Chris Crawford

Author and computer game designer; designed several notable games for the 80s and early nineties.

An interview with Chris Crawford: http://www.dadgum.com/halcyon/BOOK/CRAWFORD.HTM

Chris Crawford's web site: http://www.erasmatazz.com

His Amazon reviews: http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A36U0SVO1LH7ZE/ref=cm_pdp_reviews_see_all/002-9331745-7740036

Back in the day when Macintoshes were cutesy luggable computers with black-and-white screens, ChrisCrawford designed a number of really great concepts disguised as games. They included:

You went around to your neighbors and you 'talked' to them using this iconic language. Part of the game was like Clue, where each character knew something about other characters. You negotiated the information out of each player by buttering them up, flattering, threatening, or expressing admiration. If you flattered the wrong character at the wrong time she would get mad at you.

At night you met your opponent in a dream and you played a game of "RockPaperScissors" for points. It was all quite trippy.

These days, ChrisCrawford works quite a bit with InteractiveFiction. Someone more knowledgeable about his current work can surely fill it in here.

--Actually, he refers to his project as interactive storytelling, probably to emphasize that interactive storyworlds needn't involve puzzles or text parsers. Kef X-Schecter (FurryKef)

ChrisCrawford worked at Atari in the early 80's. He wrote a couple of games for the 8-bit Atari personal computers, including:

An interesting personal narrative of the development of Eastern Front is available here: http://www3.sympatico.ca/maury/other_stuff/eastern_front.html (maybe not so interesting if you haven't played the game).

ChrisCrawford was also responsible for the Atari 400/800 cartridge game, StarRaiders. The game was an astonishingly good space shoot-em-up, and it left you wondering how he programmed it. He answered that question in his co-authored book, DeReAtari?. -- EricJablow

--BalanceOfPower? is a classic example of bad game design. It has tons of cool stuff, great ideas, had good graphics, but was no fun. Anti-fun even, as playing it left you less happy then when you started. Chris has had pile of great ideas and made a lot of cool stuff. But his games were rarely if ever any fun, and a game that is not fun is a bad game.

Hmm... I spent many a happy hour in my childhood playing BalanceOfPower?. It's still one of my favorite strategy games. So this may be more a matter of personal taste.

I would agree that BalanceOfPower? wasn't a well-designed game. If nothing else, the mechanics of seemed really opaque: If you helped fund an insurrection somewhere, did that help your position in any way other than giving you points? It was always hard to tell. That said, BalanceOfPower? was a fairly innovative concept -- I don't remember any other computer game that tried to simulate cold-war brinksmanship -- and I yearn for new ideas, now that 99% of all video games are the same old Quake clone with bigger guns and bloodier explosions.

As an interesting side note, I read the book ChrisCrawford wrote about BalanceOfPower?, and one of the things he wrote was "If you want to learn about the Soviet mentality, play as the USSR. You'll start feeling quite paranoid, with the whole globe allied against you, and you with just a few countries (Cuba, North Korea, etc.) on your side."

The point of playing BalanceOfPower? was not to win or lose--it was to learn about diplomacy. Winning or losing or fairness wasn't important. When I was a teenager, playing BoP gave me some insight as to why national leaders did what they did.

That is exactly why it was a bad game. The point of the software was to educate the user, not to entertain the user. If you sell something as a game the buyer expects it will be fun. BoP claimed to be a game but was really a (good) educational program. If it was also lots of fun that would of course be fine, but Chris went for educational over fun.

But it was fun! I'm not sure how objectively this point can be argued, though.

If it was fun for one, the value is one, if it also educated the same one, the value was two. Chris may have valued education over fun, but he used fun to educate. Not a bad plan at all. The value for all is still there for all, whether by ones or twos. Fun indeed can be an enhancer! The same can be said for our jobs. We can get more from them than a paycheck. (Education, Experience, the feeling of accomplishment)

I don't know Chris personally (though I did talk to him on the phone a month ago, since I'm remaking Trust and Betrayal), but I know that he thinks the idea that a game has to be fun is bull. Would you say Schindler's List is a crappy movie because it's not fun? He'll happily admit that one of his other games, Balance of the Planet, was hardly any fun at all. However, I do think Balance of Power is a fun game. That you think it is not fun does not make it a bad design, and certainly not a classic example of bad design. The game sold for millions of dollars, something pretty unheard of at the time. Apparently, other people thought it was fun, too. But even if it's no fun at all, to say the design is bad because it didn't achieve something it never set out to achieve in the first place is ridiculous. - Kef X-Schecter (FurryKef)

The boardgame Twilight Struggle, from GMT Games, explicitly credits BalanceOfPower? as its inspiration. The difference is that a player wins if his opponent starts a nuclear war. Somehow, I prefer ChrisCrawford's attitude. --EricJablow

In addition, Crawford has authored the following books:

And a few others which are OutOfPrint?.

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