns is to listen to what others have to say, and not dismiss them as not getting it because they don’t follow your particular (unproven) theories.
I think he would say they are narratively poor by his defintion that the narrative must be generated by the game/player combo and not just pre-programmed. People love "The Last of Us" for it's narrative but that narritive is something that can arguably be conveyed via book or movie. Crawford wanted something where the narrative itself was generated.
And no, he wouldn't count the choices players make in the average game. Whether to get go west or east. Whether to get the a sword first or the arrow. He wanted the story and character dialog to change. Few if any games do that. Of course today with LLMs it's likely some games will soon / have already done it to some degree and will do better in the future.
Going back to his older work, you'd need to feed a context to the LLM about each characters motivations and then update that context based on player actions so that as the game progresses the way each NPC interacts with the player, and other NPCs, changes in a way that's consistent with each character's intrisict motivations and their interactions with others.
In the single player realm, there are games like Dwarf Fortress, Caves of Qud, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, etc.
Point is, the landscape of what "narrative" means in video games today is broad and deep. If none of those are even remotely like what Crawford thinks is "right" - and he's not able to design a game that meets his standards himself - I'd argue his definition of "right" might just not be workable in the first place.
There's a kind of people who want video games to have all of the possibility, depth, and meaning of real life. A game where you could do anything, be anyone, but still have consequences matter and be far reaching (like "Roy: A Life Well Lived" in Rick & Morty). Well, that exists, it's called real life, but you're not going to recreate it on a computer screen.
I played it as a cold war kid and was fascinated by it. Mid 80's, post War-Games, this game blew my mind. It simulated the world.
The lesson I remember was that conflict in the Cold War was not zero-sum. One side would win and one side would lose. There were (in this game) no win-win outcomes. But - and this is the key point - the value of each win or loss was unequally felt. For the US to back down in Indonesia was disappointing. To back down in West Germany was fatal.
Oh - and also the notion of graduated escalation & de-escalation. Playing the game well requried using escalation wisely. Sometimes you escalate (a bit) to see how they respond & judge the value of a conflict to your opponent. Sometimes you escalate (a lot) to signal to your opponent that a given conflict is very serious to you.
I don't know if I ever had _fun_ playing the game - but of the hundreds of games I played as a kid this one stuck with me.
All this with something like 64k of memory - brilliant!
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but it's not clear to me how this describes something obviously non-zero sum. Independent losses can have different values in a zero-sum hand game; what matters is whether each win is proportional to the corresponding loss. If the USSR winning in West Germany was only a small win, that would demonstrate it was non-zero sum due to the size of the loss there for the US, but I don't think the magnitude of the outcome in Indonesia would relate to that at all.
I first attended CGDC in 1994. It was two years after his Dragon Speech (which I knew nothing about), but the highlight of the conference was his talk about the challenges of story-based games. The part I remember is how he modeled stories as branching trees with fan-out, foldback, tree-of-death, etc (he covers this in the "Architecture" chapter of this book "The Art of Interactive Design"). I didn't really follow Crawford's work on Erasmatron or later, but by the late 90's it sounded like his story model had changed from a tree to a graph network structure, like a finite state machine. While it was an improvement, I was a bit skeptical that this model was enough. Nevertheless, I spent a lot of time thinking about the problem. You see, he'd already infected me with his dream of interactive storytelling.
By the time I moved to California and took a job at EA/Maxis on The Sims 2.0 team, I had decided that true interactive storytelling (as I saw it) was not possible until game AI was sophisticated enough to enable autonomous NPC chatbots. So I put that dream aside while I pursued a career in software development.
Here we are, over a quarter of a century later, and that AI technology is here now. For those of us who have been waiting for this moment, it is almost miraculous. It might be the end of an era for Chris Crawford, but it is just the beginning of the AI-based interactive storytelling era.
I'm "only" in my 50s now, but I am in my 50s now. For a couple of decades I've had this grand vision about how to build the perfect algorithmic trading system. The practical expression of this has come in fits and starts.
During the Pandemic, I finally devoted some time to building a bespoke server and hosting it co-located facility near a high-quality market data provider. I chose to do this before the software was ready in order to "light a fire under my a$$" and help motivate me to move things along. By the end of 2021 I had written, tested, and deployed a set of specialized clients written in rust to consume the market data and perform basic parsing of the real-time information. I stored the transformed output of these processes in log files as a temporary data sink that could represent the data "someday" moving downstream in a custom stream processing platform that would perform trades via an online broker.
And then, it stalled. There always seemed to be good reasons why I couldn't commit to one implementation strategy or another. Would I pass the data downstreeam via pipes? With Kafka? Via shared memory? Would the parsed input be represented via protobuf records? A custom binary format? Apache Arrow/Parquet format? Would the algorithms be expressed in custom rust code? Using Pandas(numpy)/Polars? Would I focus on my imagined "insights" into how prices move or make the transition to Machine Learning by trying to produce "special sauce" custom features that could be fed into models of various types? In the meantime, I have only collected a high volume of daily log files.
There has been some progress, of course. Last year, with LLMs as my pair programmer, I added vector processing to the ingest components, which made them run even more efficiently. I certainly enjoy the sporadic work I dedicate to working on the system. But there always seems to be a fog of possibilities ahead of me obscuring my view towards a broker API getting called.
My family and closest friends look upon this as the "hot rod in his garage" which I sometimes work on and which will probably never get finished.
The broker API I plan to use features the ability to "paper trade" in a simulated account. So I'm not so worried about switching the thing on one day and immediately blowing my account.
I do trade manually in a broker account but as fun and instructive as that is, it doesn't represent the kinds of high-speed analysis and execution my system would make once it was completed.
Someone who clearly wanted to make a difference, but mostly seems to have not just made games.
He made game tools, but then didn't actually use them to make games. And then he blamed everyone else for not being ready for what he was making.
Giving up after only one released work just seems like such a shame.
Nevertheless, it is quite sad - however, it's difficult for me to relate to the experiences of someone who lived through that first wave of personal computing and played a notable part in it - perhaps through that lens, anything was possible.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Crawford_(game_designer)
A whole person -- flattened into little bits gleaned from some text, glued together with assumptions and world-building -- dismissed as "blaming" and "giving up" "after one game"
The YouTube link in the other post has a top comment of "The best speech in all of gaming history delivered by what must be considered the Socrates of gaming.", to give you a sense of there may be more depth to this person than "giving up after 1 game".
If nothing else, it indicates the crowd perceives more depth, which will be enough to make you ponder if you missed something.
I suggest re-reading the article with a different set of assumptions -- when faced with a contradiction, first, check your premises -- it's likely the guy worried about declining programming skills and pointing out the ease at which he was dismissing JavaScript due to simple errors, is being self-aware and sarcastic.
Once you're freed via engaging with your own thinking, instead of rushing to do public judgement, it is a quite beautiful meditation of working on something that fails to get the mindshare you hoped for, and a all-too-familiar to all of us reminder of the cognitive dissonance required to be okay with that, even when you'll never be okay.
I have watched the dragon speech multiple times, and it makes me feel like you should put everything in what you are doing, as everything is your magnum opus. I have huge respect for artists and artisans that work like that. It is really difficult, and often not economically viable, but there are people that just `see` something and they want it to exist.
I often think about the dragon speech, when I am doing the same 'pick up 10 things' quest in World of Warcraft that I have been doing since 2005. Thousands of times.. I have picked up hundreds of thousands of things :) and I wonder, what game would WoW be had he succeeded.