I empathize with him. I always wanted to make indy games, going back to modding and being part of modding teams for doom, qwake, and half-life... In 2007 when the first iPhone came out, I immediately snagged one and dove into the jailbreaking and app building, eventually releasing 2 games into the app store, One did better financially, one was objectively a better game. Either way, I quit a stable job to focus on that and after 14 months I was unemployed again.

I explored tabletop games after that, modding, expanding, and even building prototypes using 3DP.

When AI exploded 2 years ago I was curious how much of a game it could build and I had recently learned about the existence of Pygame. Ended up building a zero-player 2D space sim. It's stupid, but I appreciate it and there is some art in it.

https://github.com/derekburgess/simcraft

Then recently, a coworker asked if I had tried Codex yet. I hadn't, and while riding in a car had the idea of using Codex on my phone to make a game that I could then deploy on my phone and play. Wanted to explore something meta, so I made an AI dungeon master in the style of Zork. It got out of hand and you cant deploy it on a phone- but I did deploy it remotely on my home workstation and then played over ssh from my phone ;P

https://github.com/derekburgess/dungen

I appreciate games for their randomness and have always leaned into games that incorporate generative sandbox experiences.

He's always seemed very frustrated with the gaming industry and I hope he's happy in his day to day life. I remember running across Crawford's works and storytron back around 2000. I thought he was wrong then but I hoped he would find success. After all this time it is hard not to think that he's spent years tilting at windmills.

Was his video presentation ever recorded? Would be interested to see what kind of tools he’s been building

What he describes feels so familiar to me... the ideas and projects I've cared about most have usually landed flat. And because the ideas matter to me I try over and over, hoping that there's something I can change or explain or improve that will make the difference. Like him I also can get lost in the tools, making the thing-to-make-the-thing instead of making the thing. Sometimes that's a necessary prerequisite, but I think it can also be a defense mechanism... a way to avoid approaching an ambition that intimidates me, or that I think will reveal what I lack.

I was not familiar with Chris Crawford before this, though I think I'll look into him more. Reading his idea of People Games [1] I wish he was a younger man with a bit more time to revisit these ideas with new technology. There are new interactive mediums to discover with LLMs, and it's mediums that he's clearly been trying to create all this time...

Quoting his excerpt:

"I dreamed of the day when computer games would be a viable medium of artistic expression — an art form. I dreamed of computer games encompassing the broad range of human experience and emotion: computer games about tragedies, or self-sacrifice; games about duty and honor, patriotism; a satirical game about politics, or games about human folly; games about men's relationship to God or to Nature; games about the passionate love between a boy and girl, or the serene and mature love between husband and wife of decades; games about family relationships or death, mortality, games about a boy becoming a man, and a man realizing that he is no longer young; games about a man facing truth at high noon on a dusty main street, or a boy and his dog, and a prostitute with a heart of gold. All of these things and more were part of this dream, but by themselves they amounted to nothing, because all of these things have already been done by other art forms. There was no advantage, no purchase, nothing superior about this dream, it's just an old rehash. All we are doing with the computer, if all we do is just reinvent the wheel with poor grade materials, well, we don't have a dream worth pursuing. But there was a second part of this dream that catapulted it into the stratosphere. The second part is what made this dream important and worthy: that is interactivity.

"Let me explain to you why interactivity is so overwhelmingly important. Let me talk about the human brain. You know, our minds are not passive receptacles, they are active agents. It’s not as if we have a button on the side of our heads and they come along and push the button and the top of our heads flips open and then they take a pitcher full of knowledge and pour it into our skull, and then they close the top of our head, shake well and say, «Congratulations, you’re educated now!». [...] All the higher mammals learn by playing, by doing, by interacting [...]

"The interactive conversation is effective, but the expository lecture is efficient. That’s the trade-off we make. And over the centuries, we humans have learned that the gains in efficiency outweigh the losses in effectiveness. And therefore we choose expository methods. But the sacrifice remains real! We haven’t ever solved that problem. It’s been with us since the beginning of history. Every single artist has faced this, every communicator, every teacher, every novelist, every sculptor, every singer, every musician, every painter, every single artist through all of human history has been forced to sacrifice effectiveness for efficiency… until now. Because now we have a technology that changes everything. [...] That is the revolutionary nature of the computer. It allows us to automate interactivity to achieve both effectiveness and efficiency. That was the most important part of my dream."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Crawford_(game_designer)...

Thank you, Chris

[dead]

dark reader screws this website so badly