You just won yourself a new regular viewer.

I think the thing that bothered me about what he said was his lack of substance. It’s true that a lot of people comment on the state of the industry without having made actual games (fun or otherwise), but these people generally point to things that have been done as examples of a thing done right, or done wrong and they then expound upon what it should have done.

Chris Crawford points a finger at the industry and cries foul without actually pointing to something that could be done differently. He seems to think he was on the right track 15 years ago, but what did his games do? How did they change or re-direct? What did they contribute? He made some intricate Wargames, and my question to him is: So what?

Perhaps an inelegant question, but really, why do we take this guy’s opinion seriously?

My favorite part was the last one (at the nw games festival) where he was talking about how he used to say that games would never go anywhere without “people”/emotion, and then saying “well, I was wrong”. He says he gives the presentations to recruit new people, and lots of people took his pamphlets, so apparently some people are buying into his ideas.

Still though, his storytron sounds like the worst features of adventure games set in a virtual/simulated world. Rules provide structure for games, and what he talks of doing would create an insanely complex ruleset that would take forever to figure out. Duplicating the real world for a single user so a computer can understand it requires such a complex user ruleset that I don’t see how it could be done. He says his storytron technology will eventually involve everyone in gaming, but the mass market has shown through casual games that it prefers simplicity, not complexity.

I think it’s more likely that games like Facade will surpass him. I suppose you could say Facade already has but the game is more of an interesting novelty than a fun experience.

I don’t even know why his thoughts or opinions are rewarded with column inches, much less something as profound as attention. He hasn’t made any good games, he hasn’t sold any games, he hasn’t got any justification for saying that “games are dead” beyond the fact that EA games sell (what?), he hasn’t got any solutions to what he has decided is the problem beyond “interactive storytelling” which has been demonstrated time and again over the last 25 years to be a dead end, and his own arguments and claims are internally inconsistent.

Ignore him. Please.

Interesting.

I never did like metaphors. They more often seem to be used as smoke and mirrors than as tools to make a situation clearer.

The metaphor says exactly what I intended. If there is only a single quality you use to judge a piece’s overall worth, that leads to an impoverished view of what is possible in the medium. Popular media typically do this because they’re in business, and business seeks to minimize risk, where taking a very quantitative, formula-driven view of art is a reasonably viable strategy.

Challenging, lasting work is judged by a range of qualities. It provides the grist for future innovations and, eventually, mass culture.

Either you define “fun” more broadly as “involving” and concede that there are other success metrics, or you prefer a future in which the medium does not grow beyond its current very marginal stature.

In order to make your statement, now you’ve had to define music up, and dance down. All I’m saying is that it’s a very bad metaphor. Pick another.

“music has grown beyond ‘has a beat you can dance to’”

Popular music has typically had very stringent standards regarding rhythm. Danceability – and yes, by that I mean “you can get up and move around to it, often in a social setting” – is important.

At no point did I argue that music should not have a meter of some sort. It is a formal quality of all music. Calm down, Beethoven.

Maybe what you MEANT to use as a metaphor was “all music doesn’t have to have an electric guitar,” since that would be closer to the idea of removing “fun” from a game. Perhaps you meant “all music does not need to follow a I-IV-V chord structure.” Or maybe you honestly think that anyone would want to listen to randomly chosen beeps for long periods of time.

But for most people, just as with designing a game that isn’t somehow diverting, that’s wanking. Enjoy your noise.