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Chris Crawford on Game Design

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Chris Crawford on Game Design is all about the foundational skills behind the design and architecture of a game. Without these skills, designers and developers lack the understanding to work with the tools and techniques used in the industry today. Chris Crawford, the most highly sought after expert in this area, brings an intense opinion piece full of personality and flare like no other person in this industry can. He explains the foundational and fundamental concepts needed to get the most out of game development today. An exceptional precursor to the two books soon to be published by New Riders with author Andrew Rollings, this book teaches key lessons; including, what you can learn from the history of game play and historical games, necessity of challenge in game play, applying dimensions of conflict, understanding low and high interactivity designs, watching for the inclusion of creativity, and understanding the importance of storytelling. In addition, Chris brings you the wish list of games he'd like to build and tells you how to do it. Game developers and designers will kill for this information!

504 pages, Paperback

First published June 28, 2003

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Chris Crawford

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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
Profile Image for Chris.
83 reviews
July 30, 2011
The best kind of advice: blatantly biased. Crawford doesn't try to hide away of his eccentricities or beliefs in objective-sounding weasel words. I certainly found places to disagree with his positions, and found his history of video games more than a little egocentric, but that's fine -- I know where he stands, and can better define where I do in comparison.

The best bits are when he talks about games he developed early in his career. In particular I found his discussion of coding an Atari 2600 game (never to see the light of day) intriguing, because it's the firsthand account I've read of someone grappling with the extreme technical limitations of the platform and trying to wring a decent game out of them.
Profile Image for Steve.
79 reviews24 followers
December 2, 2007
The first half are essays on how to design games and the second are lessons from crafting his own games. The painful war stories were fun to read and poignant; Even though I started reading this book 2 years ago I still remember a number of the lessons almost verbatim.

Sometimes the writing is stilted but the tone is down to earth and full of useful knowledge and experience. If you want to understand games, I think this is a good place to start.
Profile Image for Daniel Schulte.
356 reviews4 followers
July 25, 2017
There's a lot of good things in here for game designers to think about. It gets a little long at parts, and some sections feel like they could've been left out, but overall I'm glad I read it.
99 reviews1 follower
November 18, 2024
Following on from his first book, this one's a verbose and partly unnecessary victory lap. It's almost as full of insights and lessons as his first one—even more so in terms of personal design experiences—but for all the added words, the amount of added knowledge/wisdom from the previous book is too little. In fact, the biggest surprise when evaluating his two "core" books in parallel is the realization of just how little his views have changed, for better or—especially—worse.

If there ever was a curse inherent to the craft of game design, it is embodied by Crawford. By his single-minded pursuit of his own definition of what games "should be," and his insistence on never meeting the rest of us halfway, Crawford doomed himself and his career to a niche obscurity, and worse yet, he's content to reside within this tragedy of his own creation. His "interactive storytelling engine," which he states much later in his career goes unappreciated because people "just don't understand it" (i.e. we lowly people are just too stupid, I guess), has been improved on in terms of approachability, enjoyability and rigor by games like Rimworld, Caves of Qud and Dwarf Fortress, as well as the sizeable interactive fiction community that is always innovating in this niche field, yet you will never catch Crawford acknowledging this; he always has a problem with how anyone other than himself goes about things.

This is because, to him, interactive stories are a fine art that is yet to be tapped, and these stories need to be told in the precise ways that he prescribes. Never mind that every game that has ever come close to realizing his ambition (such as the games listed above) always end up becoming beloved precisely not for presenting some sort of life-changing aesthetic experience, but instead for alternating between emergent moments of silly malfunctions and moments of self-efficacious competence from the player, and little in between but the surprise and wonder of these emergences. Not to devalue these experiences (and Rimworld comes close to being an exception), but it's a fact that you'll never catch a Dwarf Fortress player crying from dramatic catharsis, and you're infinitely more likely to catch them laughing at something ridiculous that they managed to get away with, all their meta-cognition intact, immersed in the experience only through a semi-ironic detachment. Put simply, Crawford's ambitions are an artistically undesirable dead-end in the field of videogames, and have long been outperformed in the worlds of interactive fiction and non-digital games. His own later efforts in these fields (such as his ambitious interactive web retelling of Le Morte d'Arthur—a wonderful piece of art, but failing to uphold any of his design ideals and not standing up to all the great IF out there) prove as much.

Specifically on videogames, whereas games today have found a wonderful middle way between authorial, linear narratives and the joy and expression of play, Crawford won't have any of it. To him, Mario is just a rehash of 1980's Space Panic (he all but directly states this in the book), every FPS ever made is just an inherently worthless Doom clone and Dark Souls is no different than any other adventure game/RPG to ever come out. His blindness to both nuance and the singularity of personal experience, topped off with his surprising lack of empathy for players (the only field wherein he shows any shred of empathy is UX, a deeply pragmatic field, which is ironic considering how supposedly "artistic" he is), crystallizes his image as a cranky, eccentric man from a bygone era, when he could dream his wild, ineffective, impractical dreams without reality catching up to thwart them.

Crawford was once a great game designer and a hell of a dreamer. (I'd say he was the best in the world before Shigeru Miyamoto came around, but he himself apparently believes he held the crown for a good 20 years until Will Wright and The Sims, though he still levies silly and unnecessary critique on the latter creation about "why include the potty in this game???") Despite his later failures, he's the first genius of our field, and frankly I wish his legacy was more fondly remembered. That said, perhaps that would have come to pass if he just would have come down to Earth and listened to where the rest of us are coming from and where we're trying to go, instead of talking at us through hundreds and hundreds of pages and lengthy conference/interview hours of condescension and ill-fated conceptualizations.
152 reviews3 followers
unfinished
January 7, 2012
Now and then I dip into this text. Chris Crawford, for all his crotchets and foibles and unstylish prose, is one of my heroes. His ideas on interactivity make the world go round.
Profile Image for Dirk.
27 reviews
January 4, 2009
On Game Design von Chris Crawford war zunächst einmal eine Enttäuschung. Wer eine Vorstellung von Methodiken oder Tipps zum Thema Spieledesign sucht, wird in diesem Buch kaum fündig. Lediglich das erste Drittel des Buches beschäftigt sich mit dem Thema und selbst in diesem Drittel schafft es der Autor nicht, seine Ansichten auf den Punkt zu bringen. Ich hatte immer den Eindruck, dass er ja möglicherweise etwas interessantem auf der Spur ist, aber seine Ausschweifungen und insbesondere die Beispiele waren eher störend. Dazu kommt, dass viele Ansichten meiner Meinung nach doch eher an den Haaren herbeigezogen, manchmal veraltet (das aktuellste Spiel, auf welches eingegangen wird ist Die Sims von 2000, gefolgt von Half-Life, 1998 - bei einem 2003 veröffentlichten Buch!), teils widersprüchlich oder schlichtweg falsch sind. Ab und zu jedoch schimmert eine gute Idee oder ein guter Ansatz heraus.

Weshalb sich das Buch eventuell trotzdem lohnt? Die restlichen zwei Drittel des Buches bestehen aus Entwicklungsberichten der eigenen Spieleprojekte von Chris Crawford. Er geht auf Ideen und Konzepte ein, was gut lief, was schlecht lief. Zugegeben, vieles davon ist sehr Ich-bezogen und stellt Fehler immer geringer dar als die Vorteile. Dazu gibt es viele "Kriegsgeschichten" aus den "wilden Jahren der Spieleentwicklung". Quasi eine Autobiografie eines Spieledesigners. Dies hat weniger praktischen Wert als vielmehr historischen, aber ich fand es dann doch angenehm zu lesen, als ich das Buch anfing als Biografie zu lesen, statt als Fachbuch.

Mehr von Chris Crawford gibt es in der Bibliothek seiner Webseite zu lesen.
2 reviews2 followers
January 27, 2010
A lot of the book has a lot of really good content, but there's a few sections that feel a little like filler.
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