I found the read all over the place with a good helping of ego.
Honestly my main thought reading this was "no wonder their books didn't create the result expected" There is no order to the article, it starts out good, then morphs into the matrix, then a history lesson on phylosophy"
If true, the things they have achieved are "AWESOME" and "FANTASTIC" but the rant came off kind of "AWE-TASTIC"
I wonder if there may be some value in them hiring someone else to "Recompile" the books they wrote to make them more palatable. Of course I have not read the books, they may be page turners. I just wanted to offer something constructive instead of just putting them down.
That was hard to read, it doesn't feel like someone who is mentally stable, clinging on to an idea he once had. Sometimes you have to listen to the world, adjust your ideas and move on, maybe he should have listened more to the world instead of expecting the world to listen to him.
I understand what you meant, and it makes sense to majority of people. However, I'd argue that the ones who actually change the world are those who do not listen or adapt to the world. This is true because in the end most of us adapt to whatever is given or presented to us by the world.
There is a lot of "I" in this story. The examples given do not come over as overly genius, but rather trivial. The whole story comes over as written from the perspective the world revolves around the author rather than the author participating in the world. It seems it is the author misunderstanding the complexity of the world rather than the other way around.
I agree. I went through a phase in my childhood where I tried thinking in a similar way for a month or so, and I gave up because it just wasn't an effective way to try to understand things. I suspect many people tried to do so also. It's very human to try to find mechanical, senseful représentations of the world, but the world doesn't want this.
It feels like he spent too much time working on his own work rather than looking at what other people were doing and ended up disappointed that people didn't follow the same way as he did.
Yes, pretty much so, and it is not a recent development.
I don't think I'd seen an article from Erasmatazz for like 20-25 years. At that time, Crawford was making a lot of grandiose statements about "Erasmatron", his interactive storytelling system that would be the first actual expression of art on computers. And when it was released, it turned out to be just laughably crude and mechanistic compared to what the interactive fiction community (all of them hobbyists at the time) was producing at the time. He clearly had no idea of what the state of the art was in that domain, nor any interest in understanding it.
> He clearly had no idea of what the state of the art was in that domain, nor any interest in understanding it.
I think this is the most frustrating thing about these type of characters. They are usually very clever people, but by refusing to engage with people they look down on, they find themselves further and further entrenched in a narrow view - the ideas become stale without partnerships. Then comes the frustration and bitterness that no one is recognising their mastery while the world moves on. They are left isolated on an idea island and can only talk in terms of what they achieved decades ago. I suppose the idea of representing yourself online as one of the greatest scholars of the Renaissance unironically(?) says it all.
I once read an essay about Wolfram that came across a bit like this, the difference being that he managed to create a following against the odds and a earn a living from it.
As someone who followed his work closely, I think that is an over-exaggeration.
With his Erasmatron, he did make many working prototypes, and recruited a very talented IF-author to try and build storyworlds with him in that tool and guide its development through that process.
The Erasmatron is still a very interesting idea that hasn't been successfully applied yet. Whether it's due to a deep weakness in the idea, or that the right execution hasn't been found yet, I don't know.
What do you feel is the core idea of the Erasmatron that is not already well-captured by modern IF, (digital or analog) consims, or (digital or analog) roleplaying games?
If the answer is "each of those does some subset of things well but the Erasmatron would do everything well" (and this is the position I implicitly ascribe to Crawford after trying to make sense of his last 15 years of writing / commentary), do you really think that kind of scope is a desirable artistic goal, let alone feasible?
What I have seen attempted by the Erasmatron that I haven't seen in "real" games yet, is the ability to create a dramatic setting, with scenes and actors, where the actors are driven by "decorated" simulations.
Decorated simulation meaning that the actor has a data representation of their personality, behavior and motivation, which causes all their actions and interactions with other actors. "Decorated" meaning the story author can define or guide how these interactions - if they happen - will be described.
Rimworld is an example that feels very close. People love and hate each other, get into fights, parties, and go on depressed drug binges. The biggest difference from Erasmatron is that the setting is random (or "procedural" as the kids call it these days) and affected by random events. The interactions run as they may, and are not guided by a world author's desire for a specific setting or dramatic arc.
If Erasmatron it was fully applied as imagined, it would allow you to stage Romeo and Juliet, but explore what happens if Romeo leaves Juliet alone for a week until things calm down, and work on the family relationships. It's quite lofty, but I believe we can still get closer to it.
We have gotten a lot closer to it, much more than Rimworld.
- World models with motivation-driven characters is a common subgenre of IF; you could do worse than starting with Galatea which is seminal and still very good. The author is an acquaintance of Crawford, and is aligned with his stated goals - you can read her critique of his book[0] and one of his more recent tools[1]. She has previously designed Versu, an AI-driven narrative engine, and has lauded work in virtually every major narrative game design tool.
- Façade did this for limited actors in a navigable virtual space in 2005.
- Elsinore was a popular game from 2019 that did this, also graphically, for Hamlet.
> If Erasmatron it was fully applied as imagined, it would allow you to stage Romeo and Juliet, but explore what happens if Romeo leaves Juliet alone for a week until things calm down, and work on the family relationships. It's quite lofty, but I believe we can still get closer to it.
This is an AGI fantasy, and definitely not the endgame of the Erasmatron. It will not be achieved by Crawford's authoring tools, and he refuses to consider even basic refinements to the UX of his authoring tools, let alone any paradigm shift. It will probably be achieved ~never, and would not be artistically interesting even if it was.
It sounds like he was one of the first to make simulation like games, felt like Neo and like it was full of stars at the same time, and never was able to go beyond that. Hasn't looked around, hasn't become humbled by the work of others.
I don't want to make fun of this guy but it seems like his main insight is that you can use math to represent processes in the world. That's...what all of science and engineering do?
He is closer to Aristotle than modern scientists and engineers. That is create formulas to represent the world without checking how the world works at all.
He does write at the Introduction of one of his books [1] about it:
"While this approach will fail to satisfy those few dedicated person who want to delve into the innards of the program, I think it will satisfy the needs of the greater number of people who wish to understand the concepts behind the game.
Finally, I apologize to all those readers more knowledgeable about geopolitical matters than myself, who may wince at the necessary simplifications. I am first and foremost a game designer, not a political scientist. Simplification to achieve clarity is the essence of my work; clarity can be extracted from a muddy reality only by denying some of reality’s richness."
For example, in this post [0] he argues that a pinecone was cushioned by the snow and that's why it didn't bounce off the rail. But he fails to notice that there's the same amount of snow on the rail and on top of the pinecone. Instead of his hypothesis, what I think probably happened was that the pinecone bounced on the deck and then up to the rail, where it was before the snow started falling. It's not a matter of looking at objects vs processes like he claims, it's a matter of looking at what objects (in this case, the snow on top of the pinecone) can tell us about processes.
I am sure readers will dislike the genius claims, but I think it would be missing the main point to get distracted by the tone.
The point I hear most loudly is that some sort of systems thinking combined with math is a pretty useful and powerful way to think about the world, but for some reason people don’t care to learn that way of thinking.
I think this is pretty profound. Systems theorists are super quirky, (I highly recommend the systems bible btw) and some of the earliest writers were not mathematically inclined - they tend to balk at hard predictions for a variety of reasons. It is a vanishingly small group, but I think one that has a lot to offer.
Anyway, I charitably read this as a plea to care about the systems that make up the world, and second that plea.
Would you say the contents of this article indicate that the author is "mathematically inclined", in any significant way (compared to, for example, the early systems theorists you refer to)?
As someone who has followed Crawford's trajectory for the past 15ish years I have to say his biggest problem may be the opposite. He is so tightly married to the idea that narrative simulations must produce concrete, written, book-like stories that he misses how effective modern simulation games (not just computer games, but also boardgames, RP, consims, "paxsims", etc) can effectively engage systems literacy - even though they do not process "natural-language" textual inputs, through a mathematical ur-model, into "natural-language" textual outputs.
I think the average group of analysts running a matrix game is considerably more "mathematically-minded" in that they are much more interested in what the simulation does than whether it produces a particular form of output.
As a game developer I like Chris Crawford but it’s like someone should have told him decades ago that the first step of making game devs listen to you is to create games that are fun or interesting to play. Last thing of his I tested felt like a web toy proof of concept which wasn’t doing anything mind blowing and not really a game at all. In my professional opinion he has been far too much the “ideas guy” but without compelling execution, he’s just one of hundreds of “misunderstood” game design geniuses out there who never got a great game produced.
It’s sad because I think his mission is very worthwhile. He reminds me a quite a bit of a few other tragic underground game developers like Ullillillia and “Bobs game”.
Oof, comparing himself to Beethoven and Shakespeare (both fairly successful because people wanted to and continue to want to experience the products of their artistic abilities) while dismissing that nobody wants to play his game because it isn't "fun" is the biggest mental disconnect I've ever seen.
"Why have I failed? ... The simple answer is that ... I’m too far ahead of my time... I’m a misunderstood genius. ... the world doesn’t yet perceive a need for the ideas I peddle. In 1885, physicists didn’t perceive a need for special relativity, and they would have rejected it out of hand."
Or... you're wrong.
[In the movie "Matrix"] "Neo has been revived and looks down the hall at the agents and sees the reality of the Matrix: that it is numbers. I see the same thing when I look at the real world."
I've been following his work for years, And spoken to people who have been to his 'conference' (and who I suspect will be rather bemused by the way he described them here!). The general consensus was it's horribly self-referential impracticality.
There is a reason he hasn't made anything practical in 35 years. Since the time when his success at 80s game development made him think it was the wrong thing that caused the success. (Hint: it was not his ad-hoc mathematical models, no matter how much post-doc justification he can ladle on them).
I have wondered about him, but sadly this post is rather damning in my eyes.
There's something intoxicating about the idea of building worlds out of systems, feeling like you've captured infinite permutations of some phenomenon in a simple set of rules. This idea of writing worlds into existence with the flick of a wrist is the thing that first got me into computers. In some sense it's the dream that still keeps me going.
My perspective has been sobered quite a bit over the years - these things are rarely as simple as we might imagine they could be - but it remains heady stuff. I can see how it might give the right kind of person delusions of grandeur.
The egoism on display here is pretty offputting, but I feel kinship with the "dreamer" mentality underneath. This guy had a vision, and he was uncompromising in his pursuit of it, and even if the end result wasn't worth much to anyone else, some part of me has to respect that.
I'm reminded of The Room (movie)'s Tommy Wiseau. Another creative who thought he was a genius and poured his blood, sweat, and tears into his life's passion project, and it turned out to be pretty objectively bad. But it was meaningful to him, and there's something to that. There were no ulterior motives; he wanted to put this piece of himself out into the world. There's a purity of spirit. I think what's missing for these individuals is the self-awareness to know that this thing is mostly just for them, and to be okay with that idea and embrace it. That way lies happiness, I think.
Is it even self awareness or a lack of editing? Like okay, yours is a game that doesn’t get a lot of traction, but you know what else doesn’t? Board games in general. No one said you have to be entirely selfless, and one’s conviction would appear just as fraudulent if it came in the guise of piety.
Here’s what you could have done: Find five other great board games that everyone else overlooks and explain why they are dope. Put a small blurb about why your game falls in this class, and why you are proud to be in that group.
It checks off all the boxes - misunderstood, ahead of it’s time, probably genius conceptual ideas.
The funny thing is that most creators experience this, if they put their work out there: What they think is their greatest piece often isn't really perceived as such and some random thing of theirs might struck a nerve in others. This applies to a lot of things: blog posts, Tweets, videos, music, paintings, and obviously games.
I've heard that Stephen King considers the Dark Tower series his greatest work[1][2], but almost none of his fans do[3][4]. The intent of a work can be far divorced from the public reception of it.
here i am ben says bill
nothing but a lousy playwright
and with anything like luck
in the breaks i might have been
a fairly decent sonnet writer
i might have been a poet
if i had kept away from the theatre
...
well says i pete
bill s plays are highly
esteemed to this day
is that so says pete
poor mutt little he would
care what poor bill wanted
was to be a poet
Well, the first 4 books are some of his best writing, I think... The final 3 suck terribly, and were a great disappointment (to me, of course, maybe some people actually liked them)
Overall I agree, but I actually quite like the ending of the series. I've read lots of folks online who absolutely hated what ultimately happens to Roland - I thought it was a cool ending which was very much in keeping with the sort of "cosmic cycles" theme of the books. That said, there is a _lot_ of junk in those final three books, and the seventh one in particular drops the ball in several disappointing ways before it ends.
This is painfully true. I put my art on Twitter/IG and the most popular things overall are nowhere close to my favorite. I genuinely can’t even comprehend why they are. I’m not sure I could even attempt to “pander” by making more of the same subject matter, because I’m not convinced I’d replicate the correct thing lol
Apex Twin (the electronic music producer) put hours and hours of unreleased work[1] out for free a few years ago. One striking thing about the release is the number of true gems in there that outshine published work.
You must admit that the flower shop scene was a tad unrealistic, in that he was able to find a free illegal parking space right out in front of the store in San Francisco, and he didn't even get ticketed.
I admire you taking a stance for The Room but when a movie is generally lauded as one of the worst movies ever made, you are kind of on the losing side. Maybe there's good parts in there and sure, what is bad depends on the viewer. Yet sometimes you just have to admit that even with all the subjective bias removed something is just bad.
Generally lauded as a bad movie does not make The Room bad art.
Have you seen the film at a sold out crowd at cinema 21 in Portland?
There is a culture of the film and its participating attendees Marvel movies do not match.
You can say it is a bad film or you can say you don’t like that it doesn’t fit with your idea of what makes a movie objectively good. But it is absolutely not bad art.
Guernica is a large 1937 oil painting on canvas by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. It is one of his best known works, regarded by many art critics as the most moving and powerful anti-war painting in history - wikipedia
Anyhow, art is subjective. You can interpret it as you like, because its how it makes you feel. And you can argue for or against a point, but it doesn't really matter. As its almost like arguing what flavor of ice-cream is the best.
Art is not entirely, 100% subjective, or else there would be nothing to say about it, nothing to discuss. Authorial intent is not the last word but it can be interesting, and it can impact the interpretation we come away with.
> My perspective has been sobered quite a bit over the years - these things are rarely as simple as we might imagine they could be - but it remains heady stuff. I can see how it might give the right kind of person delusions of grandeur.
Likewise, although i've settled on a slightly different perspective: that most systems have simple rules (if you go low enough), and that the complexity is in the emergent behavior... it's not that we cannot necessarily capture the former, but that our concept of computer is far too tiny to run those rules in enough depth or breadth. It hasn't lessened the interest for me though. The more I understand the less those childish ideas of "grandeure" make sense, to the point that my instinct is to be suspicious of ideas focused on exploitation rather than exploration, although they can be good seeds for exploration in the form of "what ifs".
>Likewise, although i've settled on a slightly different perspective: that most systems have simple rules (if you go low enough), and that the complexity is in the emergent behavior
I concur with this. The emergent behaviour is usually the only thing we can observe, so we model our systems according to it.
The most beautiful (and usually the truest) models lie in the simplicity that causes the behaviour to emerge.
I wouldn't say our computers are too tiny, just that our brains aren't used to thinking in those terms, but we discover it by deep thinking and "deep iteration" in the topic and have to approach it from multiple sides.
Imagine yourself as a kid sitting at a chess-game, playing against Magnus Carlsen. You don't know who the guy is, you were just sitting at the sundae bar when the dude at the next table said "hey", pulled out a chess et and asked "Wanna play?". So you naively say ok, you got some time to kill while waiting for mom to pick you up.
And you start playing. You kinda know the basic rules and what the figures do. So you make a move, he makes a move, you make a move...a minute later, you eat his pawn. Ha! He did not see that coming. Soon, another one. You're killing this guy. 2 moves later, you're left with nothing but the king, running around the board. What the heck even happened?
Our minds are used to the "Eat figures = Win games" outlook, where simple steps lead to simple outcomes. While for Magnus, the figure you ate was a sacrifice that opened up a spot he will move his queen through in 3 moves. He knows the common patterns, permutations, defenses and can see moves ahead.
Our minds aren't used to thinking ahead and seeing what the sideffect of a sideffect does to the result of the sideeffect of the sideffect. Maybe once we were better at it, but we have
more interruptions so less time and depth to it (in general).
That is why we can't figure out the simple rules at first - we can't see the trees from the forest.
This is not egoism, but indeed straight narcissism. And it matches overstating a "vision". The intoxicating part may be the dream of recognition and importance. I don't think this is a good metric to assign value, at all.
I believe the most troubling thing about Crawford's path is simply in the inability to develop self-critique of his own philosophy. His thoughts on a subject seem to terminate in the thing of having a mathematical model of a topic, not what we get out of that model. It does not seem to matter if the model is inscrutable when presented within a system, or if the system degenerates into a single strategy. (I have a memory of playing "Balance of the Planet" and after struggling for some time, discovering that the model did not restrict my taxation of dirty energy. Therefore I could gain a nearly infinite budget to clean up the planet on turn 1 with no negative consequences beyond "people falling off roofs while installing solar panels." I'm not even kidding - for some reason roofing accidents are ranked up there with deforestation and carbon release as very important things to model about our impact on the planet.)
Plus, last I heard, he's still stuck on an evo-psychological model of society that is quite out of fashion these days, which doesn't exactly help matters.
Crawford's story is a good warning for anyone who embraces simulation as an "end in itself", rather than a medium, though. This was an idea in vogue with wargaming's golden era and is now carried forward by VR enthusiasts, among others.
My first thought on reading him talking about equations to estimate numbers of fighters based on a few parameters is that there are entire subfields of academia devoted to debating regularities like this: most of economics, most of modern IR theory, substantial parts of psychology, sociology and politics. And the standard criticism (within the subfield, at least) isn't that there is something inherently wrong with expressing part of the world as a mathematical model, but that the mathematical model chosen is wrongly specified. The world isn't hostile to the concept of simulations, but it does have a horrible tendency to produce data that casts doubt on their accuracy.
Do you have advice on how one can get more into reading interesting research papers in Computer Science and Software Engineering? I've previously tried subscribing to ACM but found that too many of their articles weren't of much interest or relevance to me. I definitely do feel like I've gotten lazy and that I don't challenge myself enough, but it's hard to break out of these patterns so I'd welcome any suggestions or recommendations which could help me grow.
I usually start reaching for research papers when I'm aware of a specific problem and I'm looking for the different approaches that have been taken to try and solve said problems.
Every few months I visit the NIST website and I browse through their catalogue to pick out interesting articles and publications to add to my queue.
I like to check the award section of “best thesis paper” of my local university for fun and then at work I have to read research papers in my area but then I just use a search engine to find it.
Start small and don’t take it too seriously! Little by little, just as learning a new language.
Most papers are available on author websites or arxiv. I'd check out the titles of papers in recent software engineering conferences (ICSE is a great starter) and read what you are interested in. For CS more broadly you'll need to start with a field and then find conferences since conferences are broken up by topic.
>Plus, last I heard, he's still stuck on an evo-psychological model of society that is quite out of fashion these days, which doesn't exactly help matters.
>quite out of fashion
Yeah I don't get the impression this guy is into intellectual fads. If anything he's a contrarian and will deliberately take the opposing position to the mainstream.
Evo Psych is out because a bunch of idiots (and self proclaimed non intellectuals) use it to justify and explain everything and anything with stories and no evidence. Meanwhile real research continues but is sidelined due to this bad reputation.
Understandably contrarians see this happening and immediately take the position of Evo psych because it allows them to do a lot of hypothesis generation (their favourite pass-time) and because it flies in direct opposition to current political and academic movements.
> the main reason for this is that I’ve made no attempt to sell the idea. I simply wrote it up and put it on my website. I suppose that, were I to jump through the appropriate hoops, I could garner more interest for the idea. But that is beneath my pride; I am a thinker, not a salesman. I refuse to promote myself. I put the idea before the world and the world can take it or leave it. The world mostly leaves it.
I've heard some other people blaming a lack of "sales" for their ideas not spreading. As if you can not sell. Any sort of presentation is sales, if your product or idea is out there, it is selling itself.
Maybe the focusing on sales would, ironically, bring the understanding of what people find impressive in ideas, in games or products, and it might be completely different from what we thought before.
The most important bit of doing any kind of complex sale is listening to others.
Reading the "most important" idea article that he made no attempt to sell is also illuminating. It's a mildly thought-provoking blog about how many fields have concepts of state and state change, and the concepts are interdependent and blur at the edges, leading to an unsupported conclusion that we think too much about data and inputs and not enough about CPUs. It would probably get a few upvotes and a few confused replies on LessWrong, but there's not really much for the computer scientists and creatives he clearly hopes will take notice to work with. Perhaps they might find a different version or some of his other ideas more valuable
Sales is morally bad: this idea that in order to sell, you must manipulate. Eg: “Used car salesmen” (said with disgust)
Money is evil
A bit to the side of the OP, but I feel like these two narratives have been particularly damaging to our planet’s long-term growth. To your point @amatic: If the author had let go of pride and at least explored the idea of effective communication with people as a way to spread ideas (aka sales), he may be far more objective in his self-appraisal and certainly gain perspective on how his ideas can be applied by others.
I can understand why he enjoyed building mathematical models. And why reviews of "Balance of the Planet" praised that. But assuming that was the point, I think missed the point.
I think it would be like creating Demons Souls, loving creating the back story, getting lots of praise for it, and deciding that the best thing is an interactive fiction game with nothing but unlimited detail back story. Then wondering some years later why you didn't change the world, no one has gone further than you did, and all games seem shallow compared to your imagination. Fortunately Miyazaki went a different way.
Not a surprise that Will Wright and Sid Meier (who I know is very much a fan of complexity theory) went in a more successful direction.
> There’s a grain of truth in these answers, but I don’t think that they capture the bulk of the truth, because I am dead certain that most other people have the native intelligence to understand the ideas I’ve been peddling.
The entire post, out of context, seems, as some people have called it, narcissistic or pretentious. I guess no one wants to hear someone laud themselves as a genius.
As someone who's designed many things 5-10 years before a market is available for those things, i have to constantly bite my tongue any time i have a "novel idea" - since i have no patents or published papers, why would anyone listen to me? Furthermore, the end result of bragging (even in this limited context, here) is that people like me less.
I think the linked text is interesting, although meandering. The author appears to understand that their approach to teaching / sharing their ideas is lacking, and seems to be misguided on why that is. Like the Simpsons image macro: "Could I be out of touch? No. It's the children who are wrong."
Maybe the author of the article missed the simple fact that game designers want to come up with their own rules and mathematical models, because they enjoy the process more than reading 500 pages of explanations from a genius.
Especially in a game context, you usually have to pick a few details from the real world to simulate to make a compelling game. Too many variables and it gets hard for the player to track what's the cause and effect of what is happening.
Comparing oneself with Neo Einstein to start with led me to write a rather scathing reply here. A moment of reflection led me to delete it.
I think I genuinely lack context. I do not know the author, nor any of his games.
I know that in the wider context of the game industry, they are not defining moments - games that people consider milestones.
We also know that today's games feature much more "realistic" and complex systems than the affine or multiplicative equation the author gives us. After all, interdependent agents on different levels produce results that can rarely be described by such simple measures. Getting a well-defined, realistic, complex yet FUN game system from such agent-based approaches is hard, but ultimately the goal of most game designers.
It seems to me that the author may have had some initial insight, and got snubbed in the mid-eighties by other designers or successes. It further seems that he has since then not reevaluated the state of the game industry. Or, perhaps, he lacks the ability to describe his unique insights in terms the reader can understand?
> I think I genuinely lack context. I do not know the author, nor any of his games. I know that in the wider context of the game industry, they are not defining moments - games that people consider milestones.
You definitely lack context. I think Crawford's artistic program is completely in the wrong, that the Erasmatron is a joke, and that narcissism is largely responsible for leading him down this path.
But Eastern Front and Balance of Power are seminal in wargaming and computer gaming, Siboot remains an oft-studied object, and the idea of the storytron was both reasonable and radical in 1993 even though Crawford ended up on a useless path developing it.
Crawford was a looming figure in the industry in the 80s, exited (rightly, and literally to applause!) to protest the commercial direction the industry was taking in the 90s, but then disappeared up his own ass for way too long. There's the oft-quoted line from Hamming about productive research, of which Crawford is probably among the most intense, and definitely among the most tragic, example:
I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance.
That seems reasonable to me. Other figures in the game industry retain their relevance and are known to me, a contemporary. Crawford, instead, is not.
His writings are difficult from my perspective. He claims to be a genius in quite a few areas, including AI. However, in each of these areas, history has passed him by. None of his ideas seem substantial or important from today’s perspective.
And this is not, how he claims, only our fault for missing his genius.
Instead, this person seems to be what we academics call "not well read".
His musings about AI do not predate the science. What he writes about, his work in the mid to late 70s, was already known in the 50s and 60s, as far as I can tell.
Similar to his insistence that game designers somehow do not know about systems, I think this is in part because he does not read or engage with work that is not his own.
It’s one thing to fail to communicate one’s work. It is another thing to ignore the work of other’s and use this to fuel one’s own impression of the state of the world.
Let me put it differently:
To be a successful researcher or, I'd argue, developer, you have to learn to deeply respect the contributions of other people. This includes being honest about them. One needs to see deficiencies, yes, but also allow for the possibility that there are many geniuses that share discoveries - as frustrating as that may be.
The second element of this respect is then how you engage with others. If one dismisses the approaches outright, one is not only usually unfair or wrong, one also quickly becomes disliked in any community. Internally, we all develop ideas, and we always like our own ideas. However, the process of science or progress is also fueled by interaction, and interaction requires respect. People with an overt superiority complex will always find it difficult to frame their contributions in a way that is accessible. And, with very eminent exceptions, will not really contribute to human progress.
Case in point, Crawford is obviously a deep thinker with important contributions to game development. I do believe you there!
However, from today's perspective, it is hard to find anything at all that one could consider important. Even if some inventions predate the state of the art at the time, our progress was guided by other people - people that were able to cooperate. From my perspective, his ideas were worked out either by people that predate him (or in parallel), or done better by other researchers in what followed.
So while I lack context, and recognize that my opinion does not reflect the truth, the simple fact that Crawford shows close to zero respect for other thinkers ultimately leads to a state of the world where I find almost nothing notable, revolutionary or important in his writing - be it wrong today's or yesterday's perspective. Instead, I find that his website does not lend itself to a very charitable impression of this person. Most of all, because he implicitly insults other researchers that have at least his level of genius, and which I deeply respect.
Instead, I need someone like you telling me that yes, this man is or was important.
I don't mean to give a charitable impression of him (I also don't have one), but only try to provide context I feel is missing here - a lot of people are reading this as "another indie game developer feels he didn't get his due" (boring) but the reality is "industry founder completely out of touch after 30 years" - which I think has more of a useful lesson for all of us. And that all of us (perhaps especially Crawford) should study modern history more deeply before passing any judgement.
> Other figures in the game industry retain their relevance and are known to me, a contemporary. Crawford, instead, is not.
It's hard for me to think of someone from Crawford's cohort who has remained more well-known than him, to be honest. From Wikipedia's description of the first GDCs:
About twenty-seven designers attended, including Don Daglow, Brenda Laurel, Brian Moriarty, Gordon Walton, Tim Brengle, Cliff Johnson, Dave Menconi, and Carol and Ivan Manley. The second conference, held that same year at a Holiday Inn at Milpitas, attracted about 125 developers. Early conference directors included Brenda Laurel, Tim Brengle, Sara Reeder, Dave Menconi, Jeff Johannigman, Stephen Friedman, Chris Crawford, and Stephanie Barrett. Later directors include John Powers, Nicky Robinson, Anne Westfall, Susan Lee-Merrow, and Ernest W. Adams.
Of those, I can only place Crawford, Moriarty, Westfall, and Adams off the top of my head. A few others I am familiar with their work if I follow through on the links, but can't easily associate the name with the product or company. Moriarty is the only one I would consider to have a current stature near Crawford's.
Keep in mind we're not talking about the usual "game dev ancient history" cohort of early PC developers - Romero, Carmack, Sweeney, et al. - here. This is a full generation earlier and for a set of machines that didn't come to dominate the world. Crawford exited the industry, after a long career, just as this phase was starting.
I absolutely take your points and share your sense that this is unfortunate both for him and, likely, for the industry as a whole.
I did not want to imply that he or his contributions are in fact unimportant.
Rather, the way he approaches communication leads to that feeling among the uninformed such as myself. The unfairness he feels seems to be, in part, a result of his own writing style.
It reminds me of Ted Nelson, who has worked on a nebulous vision of hypermedia for 60 (!) years. While he’s been incapable of shipping his vision, a nearly indistinguishable version of hypermedia changed the world through the world wide web. For some reason he does not accept that as validation of his vision, but as a poorly designed rip-off.
> It reminds me of Ted Nelson, who has worked on a nebulous vision of hypermedia for 60 (!) years. While he’s been incapable of shipping his vision, a nearly indistinguishable version of hypermedia changed the world through the world wide web.
Despite his failure to ship, Nelson's vision hasn't been particularly nebulous. Overambitious, somewhat srlf-referential and brittle, perhaps, but fairly clear.
And I definitely don't think the WWW is 'nearly indistinguishable'. A few features that are missing are (off the top of my head): bidirectional links, link referential integrity, versioning, annotations, transclusions with attribution and provenance, etc.
Now, none of that ever shipped. Little of it ever got as far as a PoC as part of Xanadu/Udanax. And it is pretty clear in hindsight that, if implemented, the spam problems created by many of those features could have dwarfed what we (or rather, search engines) have to deal with today (remember blog referer linkspam? That's what bidirectional links with server-enforced referential integrity leads to). Arguably, the WWW wasn't just the simplest thing that could work, but also flourished because TBL didn't attempt to implement many of Nelson's cherished features.
But that the web today falls far short of Nelson's vision, and that as visions go, his was fairly clear (If overly reliant on neologisms like enfilade etc. usually defined in terms of implementation details such as novel datastructures rather than formats or protocols), shouldn't be particularly controversial.
I do not have a lot to add to the conversation, except some examples from ML, in particular, the Support Vector Machine was conceived much earlier than it was published but Vapnik's work was repeatedly rejected, yet SVMs are one of ML's brightest achievements.
Similarly, the Neural Network was repeatedly dismissed, with Minsky being a prominent example.
Not all ideas amount the same, but perhaps, at least in ML, we need to be open to exploring as many ideas as possible instead of performing grad student descent on the current consensus valley.
Of course the first HN comment has to be something negative, derisive and lacking in compassion. When there's blood in the water the sharks come, but when people are being vulnerable and exposing themselves (by saying something that's easily ridicul-able) like this, there's no need to be cruel. Not saying you're wrong just like, why not...look for the good, and why not that be the first HN comment. This place...Maybe everyone's just so scared of vulnerability..."innocence cannot exist underground, it needs to be stamped out." -- Prisoner in Bane's prison, Dark Knight Rises. Man it would be great to come here and be surprised. "Hackers" are commonly so intellectually arrogant, it's funny they attack anyone who's doing it in a vulnerable way...sigh sad.
People piling on with their theories about why "Crawford is wrong" -- I think that a lot of the "unappreciated genius" writings of Newton, and Einstein and Galileo (and many others) before they received the recognition they felt they'd earned, had the same tones and meanings. Maybe this guy will "end up" being a "success" or not in future. But to me that's not the important thing here. It's just be kind to someone, how sad it must be for this guy. sad smile emoji
I don't see the vulnerability you speak of. It sounds more like arrogance. Claiming to be a misunderstood genius is not presenting yourself as vulnerable, it's a shield to defend yourself against criticism or the lack of praise, to enable you to continue to see yourself as the genius that nobody else recognises in you.
I don't know, in just the previous blog linked on top "am I a genius?" he says "I am reluctant; I hate having to depend upon anybody else for anything. I don’t want my success or failure to be determined by the idiots who populate this planet." I don't think it does him any good to encourage the bitterness that leads people to post things like that.
OA is being narcissistic not vulnerable. There is a big difference. Instead of proving his theories by developing new games and showing the world how to do it, he gets upset that nobody recognises him as a genius, based on him doing a few somewhat successful games many years ago.
Yeah, the article comes across as rather arrogant.
And he doesn't really make the case that there's no demand yet for his ideas; his ideas involve simulationist games of some sort, and there's tons of demand for that.
It is true that many of these sort of games used to take really ugly shortcuts in the 1980s, but where SimCity just faked traffic, City Skylines simulates every person in the city, including the traffic resulting from that.
If you want to see a game with complex interactions of simulated systems, check out Europa Universalis. It simulates every country in the world, its armies, ideas, economy (tax, production, and trade resulting from production). In combat it simulates how the units of those armies interact. How trade flows around the world is incredibly complex (but also too hard-coded in my opinion; I think it could still be improved).
Seems to me that plenty of games are incredibly successful doing the sort of thing he did. If he does have a misunderstood genius that these games can't touch, he's not making that case in this article. It sounds more like he has a rather overblown sense of the importance of his work, and a lack of appreciation of the work of others.
It’s often honestly much better to attribute it to luck and hard work (often because it just IS luck) - trying to get lightning to strike twice precludes you doing something new.
I stopped reading after the first paragraphs because it felt like the author is at best a lazy writer and at worst an intellectual imposter.
I loved The Matrix. It was a great flick. It wasn't art though and somebody using this lame reference today makes me question their expertise on the subject. The Matrix used ideas from Baudrillard & Borges. Both are cornerstones in post-modern literature while the Matrix is just an action flick rehashing the ideas from Plato's cave. The director hoped it would rub off on them so that they can shrowd themselves in philosophical wisdom. Everyone on the set was given a copy of Simulacra by the director to read. (this is often quoted along with Neo's own copy in the film and makes me question who actually read the book and how many of them read it enough times to understand it)
Baudrillard who was asked about what he thought about the film said it was merely another copy of Plato's cave allegory and it made no effort to actually touch the core-ideas of the book.
>> Neo has been revived and looks down the hall at the agents and sees the reality of the Matrix: that it is numbers. ....
When somebody uses The Matrix in a blog post >20 years later I can't help but wonder why they chose it. Something tells me they have a poor understanding of the world. It's like somebody referencing a Mickey Mouse comic to talk about ducks. It means your audience are probably fools (and by extension the author). How can they be taken serious when they don't understand even their own self-chosen references/allegory.
My idea as well. The Matrix has a lot of allegories in it, and you can shoehorn a lot of your own ideas onto it. I would say the Matrix is great starting point to get you interested in philosophy though.
The Matrix is an interesting movie and I bet got a lot of people interested in learning more. The problem as you note is that the author in this case is 70 or so years old and doesn't seem to have moved beyond the reference.
I think the silly Matrix analogy is really telling.
Forget about Plato’s cave and Baudrillard for second, The Matrix is about that stuff the way tic tac toe is about drawing circles and x’s.
The Matrix is about ego. It’s about the fantasy that one day soon your unique magical gifts will finally be recognized. To the untrained eye you might appear to be another TPS report filing schmuck, but deep down you’ve always been a hero. Any day now your circumstances are going to change, and then your real life will begin.
This is not a path that generally leads to happiness or creative accomplishment, and I think its traces are pretty plain in TFA.
Okay now I’ve got Matrix on the brain. Going to self-indulgently reply to myself instead of just editing my first post bc this is totally off topic and I just want to spitball about The Matrix.
I think a lot of my problems with The Matrix are rooted in how it (mal-)adapts Campbell’s hero’s journey.
Here’s the basic outline of the hero’s journey:
- There’s a mundane (“real”, we’ll come back to that) world and a magical world. A problem in the magical world threatens the mundane world. (Sauron is rising in the east, Grendel is lurking in the forest, etc)
- A hero is identified in the mundane world who has the power to navigate both. (Luke is both a farm boy and a jedi. Neo is a programmer and the chosen one)
- The hero enters the magical world and resolves the problem.
- The hero (usually) returns to the mundane world, bringing power from the magical world. Even if the hero doesn’t return, the mundane world is brought to a new equilibrium. This is the real point of the story: the hero’s journey isn’t about the magical world, it’s about healing the mundane world.
The twist in The Matrix is that the mundane world turns out to be an illusion. But that’s a trick: the “real” world, unplugged from the matrix, is in a story sense magical. It’s a fantastical sci-fi world, just as far down the rabbit hole as the matrix itself.
So the last, most important step in the hero’s journey falls apart. You can’t heal the mundane world if it doesn’t exist. This helps move the focus of the story back to the first stages, the ego-fulfillment part where the hero is identified. Everyone remembers the red pill and “I know kung-fu”; not so much the incoherent sequels.
We’re actually circling back around to Baudrillard here, but I think maybe not in the way the Wachowskis intended.
I think you could also probably read Total Recall as an anti-Matrix. If The Matrix is about the allure of imagining yourself to be innately a hero, Total Recall is about the danger.
thanks for posting the followup. I'm very glad you took the time to write it. it's magical HN exists and such discourse is possible. it's a shame this gem will not get the eyeballs it deserves. I urge you to bookmark it as a reminder to use it on a fresh post one day when the topic comes up and it doesn't get lost.
Crawford says nobody truly followed in his footsteps but I think Jason Rohrer qualifies. The two even shot a documentary together, and the scene where Crawford showed off his Storytron project to Jason was pretty revealing. Jason called it baroque and Crawford responded that he'd consider his life a failure if the project fails:
Crawford definitely is not doing enough introspection. I hope the man resets and makes an inspiring project without the self-romanticizing or self-pitying.
Crawford's travails remind me of the story of the pottery class (https://excellentjourney.net/2015/03/04/art-fear-the-ceramic...), in which half a studio is graded on the sheer quantity of pots they produce, while the others are graded on making one perfect pot. The "quantity" group ends up making higher quality pots because they've practiced and learned from their failures.
Self awareness, which is the 'real' topic of this post is a challenging thing.
Growing up, I was naturally humble, and I knew I didn't know much and was amazed to find some confidence after ostensibly earning it to some degree.
What I found was a world of BS-ers so many people convincingly telling others they are the best, and having others believe that.
Then I found that many of these BS-ers believe their own drama - that's scary.
It's doubly scary when these people are in fact, talented, but they project it 10x further with their egos. (Think: Kanye West etc.)
I use the term 'I' here but I think this is at least a common path.
But something I struggle with is just how many regular people are like this? Is tech full of 22-year holds who think they are really that smart? It's one thing to try to change the world, fine, but another to think that you know better or are entitled to that. Or is it a generational issue?
I think we all have sparks of genius, and it takes a lot of hustle to communicate even basic ideas. We need to reinforce ourselves to keep it up. But on some level, we have to try to be objective as well. That's really, really hard, especially if you know something that others might not know, or at least feel that you do.
> But on some level, we have to try to be objective as well.
That's not untrue, but it's all about marketing now. Marketing really is all there is — some people call it 'growth hacking', but in the end it's what separates the wheat from the chaff. Having knowledge or skills is all well and good, but having perceived knowledge and skills is better for all extrinsic intents and purposes, so long as you've got enough to sustain the facade.
Objectivity in self-assessment isn't a bad thing, but success nowadays is defined by what you can make others believe.
Of course, there's the other kind of success - the kind Saitama in One Punch Man enjoys - getting good at something almost by accident, just because you love doing it. If you can make a living just doing what you love, who gives a damn whether other people know of you?
The ability to sustain a facade thanks to marketing may be possible currently, in some circumstances; but that might not be true forever.
It's also true that success doesn't require marketing; plenty of popular software and libraries, for example, have achieved their position not by advertising themselves, but by providing the correct solution for the task at hand.
I should clarify that I meant success in the context of personal status. Even the authors of popular software and libraries usually remain obscure unless they choose to market themselves. For example, take the author of Flappy Bird who I can't even name offhand vs. Jonathan Stroud. The difference is in the marketing.
Hi all, it seems there is some important context to this article in the following blog posts, specifically "Seventy" and "Gemma". I think there is something to be learned from this article about loneliness as we age and look back on our impact on the world. Hope everyone reading this can find someone to appreciate the work they're doing because I find it impossible to believe that everyone isn't doing at least one thing of value to someone else.
I think the most important thing I've got from that graphic is to choose your partner very well, being careful of how they will keep you company in the very long term.
The image says "Spend time with those you love. One of these days you will say either 'I wish I had' or 'I'm glad I did'."
But another way to interpret this graph is to spend less time attempting to cultivate relationships (which yield less and less value over the long term) and spend more time developing interests and skills that keeps you happy and occupied as on average we tend to age in isolation.
Agreed, and thank you for pointing out the other posts. The remembrance of his friend was particularly affecting. I recall playing Balance of Power, and reading Chris Crawford's book on game design as a teenager in the early 90s. He's had an impact, beyond tilting at windmills and watching his friends grow old.
Keep it respectful guys - while a lot of you are earning a shit load to peddle ads, this dude make some amazing original things and more importantly spent a huge portion of his life trying to help others get value from his thoughts and ideas.
Some tier-A mathematicians working on some pretty fucking cool problems in online decision making and machine learning, or someone who writes shit like:
"Young people these days, I am told, are illiterate and cannot understand the written word. They can learn only from video. So should I speak to them in the language they understand?
Yes, I probably am a genius—but the issue is meaningless."
This guy seems to try to bluntly tell it like it is. He's completely wrong, but hopefully he can appreciate the same sort of blunt feedback from others.
He has some interesting idea and is more than ready to share them with others, which is a respectable thing to do I agree. On the other hand, I find his models hilariously bad, e.g. :
> With Balance of Power, I could write a simple equation for the number of fighters who would join an insurgency against the government:
> `Fighters = Political Immaturity * Population * Previous Success of Insurgency`
> Here, `Political Immaturity` is a constant I defined for each country based on my estimate of how much people respected the rule of law.
Of course, but such simplifications are necessary given the limited power of typical 8- and 16-bit home computers of the time. And you don't need to do anything particularly advanced to create an engaging game, which Balance of Power is.
Of course you need to keep things simple on the hardware of that time. But still, I don't understand his complaint that nobody else followed in his footsteps; Europa Universalis has tons of calculations like that, all of them a lot more sophisticated than that. They're still massive simplifications of course, but I don't see how it's not a natural progression from his work in the 1980s.
> Europa Universalis has tons of calculations like that, all of them a lot more sophisticated than that.
It's incredible how many people keep missing the man's point. Almost making it for him. His point is the gaming industry is still completely filled with mindless NPCs and simple boolean interactions. He calls out God of War in another article as an extreme disappointment.
The fact that everyone here is saying his ideas have continued, but keep naming the same two or three games made by only a couple gaming companies proves how right he is. If you want any form of deep interactivity play a deep strategy game, anything else besides that in game design is still about as interactive as pacman.
His point is that after 35 years and literal orders of magnitude improvement in processing power, the average game is still modeled using incredibly simplistic logic and makes for empty interactions. And take a look at most any top selling game and it's true.
Your average squirrel in the park has more interesting behavior or interaction than most game characters. It's essentially just been "better graphics, bigger explosions" for three decades now. None of that precludes dynamic interactions.
Big game companies just make what sells. I don't see why anyone would expect that to change. It shouldn't surprise anyone that many games aren't very good; most of everything is crap, and games are no different. But the logic in the best games has absolutely progressed since the 1980s, and even many (though not all) FPS games put quite a bit of effort into making their game characters move and act in a believable way. Far more than they did 34 years ago.
Though there's undoubtedly still plenty of room for improvement. In terms of how smart computer characters move and act, I think Robin Hood, the Legend of Sherwood (2002) still stands out: there, when a guard spots you, they first become curious and come check you out. When they're sure they've seen you, they raise the alarm and attack you, and other guards that hear them, join them. When a guard finds a dead guard, they look for their boss, who then organises a search party. It's all very logical, and it results in a very exciting isometric stealth game. Especially the fact that the guards cooperate, but need to communicate over credible distances first, makes the whole thing work very well. There may well have been other games that work like this; I don't pretend to know most games, but I've never played anything else quite like it.
Think about Eastern Front (which I haven't played) or Balance of Power (which I have, on the Amiga). There are tons of games that are similarly built, in whole or in part, on such mathematical models: SimCity, Rollercoaster Tycoon, the Civ series, any number of turn-based and real-time strategy games going back to the 8-bit era. Even RPGs use mathematical rules, with a handy dose of chance, to decide the outcome of different kinds of attack.
There's even a whole (I seem to remember) chapter in Stephen Hill's "Amiga Game Maker's Manual with AMOS Basic" on building "simulation games" using simple mathematical models.
Whilst I respect Chris Crawford's contribution to the video games industry I don't understand this perspective at all.
> spent a huge portion of his life trying to help others get value from his thoughts and ideas.
Did he really? Or did he spend that time satisfying his own ego and tell himself it was for the sake of helping others? Certainly it sounds like he managed less actual helping others than those of us "earning a shit load to peddle ads".
I have read most of the stuff he has written and it is 95% fluff and 5% ideas. Lots of promises and self-promoting. Very little actual value. In contrast, I have also read Einstein’s book about relativity. The difference is like night and day. Einstein: 100% mind blowing ideas. 0% self-promoting.
I would suggest for the author to play "Democracy 3", "Stellaris", "Europa Universalis", "Hearts of Iron" and "Dwarf Fortress". This mode of game is not actually so uncommon. Stellaris does so much computation and simulation that some relatively modern computers cannot run them.
Dwarf Fortress' creator Tarn Adams is the antithesis of this guy, as far as I can see from a brief perusal of his articles beyond this one. Tarn is humble, often plays down his acheivements, is really interested in how his players and community interact with the systems, and builds out complexity based on the desires and needs of the players.
I don't mean to diminish the work of Crawford, but he is building the same kind of simulationst mechanisms that Adams is, but Adams hit on success partly because of his personality.
I agree - Adams is incredibly humble (and shy) - and he's driven by making the game he wants to play; he cares less about the mechanisms and more about the results - he wants edifying gameplay and a game that can tell STORIES.
It's almost perfectly the academic/amateur divide if you will; which is amusing given Adams' background in education.
Indeed. But that's his problem. He's been in a hole for 30 years while the gaming industry grew and evolved exponentially through the actions and competition of thousands of individuals and companies. His vision of simulating complex systems with simple approximations from mathematical formulae and algorithms has been realized countless times. You mentioned some great (and sophisticated) examples but honestly, almost every single game has some elements of these these design ideas. It's nothing new ... and honestly kind of obvious. Anyone who wants to make a strategy game has to figure out how to believably simulate behaviour on computing devices of the time. If you're talking about computers in the 80s, you are forced to find simple mathematical expressions because a more complex simulation will bog your game down. So I'm not even sure how novel his ideas were, even in the early 80s.
This is also why it's so hard to meaningfully come up with something novel by thinking really really hard about it in a secluded cave. You need to refine your ideas by constantly testing them in the market of ideas either through collaboration or concrete implementation.
Hate to pile on, but the man’s post reads like an incel post, except incel’s are funny about their entitlement.
Oddly, I never heard of him but find the concept of a geopolitical subversive game extremely interesting (his Balance of Power game). In a sense, our current geopolitics literally has five or six actors operating via undercurrents to destabilize a variety of forces in our world. It’s a poker game, who is doing it and can you stop it from impacting your own country? Okay, so who the hell would be interested in this game (it seems like not many), but I’m interested you little incel, why so entitled?
Narcissism is like getting sprayed by a Skunk (not us, or possibly many of us, but in this case him), where you need many many washes to get rid of the smell. It’s possible, but it takes a lot of time. Talk about the work, force yourself to remove yourself from the equation at all cost, and hide your entitlement, and indulging in woe-is-me.
Small-aside:
If anyone wants to think about just how dangerous and self destructive this type of martyrdom thinking actually is, if you mix this post with any kind of drug or alcohol abuse, you pretty much have jet fuel for self pity and serious long term substance abuse issues. It is way too comfortable of a thing to slip into with the right lubricants on a daily basis.
Complicated invisible simulations that the player interacts with only on the periphery do not make for good gameplay. This has been proven repeatedly. Orion 3 famously killed the MOO franchise trying this approach. A variety of space fighter games promised the player a living simulated universe to play in, forgetting that the key point of the game was not to watch stellar politics that you could only minimally manipulate.
People like them in the right situations, like your enemies in strategy games. You don't interact with their populations, civic choices etc, nor have you any insight into how the AI makes these choices, but it is still all there running in the game.
It isn't easy to create a hard rule of when low interaction simulations adds to the game, but it is clearly wrong to say that they are always bad.
I would point to "Ghandi threatening you with nuclear weapons" as a counterexample. Civ AI players were notoriously mercurial and their behavior is so bewildering that people developed elaborate theories about software bugs that are completely false to explain them (the "Ghandi becomes violent late-game because of integer rollover" myth).
I highly doubt that anyone has not made a game whose systems complexity surpassed the algorithmic hurdle of multiplying three numbers, or two numbers and a constant. I have not previously heard of this person or of their work.
Were it not for HN, I likely wouldn't ever have -- he made two 4/5 games, and sold a quarter of a million copies! This is absolutely a modest success, but this was thirty years ago. He doesn't seem to have published anything since: wikipedia says he started working on Interactive Fiction in 1991, but stopped in 2018 (having released nothing) since "humanity will take centuries to catch up". It seems as if his ego has outstripped his accomplishments.
I relate to many of these points as inner thoughts, however it's important to play Devil's advocate and remember that the stars really have to align for your ideas or work to spread and gain recognition. It's not enough to make something great, you also have to communicate about it effectively and other people have to be personally interested in it, too, which is beyond your control. Your best ideas might be useful to you but seen as boring to others. And you shouldn't assume that the reason is that you are ahead of your time. The explanation is probably much simpler. I sometimes think to myself, "I've released a lot of open source code that's really simple and useful and better than any of the alternatives I could find. Why doesn't it get more traction?" In some cases, it very well might if I could get people to just look at the source code, but I struggle to write a compelling README that convinces people to even bother doing so. You have to accept that you might be strong at one part of the process but weak in another. Sure you could be a genius that excels at everything and are so far ahead that no one understands you. But no, you've probably dropped the ball somewhere. Take a step back, examine people's perceptions of your work, and work backwards to fix the roadblocks of success. Love it or hate it, marketing plays a big role here. Even something as simple as having a good logo can double the number of people that pay attention. And don't try to convince people that your algorithms are amazing. Convince them that those algorithms solve their problems.
He compares himself to the nearly-forgotten "hero" scientists. But he really belongs to the ranks of the unknown multitude of almost-successful "forgotten" - the people who spent their lives pursuing their ideas but those ideas were never received well, or popularised.
I keep seeing startups almost succeed. They got everything "right", there's nothing they did wrong, but for some reason it didn't take off. While others don't even get the basics right and yet it soars. There doesn't seem to be any reason for it. Or at least none that I can see.
We don't know why something "goes viral". We can't predict that, can't control it. Just try to make the most of it if it happens to us.
There's a vast pool of people all trying to do things, in every discipline. For reasons we (and they) don't understand, some of them "succeed" and are popularised. We hear about them. The rest are mostly ignored. We don't hear about them. There's nothing we can particularly identify as making an individual succeed or not. Like everything in life, the process doesn't care about individuals. It's the genetic approach - spread the population over a large area and let the successful ones survive to the next generation. The rest of them die bitterly regretting their failure in blog posts.
I connected a lot with this right until the Why Failure section. I thought he was going to admit that he had a blind spot, that thinking he was the one who needed to 'imbue (others) with (his) style of thinking' was solipsistic.
It reminds me a lot of myself. I'm always sitting with a feeling like I've got some special perspective, that I'm the only one trying to 'figure it all out' and I'm always on the verge to, and when I do it will be incredible. And as I get older at the heart of it I feel something much sadder - a fear and a loneliness. An inability to engage and stand my ground with the people around me. Though that could be just me.
As someone who enjoyed playing Balance of Power on the Amiga (without understanding what I was doing) this was a quite interesting read. I am reminded of the game over-screen: We do not reward failure.
I read this and the comments, and I can't help but feel... a loss for everyone.
I was a graduate student, and I met some fairly miserable professors toiling away. It's hard having ideas and then lacking the social skills to bring them forth. The social skills help with relevance, but also relating the internal ideas with external ideas and building real momentum.
There is a lesson here for anyone young.
The mistake here is to assume genius internally. Rather, it is better almost categorically to assume you are an idiot and then talk with others without the ego. "Hey, here is an idea" and many times others will not get it, and that's ok because communication is exceptionally hard.
However, if you want people to call you genius, then all you have to do is be around people and then help them with their ideas. "Have you tried X?" in an applicable way, and people will respond because you bridged the gap between their problems and your deep understanding.
As an example, I have a lot of dumb projects that excite me. One of them, which I refer to a large number of times, is my dumb programming language for board games ( http://www.adama-lang.org/ ). When people don't get it, is it their failing or mine? The truth is that it is a mix of both, but it is mostly mine because I have the burden to communicate effectively.
> It's hard having ideas and then lacking the social skills to bring them forth.
This article kind of reminds me of a professor I knew, but I'd describe him as the opposite: big on vision, self-promotion, and the whole social game, while not having the ability to back it up with good ideas or implementation. And for both the author and the professor I know, I'd say the social side is the source of their success, rather than its limit. Not everyone can take simple ideas that are semi-common sense to people skilled in the area, and build career success from them as an independent researcher.
I always suspected the professor was bipolar, because in addition to the brimming energy and excitement about taking over the world with his vision, there were down days too where he got angry at the world for not believing in him etc.
I often feel like people formulate the problem wrong. It's not that "your idea was great but only 5% of good ideas work out" but I believe it's more "your idea was almost great but only 5% of ideas are actually great". I feel like it's less about needing luck for a great idea to work out and more about needing more luck to have a better idea. Often times these almost-geniouses are technically talented or creative but lack empathy or social intelligence to see the whole picture. You or your team need to be the whole package to be able to see a problem from all possible angles.
Problem is that the author starts with a false premise. There are as many games having complex geopolitical models underneath as the market can support. Turns out the author either does not know them, or they don't explicitly mention his prior work. Games aren't scientific papers though, so they don't need citations.
But maybe some of the developers of complex strategy games mentioned him during GDC or other conferences?
Maybe one of the calculations that should be added to the model is that owners of computers in the 80's were a very different bunch from the people having computers today.
> Games aren't scientific papers though, so they don't need citations.
I just imagined an alternate reality: What if they did? What if all software did? That'd be kind of interesting if development was more explictely collaborative in that way. I guess open source works like that to a degree but still not everything is documented. We've lost a lot of history in our piles of code. Maybe some day obsessive histotians will be digging through chat logs found on hard drives dug out of landfills. Imagine how incomplete that story would be.
The main thing I fear is that it would spark parent or other IP lawsuits. Admitting you based your successful game on someone else's ideas may make the other person's lawyers think they deserve a share of your profit.
I think a lot of IP law is hostile to that sort of free flow of ideas.
> Maybe one of the calculations that should be added to the model is that owners of computers in the 80's were a very different bunch from the people having computers today.
This is probably the answer! I was a little kid then, but my uncle played them and I remember that game and some others like it... they were all offshoots of war game board games.
People have moved on since, or maybe better put the market has grown and the number of people interested in nerdy strategy games has not.
Wargames are more popular than ever, and cover a wider variety of topics than before, but (from the perspective of the 80s, surprisingly) the focus has largely moved back to analog games.
The budget to make an analog game is considerably less, especially at "wargame quality". Selling 1k units at $30-70 of a unique system on a marginal topic is sustainable in a way that a digital version is not (and may never be; print-on-demand quality is improving, but the cost of cross-platform development and supporting digital distribution is rising). And the most interesting adversary in asymmetric, multiplayer, non-zero-sum situations often remains another human even given unlimited programmer and compute time.
Also, the field of wargame design is professionalizing, and the major clients with the "big" budgets (governments and NGOs) generally want dynamic, transparent, refereed games. Sometimes those have some digital support for the referee, but only for time or communication efficiency, not to increase the mathematical sophistication of the simulation. Think Excel spreadsheets, not SVMs.
Yeah that's my take. He gives examples of his "genius" preceded by a cringey analogy to Neo seeing the matrix as code and then gives an example formula that's very trivial and the exposition is extremely shallow which suggests frankly that the author's thinking is also rather shallow. There's no hint of analysis, understanding, or useful insights to the real complexities that arise when trying to glue a bunch of disparate models together into a complex interacting system. Instead he gives us just a trivial application of very basic mathematics to design of a game. Guess what, I'd have done the exact same thing if I had been assigned to design a game and I'd venture to guess that half the people on this site would take a similar approach.
The idea itself is hardly as exceptional as the author wants it to be.
This whole thing to me sounds a bit like a textbook case of the author having spent his life as the smartest person in the room, but only because he's been in the wrong room his whole life. To use an analogy: I suspect he's not Mozart... He's a very decent musician or composer that's spent his life in a community college orchestra and never ventured out into the world to interact with people that can eat him for lunch.
Yeah, the whole article comes off as written for the author's ego first, and everyone else last. He presents these rudimentary equations while lamenting that he's just ahead of his time. I'm sorry, but 3 * A/B is not some mind-blowing model of geopolitical forces at play.
SimCity came out around this time and was inspired by the book Urban Dynamics, which contains complicated models based on systems of differential equations which feed into one-another. Considering that, the work referenced seems elementary, to the point of not even needing to be explained.
As it turns out, those complicated systems are the foundation of fun for an entire class of games. Most strategy games, from SimCity, Civilization, Factorio, or Off World Trading Company consist largely of balancing growth across various interlocking systems.
There are many, such as a lot of Paradox games, Aurora 4X, and so on. Few are based on the present state of the world, though. That doesn't make it any less an issue of geopolitics.
It is true that there are several such games. The statement I was replying to goes above and beyond that to say that there are as many as the market can bear. The efficient market hypothesis is something of a pet peeve of mine, and so I try to call it out when it is erroneously used as support for, well, anything.
Haha, that's brilliant! I didn't see the article, do you have a link? I can visualize the core argument, that at a fundamental level the EMH is saying that optimization problems under constraints are a solved problem, and I'm curious what other details/formalism go into it.
I'm no economist, and I didn't want to imply efficient market. More of a guesswork: there are a lot of those games out, some successful, some failed. They usually require quite some involvement to play at good level so I suppose people don't really jump to a new game immediately. They take a ton of time to develop and if they were more popular, I'm quite sure there would be more of them. Contrast this with for example the RTS genre, which is practically extinct.
> The statement I was replying to goes above and beyond that to say that there are as many as the market can bear.
There are a lot of these games. And the techniques behind designing a "good" geo-political strategy game are very well understood by now. It's also a market that is cheap to develop for, because these games don't typically rely on expensive, cutting-edge art assets.
It's reasonable to assume that the market for these games is saturated, as mature, well understood, low capital investment markets tend to be.
I disagree with your assertion that it's well understood how to make a good geopolitical strategy game. Most of them struggle with scaling issues; they turn into micromanagement grinds once the scale of simulation gets large enough.
There's a lot left to be discovered in terms of what control schemes and other features result in a fun experience. I have ideas on how to make a better 4x game but I would rather make a PoC than give them away for free. :)
Fair enough, but I think we can agree that the techniques behind building a geopolitical strategy game that sells well is understood. The past three Civilization games have surpassed 5 million units each.
Paradox games has several games in the million+ club, and their games are insanely complicated niche games which take longer to learn than most AAA titles take to complete.
On the other end of the spectrum is Off World Trading Company. That game is the essence of great strategy distilled down into little more than the fundamentals.
It's incredible how many people keep missing the man's point. Almost making it for him. His point is the gaming industry is still completely filled with mindless NPCs and simple boolean interactions. He calls out God of War in another article as an extreme disappointment.
The fact that everyone here is saying his ideas have continued, but keep naming the same two or three games made by only a couple gaming companies, in a niche genre proves how right he is. If you want any form of deep interactivity play a deep strategy game, anything else besides that in game design is still about as interactive as pacman.
His point is that after 35 years and literal orders of magnitude improvement in processing power, the average game is still modeled using incredibly simplistic logic and makes for empty interactions. And take a look at most any top selling game and it's true.
Your average squirrel in the park has more interesting behavior or interaction than most game characters. It's essentially just been "better graphics, bigger explosions" for three decades now. None of that precludes dynamic interactions.
He's essentially arguing for Probabilistic Programming without using the term. And saying it should be at the heart of all games, no just deep strategy games. Actually a step further he says it should be at the heart of any interactive software
The second link below gives a pretty good overview of his thoughts on interactivity and how to model human and system behavior. Lesson 7 (how to express ideas mathily) while simple, was mildly interesting. Some of the others are better, but are harder to read standalone, build on prior items.
Essentially it's a summarized course of how to model the essentials of human behavior in a system. Not ground breaking, but at the same time, way more advanced than anything you see in the vast majority of games.
If I were writing a simple game, I'd skim link 2 for ideas I could steal and easily apply to up he interest factor. You definitely could build some interesting mechanics with these ideas.
He doesn't just reject the mainstream AAA titles like God of War though, but everything from heavy-physics-model IF like Hadean Lands to heavy-character-model IF like Blue Lacuna to consims like Europa Universalis to emotionally-driven immersive sims like Gone Home to... well, anything that isn't a verb selector triggering algorithmic character reactions.
I can't remember where I read it, but a critique of his work from... 5? years ago, was essentially "the dragon is already dead, but Crawford can't accept it because his sword didn't slay it." Generously, at some point he lost sight of the goal in favor of the tool. Less generously, he saw the holodeck, wanted specifically that, and came up with the tripartite dragon as the dog to wag.
Boolean interactions are piecewise functions as well. He seems to be arguing to use functions for modeling and considering the whole process or interactions between the functions but has not described an actual approach to doing so in this article. How is picking a set of booleans really all that functionally different from from drawing a surface over the intersection of all of his functions and just treating them as booleans on each surface of that hypercube?
I don't find it particularly groundbreaking to use a set of ad-hoc functions as interactions. He seems so focused on the idea of functions and complexity that he's missing much of the point of why people play games and solely focused on strategy games. In my opinion, a lot of the best games are the simplest games because I play them to take my mind off of other things. It's not about having a lot of complexity, it's about having interesting complexity.
This was written with such self-aggrandizement that it is not super enjoyable to read. It is easy to see why the ideas of someone who projects themselves as a genius is having trouble relating to people who may not believe him to be one. The usefulness of ideas seems to have some respect to how well they fit into the way other people want to use them. He's not focusing on how other people would use them but rather on how he wants them to be used. He seems to have missed the transition from systems-oriented design to human-oriented design.
> He's essentially arguing for Probabilistic Programming without using the term. And saying it should be at the heart of all games, no just deep strategy games. Actually a step further he says it should be at the heart of any interactive software
I haven't grasped this at all from the article but let's assume that's what he said.
In that case I think he's 100% wrong. Many games are fun precisely because they are clear cut and straightforward with no probabilities or randomness. Best competitive games avoid random components altogether.
Well said. The book Extreme Ownership has a slightly different take of what I think is basically the same idea. It opened my eyes to a new way of thinking about people above you in the organizational hierarchy and advocated taking ownership up the chain as well as down. Instead of asking yourself "why isn't my boss listening to me?", you should ask yourself how you are failing to communicate to your boss. Obviously things aren't entirely your fault all the time, but changing your ownership mentality is a tremendously empowering idea--especially when it goes in the opposite direction of traditionally perceived power vectors.
EO is great and has really changed how I interact with people.
> Obviously things aren't entirely your fault all the time
I prefer using the word 'control' over fault, because fault has so many negative connotations. Things are not entirely in your control all the time, but many times they are. How a person responds to situation is always in their control. The classic one which you refer to is blaming others when a failure occurs - communication or otherwise. And yes, it is completely empowering and changes how one acts as a leader or team member.
Please be careful about the downsides of EO, which can be seen in the author's complicated legacy within the SEALS. The culture this produced when taken too far can be seen in the Ed Gallagher problem[0]. When things are decentralized, you have to make sure you can trust your people. When you can't, you end up with Gallagher, or LAPD Rampart scandal.
If you can't trust your people, then you have a big problem no matter what management style you use. I would argue EO has nothing to to do with it. In fact, if EO had been followed in this case, the subordinate operators would have put a stop to a crazy officer. What's described in that article is the opposite of subordinates being empowered.
Also, AFAIK, Jocko have never addressed the issue you linked. It might be because he simply doesn't know enough to comment. He left the military in 2010 and this incident happened in 2017. Do you have anything to attach him or EO directly to it?
The author wrote follow-up book called The Dichotomy of Leadership specifically to address the problem of people taking EO too far in one direction. But like my sibling comment mentions, I don't think you should blame the Gallagher problem on EO without clear evidence connecting the two. And even if you do, the follow-up book is there to clarify.
Not to sound like a Jocko fanboy because I think he does have his faults like anyone, but he addresses similar situations in his podcast while reviewing books like The Rape of Nanking, No Ordinary Men, and talking about the My Lai massacre. In all of those situations, EO would would have led the soldiers involved to question leadership and put a stop to what was happening. Giving up control and just 'following orders' was what in part, led to these horrific acts.
You should probably try to give credit for the idea where credit is due.
By the way, this is an important part of the growth of junior engineers into senior engineers. I've noticed junior engineers tend to identify obstacles as blockers. When asked about progress or estimates, they just talk about the blockers. Completely out of their control. Senior engineers find workarounds, solutions, alternatives.
They are giving credit where credit is due, to the person who made that concept real to them.
It is literally impossible to find the original source of every good idea a person has implemented, much less heard.
You should probably stop telling people what to do and appreciate alternate routes to arrive at good ideas.
Love your comment on junior vs. senior engineers. Very insightful!
Well said! Communication is a two-way street. Effective communication is the hardest problem I'm aware of and there is no universal solution.
Alan Alda's book _If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?_ does a great job of outlining exactly this problem that a lot of scientists seem to have with communication. He also personally narrates the Audible version, if that's your thing.
> However, if you want people to call you genius, then all you have to do is be around people and then help them with their ideas.
I believe that if your goal is to be called genius, you're already damning yourself.
From Faust:
Take children's, monkeys' gaze admiring,
If such your taste, and be content;
But ne'er from heart to heart you'll speak inspiring,
Save your own heart is eloquent!
Communication takes effort from both sides. Every rule or tip should really be considered in 2 fold. Like so: Of course, if the goal is to explain an idea, you shouldn't present yourself as the genius you so clearly are in your own opinion. At the same time you should never dismiss an idea for its lack of proper presentation. The later is a much more frequent mistake. One should judge an idea for what it is. One should actively suppress ones intention to praise an idea for who presented it or how it was presented. If you do something like: This persons expertise is worth 1000 points therefore his ideas are worth 1000 points it begs to question how the person got to 1000 points as you've eliminated the mechanism that should have rated him. IOW if someone came up with a fantastic idea it means you should examine his other ideas but do so as objectively as you would the village idiots.
Yes, I completely agree. I've seen so many cool ideas out there that are largely a failure of "marketing", which is basically the fist few lines of the README.md.
I always encourage junior devs to include some lines of code to do a "hello world", or a screenshot if it's something graphical, or both, _as early as possible_ in the README, so as to show the casual reader what their project is all about.
For programming languages I can't upvote this enough! History and motivation and features and all that are interesting if I decide to learn about the language, but to decide whether I want to learn about it, it's really all about seeing a code sample that inspires me.
I am also interested in languages to model board games, and I think your biggest mistake might be in relying too heavily on imperative programming models for a domain that doesn't require them.
Have you tried converting games to your language, or read other literature on codifying game rules? It's much more popular to use declarative or logic based designs to state how a game can evolve. General Game Playing competitions, where the goal is to write AIs that can compete at _any_ game, use a Datalog variant to declare their rules. Extensions of this enable modeling complex games like Dominion (https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AIIDE/article/view/12669/1251...).
Pattern matching is another promising way to model and rapidly prototype games, with the most approachable version probably being PuzzleScript.
I look at the imperative programming model as the escape hatch, and I'm focusing first on data. My next step is to build UIs and look into AI.
For instance, I've build the entire back-end for Battlestar Galactica ( https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/37111/battlestar-galacti... ). I can't release a product around this as the IP is not mine, but it is a good foil. I play a bunch of games, and it's hard to boil down every game into a concrete set of rules.
So, my strategy relies first on getting (1) data synchronization, (2) privacy, (3) multi-user transaction flow , and (4) durability of state on solid ground. Once the foundation is good, and the foundation can grow into other domains (like converting Excel worksheets into web apps) then I can ask what models, idioms, and ideas do I want to layer on top of it.
The hard part, it turns out, after the back-end works is getting a usable UI. This is my current focus, and I hope to have results sometime this year with my silly approach.
The author is evaluating other games and determining that they don't live up to his standards. One possibility is that the author is the best at what he does, as he believes. Another is that the author is not competent to judge the complexity of these other games. A chess grandmaster may view the board and know the inevitability of mate in three, while a normal human might see the same board as favoring the eventual loser, based on some simplistic understanding of piece strength. Whole thing seems a bit Dunning-Kruger-ish.
Crawford comes across to me as an eccentric artist, not a game designer, and with the accompanying ego. This has helped the industry, such as when creating (C)GDC. But, like many artists, he has strong opinions on what qualifies. I personally don't enjoy games that are "games as art", but I respect their place. Crawford doesn't seem to view "games as games" with such respect.
I looked at a few pages on the site. I kept expecting some reference to Whitehead's process philosophy from the 1920s but it never came.
"Whitehead argued that reality consists of processes rather than material objects, and that processes are best defined by their relations with other processes, thus rejecting the theory that reality is fundamentally constructed by bits of matter that exist independently of one another."
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 270 ms ] thread[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1868558 (too bad the actual site is down)
Honestly my main thought reading this was "no wonder their books didn't create the result expected" There is no order to the article, it starts out good, then morphs into the matrix, then a history lesson on phylosophy"
If true, the things they have achieved are "AWESOME" and "FANTASTIC" but the rant came off kind of "AWE-TASTIC"
I wonder if there may be some value in them hiring someone else to "Recompile" the books they wrote to make them more palatable. Of course I have not read the books, they may be page turners. I just wanted to offer something constructive instead of just putting them down.
I don't think I'd seen an article from Erasmatazz for like 20-25 years. At that time, Crawford was making a lot of grandiose statements about "Erasmatron", his interactive storytelling system that would be the first actual expression of art on computers. And when it was released, it turned out to be just laughably crude and mechanistic compared to what the interactive fiction community (all of them hobbyists at the time) was producing at the time. He clearly had no idea of what the state of the art was in that domain, nor any interest in understanding it.
I think this is the most frustrating thing about these type of characters. They are usually very clever people, but by refusing to engage with people they look down on, they find themselves further and further entrenched in a narrow view - the ideas become stale without partnerships. Then comes the frustration and bitterness that no one is recognising their mastery while the world moves on. They are left isolated on an idea island and can only talk in terms of what they achieved decades ago. I suppose the idea of representing yourself online as one of the greatest scholars of the Renaissance unironically(?) says it all.
I once read an essay about Wolfram that came across a bit like this, the difference being that he managed to create a following against the odds and a earn a living from it.
With his Erasmatron, he did make many working prototypes, and recruited a very talented IF-author to try and build storyworlds with him in that tool and guide its development through that process.
The Erasmatron is still a very interesting idea that hasn't been successfully applied yet. Whether it's due to a deep weakness in the idea, or that the right execution hasn't been found yet, I don't know.
If the answer is "each of those does some subset of things well but the Erasmatron would do everything well" (and this is the position I implicitly ascribe to Crawford after trying to make sense of his last 15 years of writing / commentary), do you really think that kind of scope is a desirable artistic goal, let alone feasible?
Decorated simulation meaning that the actor has a data representation of their personality, behavior and motivation, which causes all their actions and interactions with other actors. "Decorated" meaning the story author can define or guide how these interactions - if they happen - will be described.
Rimworld is an example that feels very close. People love and hate each other, get into fights, parties, and go on depressed drug binges. The biggest difference from Erasmatron is that the setting is random (or "procedural" as the kids call it these days) and affected by random events. The interactions run as they may, and are not guided by a world author's desire for a specific setting or dramatic arc.
If Erasmatron it was fully applied as imagined, it would allow you to stage Romeo and Juliet, but explore what happens if Romeo leaves Juliet alone for a week until things calm down, and work on the family relationships. It's quite lofty, but I believe we can still get closer to it.
- World models with motivation-driven characters is a common subgenre of IF; you could do worse than starting with Galatea which is seminal and still very good. The author is an acquaintance of Crawford, and is aligned with his stated goals - you can read her critique of his book[0] and one of his more recent tools[1]. She has previously designed Versu, an AI-driven narrative engine, and has lauded work in virtually every major narrative game design tool.
- Façade did this for limited actors in a navigable virtual space in 2005.
- Elsinore was a popular game from 2019 that did this, also graphically, for Hamlet.
> If Erasmatron it was fully applied as imagined, it would allow you to stage Romeo and Juliet, but explore what happens if Romeo leaves Juliet alone for a week until things calm down, and work on the family relationships. It's quite lofty, but I believe we can still get closer to it.
This is an AGI fantasy, and definitely not the endgame of the Erasmatron. It will not be achieved by Crawford's authoring tools, and he refuses to consider even basic refinements to the UX of his authoring tools, let alone any paradigm shift. It will probably be achieved ~never, and would not be artistically interesting even if it was.
[0] https://emshort.blog/2017/08/01/chris-crawford-on-interactiv...
[1] https://emshort.blog/2017/06/21/chris-crawfords-encounter-ed...
It's a personal blog. That's what personal website are. People reflecting about their own life and thoughts.
"While this approach will fail to satisfy those few dedicated person who want to delve into the innards of the program, I think it will satisfy the needs of the greater number of people who wish to understand the concepts behind the game.
Finally, I apologize to all those readers more knowledgeable about geopolitical matters than myself, who may wince at the necessary simplifications. I am first and foremost a game designer, not a political scientist. Simplification to achieve clarity is the essence of my work; clarity can be extracted from a muddy reality only by denying some of reality’s richness."
[1] http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/my-books/balance-of-power-...
[0]http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/science/an-odd-discovery.h...
The point I hear most loudly is that some sort of systems thinking combined with math is a pretty useful and powerful way to think about the world, but for some reason people don’t care to learn that way of thinking.
I think this is pretty profound. Systems theorists are super quirky, (I highly recommend the systems bible btw) and some of the earliest writers were not mathematically inclined - they tend to balk at hard predictions for a variety of reasons. It is a vanishingly small group, but I think one that has a lot to offer.
Anyway, I charitably read this as a plea to care about the systems that make up the world, and second that plea.
I think the average group of analysts running a matrix game is considerably more "mathematically-minded" in that they are much more interested in what the simulation does than whether it produces a particular form of output.
It’s sad because I think his mission is very worthwhile. He reminds me a quite a bit of a few other tragic underground game developers like Ullillillia and “Bobs game”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwZi58u1FjI
"Why have I failed? ... The simple answer is that ... I’m too far ahead of my time... I’m a misunderstood genius. ... the world doesn’t yet perceive a need for the ideas I peddle. In 1885, physicists didn’t perceive a need for special relativity, and they would have rejected it out of hand."
Or... you're wrong.
[In the movie "Matrix"] "Neo has been revived and looks down the hall at the agents and sees the reality of the Matrix: that it is numbers. I see the same thing when I look at the real world."
I've been following his work for years, And spoken to people who have been to his 'conference' (and who I suspect will be rather bemused by the way he described them here!). The general consensus was it's horribly self-referential impracticality.
There is a reason he hasn't made anything practical in 35 years. Since the time when his success at 80s game development made him think it was the wrong thing that caused the success. (Hint: it was not his ad-hoc mathematical models, no matter how much post-doc justification he can ladle on them).
I have wondered about him, but sadly this post is rather damning in my eyes.
My perspective has been sobered quite a bit over the years - these things are rarely as simple as we might imagine they could be - but it remains heady stuff. I can see how it might give the right kind of person delusions of grandeur.
The egoism on display here is pretty offputting, but I feel kinship with the "dreamer" mentality underneath. This guy had a vision, and he was uncompromising in his pursuit of it, and even if the end result wasn't worth much to anyone else, some part of me has to respect that.
I'm reminded of The Room (movie)'s Tommy Wiseau. Another creative who thought he was a genius and poured his blood, sweat, and tears into his life's passion project, and it turned out to be pretty objectively bad. But it was meaningful to him, and there's something to that. There were no ulterior motives; he wanted to put this piece of himself out into the world. There's a purity of spirit. I think what's missing for these individuals is the self-awareness to know that this thing is mostly just for them, and to be okay with that idea and embrace it. That way lies happiness, I think.
Here’s what you could have done: Find five other great board games that everyone else overlooks and explain why they are dope. Put a small blurb about why your game falls in this class, and why you are proud to be in that group.
It checks off all the boxes - misunderstood, ahead of it’s time, probably genius conceptual ideas.
[1] https://darktower.fandom.com/wiki/The_Dark_Tower_Series [2] https://stephenking.com/darktower/ [3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbes-personal-shopper/2021/02...? [4] https://stephenking.com/xf/index.php?threads/which-king-book...
1: https://archive.org/details/AphexTwinAllUser18081971Soundclo...
Lack of editing I think has it's place.
When you know roughly where to go and want to make money and go to market, build a team and have the team edit each other's work.
When you want to figure something out in a totally new domain, don't waste time on editing just throw shit out there and run.
You must admit that the flower shop scene was a tad unrealistic, in that he was able to find a free illegal parking space right out in front of the store in San Francisco, and he didn't even get ticketed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIkoXhgtI58
Have you seen the film at a sold out crowd at cinema 21 in Portland?
There is a culture of the film and its participating attendees Marvel movies do not match.
You can say it is a bad film or you can say you don’t like that it doesn’t fit with your idea of what makes a movie objectively good. But it is absolutely not bad art.
Bad art is all around us. But it is not The Room.
That's the whole point of art.
Guernica is a large 1937 oil painting on canvas by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. It is one of his best known works, regarded by many art critics as the most moving and powerful anti-war painting in history - wikipedia
Anyhow, art is subjective. You can interpret it as you like, because its how it makes you feel. And you can argue for or against a point, but it doesn't really matter. As its almost like arguing what flavor of ice-cream is the best.
Someone might argue that author interpretation was intentionally stated in bad faith as a artistic performance etc.
But in the end an interesting discussion is probably the thing of most value (for me at least).
Likewise, although i've settled on a slightly different perspective: that most systems have simple rules (if you go low enough), and that the complexity is in the emergent behavior... it's not that we cannot necessarily capture the former, but that our concept of computer is far too tiny to run those rules in enough depth or breadth. It hasn't lessened the interest for me though. The more I understand the less those childish ideas of "grandeure" make sense, to the point that my instinct is to be suspicious of ideas focused on exploitation rather than exploration, although they can be good seeds for exploration in the form of "what ifs".
I concur with this. The emergent behaviour is usually the only thing we can observe, so we model our systems according to it. The most beautiful (and usually the truest) models lie in the simplicity that causes the behaviour to emerge.
I wouldn't say our computers are too tiny, just that our brains aren't used to thinking in those terms, but we discover it by deep thinking and "deep iteration" in the topic and have to approach it from multiple sides.
Imagine yourself as a kid sitting at a chess-game, playing against Magnus Carlsen. You don't know who the guy is, you were just sitting at the sundae bar when the dude at the next table said "hey", pulled out a chess et and asked "Wanna play?". So you naively say ok, you got some time to kill while waiting for mom to pick you up.
And you start playing. You kinda know the basic rules and what the figures do. So you make a move, he makes a move, you make a move...a minute later, you eat his pawn. Ha! He did not see that coming. Soon, another one. You're killing this guy. 2 moves later, you're left with nothing but the king, running around the board. What the heck even happened?
Our minds are used to the "Eat figures = Win games" outlook, where simple steps lead to simple outcomes. While for Magnus, the figure you ate was a sacrifice that opened up a spot he will move his queen through in 3 moves. He knows the common patterns, permutations, defenses and can see moves ahead.
Our minds aren't used to thinking ahead and seeing what the sideffect of a sideffect does to the result of the sideeffect of the sideffect. Maybe once we were better at it, but we have more interruptions so less time and depth to it (in general).
That is why we can't figure out the simple rules at first - we can't see the trees from the forest.
This is not egoism, but indeed straight narcissism. And it matches overstating a "vision". The intoxicating part may be the dream of recognition and importance. I don't think this is a good metric to assign value, at all.
Plus, last I heard, he's still stuck on an evo-psychological model of society that is quite out of fashion these days, which doesn't exactly help matters.
Crawford's story is a good warning for anyone who embraces simulation as an "end in itself", rather than a medium, though. This was an idea in vogue with wargaming's golden era and is now carried forward by VR enthusiasts, among others.
It’s almost like they protect their pride by not challenging themselves, thereby being able to say they are knowledgeable with a conscience.
I usually start reaching for research papers when I'm aware of a specific problem and I'm looking for the different approaches that have been taken to try and solve said problems.
Every few months I visit the NIST website and I browse through their catalogue to pick out interesting articles and publications to add to my queue.
Start small and don’t take it too seriously! Little by little, just as learning a new language.
>quite out of fashion
Yeah I don't get the impression this guy is into intellectual fads. If anything he's a contrarian and will deliberately take the opposing position to the mainstream.
Evo Psych is out because a bunch of idiots (and self proclaimed non intellectuals) use it to justify and explain everything and anything with stories and no evidence. Meanwhile real research continues but is sidelined due to this bad reputation.
Understandably contrarians see this happening and immediately take the position of Evo psych because it allows them to do a lot of hypothesis generation (their favourite pass-time) and because it flies in direct opposition to current political and academic movements.
> the main reason for this is that I’ve made no attempt to sell the idea. I simply wrote it up and put it on my website. I suppose that, were I to jump through the appropriate hoops, I could garner more interest for the idea. But that is beneath my pride; I am a thinker, not a salesman. I refuse to promote myself. I put the idea before the world and the world can take it or leave it. The world mostly leaves it.
I've heard some other people blaming a lack of "sales" for their ideas not spreading. As if you can not sell. Any sort of presentation is sales, if your product or idea is out there, it is selling itself.
Maybe the focusing on sales would, ironically, bring the understanding of what people find impressive in ideas, in games or products, and it might be completely different from what we thought before.
Reading the "most important" idea article that he made no attempt to sell is also illuminating. It's a mildly thought-provoking blog about how many fields have concepts of state and state change, and the concepts are interdependent and blur at the edges, leading to an unsupported conclusion that we think too much about data and inputs and not enough about CPUs. It would probably get a few upvotes and a few confused replies on LessWrong, but there's not really much for the computer scientists and creatives he clearly hopes will take notice to work with. Perhaps they might find a different version or some of his other ideas more valuable
Money is evil
A bit to the side of the OP, but I feel like these two narratives have been particularly damaging to our planet’s long-term growth. To your point @amatic: If the author had let go of pride and at least explored the idea of effective communication with people as a way to spread ideas (aka sales), he may be far more objective in his self-appraisal and certainly gain perspective on how his ideas can be applied by others.
I can understand why he enjoyed building mathematical models. And why reviews of "Balance of the Planet" praised that. But assuming that was the point, I think missed the point.
I think it would be like creating Demons Souls, loving creating the back story, getting lots of praise for it, and deciding that the best thing is an interactive fiction game with nothing but unlimited detail back story. Then wondering some years later why you didn't change the world, no one has gone further than you did, and all games seem shallow compared to your imagination. Fortunately Miyazaki went a different way.
Not a surprise that Will Wright and Sid Meier (who I know is very much a fan of complexity theory) went in a more successful direction.
I'm curious why you quoted around this bit.
As someone who's designed many things 5-10 years before a market is available for those things, i have to constantly bite my tongue any time i have a "novel idea" - since i have no patents or published papers, why would anyone listen to me? Furthermore, the end result of bragging (even in this limited context, here) is that people like me less.
I think the linked text is interesting, although meandering. The author appears to understand that their approach to teaching / sharing their ideas is lacking, and seems to be misguided on why that is. Like the Simpsons image macro: "Could I be out of touch? No. It's the children who are wrong."
We all like to start from scratch, don't we?
This is a programming lesson, too.
I think I genuinely lack context. I do not know the author, nor any of his games.
I know that in the wider context of the game industry, they are not defining moments - games that people consider milestones.
We also know that today's games feature much more "realistic" and complex systems than the affine or multiplicative equation the author gives us. After all, interdependent agents on different levels produce results that can rarely be described by such simple measures. Getting a well-defined, realistic, complex yet FUN game system from such agent-based approaches is hard, but ultimately the goal of most game designers.
It seems to me that the author may have had some initial insight, and got snubbed in the mid-eighties by other designers or successes. It further seems that he has since then not reevaluated the state of the game industry. Or, perhaps, he lacks the ability to describe his unique insights in terms the reader can understand?
You definitely lack context. I think Crawford's artistic program is completely in the wrong, that the Erasmatron is a joke, and that narcissism is largely responsible for leading him down this path.
But Eastern Front and Balance of Power are seminal in wargaming and computer gaming, Siboot remains an oft-studied object, and the idea of the storytron was both reasonable and radical in 1993 even though Crawford ended up on a useless path developing it.
Crawford was a looming figure in the industry in the 80s, exited (rightly, and literally to applause!) to protest the commercial direction the industry was taking in the 90s, but then disappeared up his own ass for way too long. There's the oft-quoted line from Hamming about productive research, of which Crawford is probably among the most intense, and definitely among the most tragic, example:
I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance.
His writings are difficult from my perspective. He claims to be a genius in quite a few areas, including AI. However, in each of these areas, history has passed him by. None of his ideas seem substantial or important from today’s perspective.
And this is not, how he claims, only our fault for missing his genius. Instead, this person seems to be what we academics call "not well read".
His musings about AI do not predate the science. What he writes about, his work in the mid to late 70s, was already known in the 50s and 60s, as far as I can tell.
Similar to his insistence that game designers somehow do not know about systems, I think this is in part because he does not read or engage with work that is not his own.
It’s one thing to fail to communicate one’s work. It is another thing to ignore the work of other’s and use this to fuel one’s own impression of the state of the world.
Let me put it differently: To be a successful researcher or, I'd argue, developer, you have to learn to deeply respect the contributions of other people. This includes being honest about them. One needs to see deficiencies, yes, but also allow for the possibility that there are many geniuses that share discoveries - as frustrating as that may be. The second element of this respect is then how you engage with others. If one dismisses the approaches outright, one is not only usually unfair or wrong, one also quickly becomes disliked in any community. Internally, we all develop ideas, and we always like our own ideas. However, the process of science or progress is also fueled by interaction, and interaction requires respect. People with an overt superiority complex will always find it difficult to frame their contributions in a way that is accessible. And, with very eminent exceptions, will not really contribute to human progress.
Case in point, Crawford is obviously a deep thinker with important contributions to game development. I do believe you there!
However, from today's perspective, it is hard to find anything at all that one could consider important. Even if some inventions predate the state of the art at the time, our progress was guided by other people - people that were able to cooperate. From my perspective, his ideas were worked out either by people that predate him (or in parallel), or done better by other researchers in what followed. So while I lack context, and recognize that my opinion does not reflect the truth, the simple fact that Crawford shows close to zero respect for other thinkers ultimately leads to a state of the world where I find almost nothing notable, revolutionary or important in his writing - be it wrong today's or yesterday's perspective. Instead, I find that his website does not lend itself to a very charitable impression of this person. Most of all, because he implicitly insults other researchers that have at least his level of genius, and which I deeply respect.
Instead, I need someone like you telling me that yes, this man is or was important.
> Other figures in the game industry retain their relevance and are known to me, a contemporary. Crawford, instead, is not.
It's hard for me to think of someone from Crawford's cohort who has remained more well-known than him, to be honest. From Wikipedia's description of the first GDCs:
About twenty-seven designers attended, including Don Daglow, Brenda Laurel, Brian Moriarty, Gordon Walton, Tim Brengle, Cliff Johnson, Dave Menconi, and Carol and Ivan Manley. The second conference, held that same year at a Holiday Inn at Milpitas, attracted about 125 developers. Early conference directors included Brenda Laurel, Tim Brengle, Sara Reeder, Dave Menconi, Jeff Johannigman, Stephen Friedman, Chris Crawford, and Stephanie Barrett. Later directors include John Powers, Nicky Robinson, Anne Westfall, Susan Lee-Merrow, and Ernest W. Adams.
Of those, I can only place Crawford, Moriarty, Westfall, and Adams off the top of my head. A few others I am familiar with their work if I follow through on the links, but can't easily associate the name with the product or company. Moriarty is the only one I would consider to have a current stature near Crawford's.
Keep in mind we're not talking about the usual "game dev ancient history" cohort of early PC developers - Romero, Carmack, Sweeney, et al. - here. This is a full generation earlier and for a set of machines that didn't come to dominate the world. Crawford exited the industry, after a long career, just as this phase was starting.
I did not want to imply that he or his contributions are in fact unimportant. Rather, the way he approaches communication leads to that feeling among the uninformed such as myself. The unfairness he feels seems to be, in part, a result of his own writing style.
Despite his failure to ship, Nelson's vision hasn't been particularly nebulous. Overambitious, somewhat srlf-referential and brittle, perhaps, but fairly clear.
And I definitely don't think the WWW is 'nearly indistinguishable'. A few features that are missing are (off the top of my head): bidirectional links, link referential integrity, versioning, annotations, transclusions with attribution and provenance, etc.
Now, none of that ever shipped. Little of it ever got as far as a PoC as part of Xanadu/Udanax. And it is pretty clear in hindsight that, if implemented, the spam problems created by many of those features could have dwarfed what we (or rather, search engines) have to deal with today (remember blog referer linkspam? That's what bidirectional links with server-enforced referential integrity leads to). Arguably, the WWW wasn't just the simplest thing that could work, but also flourished because TBL didn't attempt to implement many of Nelson's cherished features.
But that the web today falls far short of Nelson's vision, and that as visions go, his was fairly clear (If overly reliant on neologisms like enfilade etc. usually defined in terms of implementation details such as novel datastructures rather than formats or protocols), shouldn't be particularly controversial.
Similarly, the Neural Network was repeatedly dismissed, with Minsky being a prominent example.
Not all ideas amount the same, but perhaps, at least in ML, we need to be open to exploring as many ideas as possible instead of performing grad student descent on the current consensus valley.
People piling on with their theories about why "Crawford is wrong" -- I think that a lot of the "unappreciated genius" writings of Newton, and Einstein and Galileo (and many others) before they received the recognition they felt they'd earned, had the same tones and meanings. Maybe this guy will "end up" being a "success" or not in future. But to me that's not the important thing here. It's just be kind to someone, how sad it must be for this guy. sad smile emoji
He's an older man, seeing his age group die around him and trying to measure his impact on the world.
Reading the title of the article, I'd say he is feeling quite vulnerable.
And he doesn't really make the case that there's no demand yet for his ideas; his ideas involve simulationist games of some sort, and there's tons of demand for that. It is true that many of these sort of games used to take really ugly shortcuts in the 1980s, but where SimCity just faked traffic, City Skylines simulates every person in the city, including the traffic resulting from that.
If you want to see a game with complex interactions of simulated systems, check out Europa Universalis. It simulates every country in the world, its armies, ideas, economy (tax, production, and trade resulting from production). In combat it simulates how the units of those armies interact. How trade flows around the world is incredibly complex (but also too hard-coded in my opinion; I think it could still be improved).
Seems to me that plenty of games are incredibly successful doing the sort of thing he did. If he does have a misunderstood genius that these games can't touch, he's not making that case in this article. It sounds more like he has a rather overblown sense of the importance of his work, and a lack of appreciation of the work of others.
I love this!
Believing that you have complete insight into why you were successful the first time seems to be a major blocker to continued success.
I loved The Matrix. It was a great flick. It wasn't art though and somebody using this lame reference today makes me question their expertise on the subject. The Matrix used ideas from Baudrillard & Borges. Both are cornerstones in post-modern literature while the Matrix is just an action flick rehashing the ideas from Plato's cave. The director hoped it would rub off on them so that they can shrowd themselves in philosophical wisdom. Everyone on the set was given a copy of Simulacra by the director to read. (this is often quoted along with Neo's own copy in the film and makes me question who actually read the book and how many of them read it enough times to understand it)
Baudrillard who was asked about what he thought about the film said it was merely another copy of Plato's cave allegory and it made no effort to actually touch the core-ideas of the book.
>> Neo has been revived and looks down the hall at the agents and sees the reality of the Matrix: that it is numbers. ....
When somebody uses The Matrix in a blog post >20 years later I can't help but wonder why they chose it. Something tells me they have a poor understanding of the world. It's like somebody referencing a Mickey Mouse comic to talk about ducks. It means your audience are probably fools (and by extension the author). How can they be taken serious when they don't understand even their own self-chosen references/allegory.
Why not? What would it need to become "art"? Maybe if it had less action, would that be enough?
Forget about Plato’s cave and Baudrillard for second, The Matrix is about that stuff the way tic tac toe is about drawing circles and x’s.
The Matrix is about ego. It’s about the fantasy that one day soon your unique magical gifts will finally be recognized. To the untrained eye you might appear to be another TPS report filing schmuck, but deep down you’ve always been a hero. Any day now your circumstances are going to change, and then your real life will begin.
This is not a path that generally leads to happiness or creative accomplishment, and I think its traces are pretty plain in TFA.
I think a lot of my problems with The Matrix are rooted in how it (mal-)adapts Campbell’s hero’s journey.
Here’s the basic outline of the hero’s journey:
- There’s a mundane (“real”, we’ll come back to that) world and a magical world. A problem in the magical world threatens the mundane world. (Sauron is rising in the east, Grendel is lurking in the forest, etc)
- A hero is identified in the mundane world who has the power to navigate both. (Luke is both a farm boy and a jedi. Neo is a programmer and the chosen one)
- The hero enters the magical world and resolves the problem.
- The hero (usually) returns to the mundane world, bringing power from the magical world. Even if the hero doesn’t return, the mundane world is brought to a new equilibrium. This is the real point of the story: the hero’s journey isn’t about the magical world, it’s about healing the mundane world.
The twist in The Matrix is that the mundane world turns out to be an illusion. But that’s a trick: the “real” world, unplugged from the matrix, is in a story sense magical. It’s a fantastical sci-fi world, just as far down the rabbit hole as the matrix itself.
So the last, most important step in the hero’s journey falls apart. You can’t heal the mundane world if it doesn’t exist. This helps move the focus of the story back to the first stages, the ego-fulfillment part where the hero is identified. Everyone remembers the red pill and “I know kung-fu”; not so much the incoherent sequels.
We’re actually circling back around to Baudrillard here, but I think maybe not in the way the Wachowskis intended.
I think you could also probably read Total Recall as an anti-Matrix. If The Matrix is about the allure of imagining yourself to be innately a hero, Total Recall is about the danger.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zA_0_dSD3-Q&t=27m35s
Crawford definitely is not doing enough introspection. I hope the man resets and makes an inspiring project without the self-romanticizing or self-pitying.
More succinctly, "real artists ship."
Growing up, I was naturally humble, and I knew I didn't know much and was amazed to find some confidence after ostensibly earning it to some degree.
What I found was a world of BS-ers so many people convincingly telling others they are the best, and having others believe that.
Then I found that many of these BS-ers believe their own drama - that's scary.
It's doubly scary when these people are in fact, talented, but they project it 10x further with their egos. (Think: Kanye West etc.)
I use the term 'I' here but I think this is at least a common path.
But something I struggle with is just how many regular people are like this? Is tech full of 22-year holds who think they are really that smart? It's one thing to try to change the world, fine, but another to think that you know better or are entitled to that. Or is it a generational issue?
I think we all have sparks of genius, and it takes a lot of hustle to communicate even basic ideas. We need to reinforce ourselves to keep it up. But on some level, we have to try to be objective as well. That's really, really hard, especially if you know something that others might not know, or at least feel that you do.
That's not untrue, but it's all about marketing now. Marketing really is all there is — some people call it 'growth hacking', but in the end it's what separates the wheat from the chaff. Having knowledge or skills is all well and good, but having perceived knowledge and skills is better for all extrinsic intents and purposes, so long as you've got enough to sustain the facade.
Objectivity in self-assessment isn't a bad thing, but success nowadays is defined by what you can make others believe.
Of course, there's the other kind of success - the kind Saitama in One Punch Man enjoys - getting good at something almost by accident, just because you love doing it. If you can make a living just doing what you love, who gives a damn whether other people know of you?
It's also true that success doesn't require marketing; plenty of popular software and libraries, for example, have achieved their position not by advertising themselves, but by providing the correct solution for the task at hand.
It must be truly sad to think you're a genius who was never appreciated. I say that without any sarcasm.
Reminds me of this visualization I just saw (warning, may cause a tightening in the chest):
https://twitter.com/pavtalk/status/1360264692250288131
But another way to interpret this graph is to spend less time attempting to cultivate relationships (which yield less and less value over the long term) and spend more time developing interests and skills that keeps you happy and occupied as on average we tend to age in isolation.
http://www.erasmatazz.com/personal/self/seventy.html
I can't help but read this and think about my own path in life and especially family.
"Young people these days, I am told, are illiterate and cannot understand the written word. They can learn only from video. So should I speak to them in the language they understand?
Yes, I probably am a genius—but the issue is meaningless."
bahaha
The algorithms that are used by most ad recommendation services are deep enough themselves.
The ICML test of time award this year was for an adaptation of a technique used to study online decision making algorithms.
> With Balance of Power, I could write a simple equation for the number of fighters who would join an insurgency against the government:
> `Fighters = Political Immaturity * Population * Previous Success of Insurgency`
> Here, `Political Immaturity` is a constant I defined for each country based on my estimate of how much people respected the rule of law.
I mean, come on…
It's incredible how many people keep missing the man's point. Almost making it for him. His point is the gaming industry is still completely filled with mindless NPCs and simple boolean interactions. He calls out God of War in another article as an extreme disappointment.
The fact that everyone here is saying his ideas have continued, but keep naming the same two or three games made by only a couple gaming companies proves how right he is. If you want any form of deep interactivity play a deep strategy game, anything else besides that in game design is still about as interactive as pacman.
His point is that after 35 years and literal orders of magnitude improvement in processing power, the average game is still modeled using incredibly simplistic logic and makes for empty interactions. And take a look at most any top selling game and it's true.
Your average squirrel in the park has more interesting behavior or interaction than most game characters. It's essentially just been "better graphics, bigger explosions" for three decades now. None of that precludes dynamic interactions.
Though there's undoubtedly still plenty of room for improvement. In terms of how smart computer characters move and act, I think Robin Hood, the Legend of Sherwood (2002) still stands out: there, when a guard spots you, they first become curious and come check you out. When they're sure they've seen you, they raise the alarm and attack you, and other guards that hear them, join them. When a guard finds a dead guard, they look for their boss, who then organises a search party. It's all very logical, and it results in a very exciting isometric stealth game. Especially the fact that the guards cooperate, but need to communicate over credible distances first, makes the whole thing work very well. There may well have been other games that work like this; I don't pretend to know most games, but I've never played anything else quite like it.
Is it though? Can you really blame readers if he isn't communicating clearly which, I would argue, if that's his point then he isn't.
What an entrance.
Think about Eastern Front (which I haven't played) or Balance of Power (which I have, on the Amiga). There are tons of games that are similarly built, in whole or in part, on such mathematical models: SimCity, Rollercoaster Tycoon, the Civ series, any number of turn-based and real-time strategy games going back to the 8-bit era. Even RPGs use mathematical rules, with a handy dose of chance, to decide the outcome of different kinds of attack.
There's even a whole (I seem to remember) chapter in Stephen Hill's "Amiga Game Maker's Manual with AMOS Basic" on building "simulation games" using simple mathematical models.
Whilst I respect Chris Crawford's contribution to the video games industry I don't understand this perspective at all.
Did he really? Or did he spend that time satisfying his own ego and tell himself it was for the sake of helping others? Certainly it sounds like he managed less actual helping others than those of us "earning a shit load to peddle ads".
I don't mean to diminish the work of Crawford, but he is building the same kind of simulationst mechanisms that Adams is, but Adams hit on success partly because of his personality.
It's almost perfectly the academic/amateur divide if you will; which is amusing given Adams' background in education.
It's hard to get into, but the systems it implements compliment each other really well to create a realistic space empire building game.
Examples you mentioned above are all "mass market" (except DF) in comparison.
This is also why it's so hard to meaningfully come up with something novel by thinking really really hard about it in a secluded cave. You need to refine your ideas by constantly testing them in the market of ideas either through collaboration or concrete implementation.
Oddly, I never heard of him but find the concept of a geopolitical subversive game extremely interesting (his Balance of Power game). In a sense, our current geopolitics literally has five or six actors operating via undercurrents to destabilize a variety of forces in our world. It’s a poker game, who is doing it and can you stop it from impacting your own country? Okay, so who the hell would be interested in this game (it seems like not many), but I’m interested you little incel, why so entitled?
Narcissism is like getting sprayed by a Skunk (not us, or possibly many of us, but in this case him), where you need many many washes to get rid of the smell. It’s possible, but it takes a lot of time. Talk about the work, force yourself to remove yourself from the equation at all cost, and hide your entitlement, and indulging in woe-is-me.
Small-aside:
If anyone wants to think about just how dangerous and self destructive this type of martyrdom thinking actually is, if you mix this post with any kind of drug or alcohol abuse, you pretty much have jet fuel for self pity and serious long term substance abuse issues. It is way too comfortable of a thing to slip into with the right lubricants on a daily basis.
It isn't easy to create a hard rule of when low interaction simulations adds to the game, but it is clearly wrong to say that they are always bad.
Were it not for HN, I likely wouldn't ever have -- he made two 4/5 games, and sold a quarter of a million copies! This is absolutely a modest success, but this was thirty years ago. He doesn't seem to have published anything since: wikipedia says he started working on Interactive Fiction in 1991, but stopped in 2018 (having released nothing) since "humanity will take centuries to catch up". It seems as if his ego has outstripped his accomplishments.
In the late 1980s, he was a significant figure in computer gaming. I knew about him because of Balance of Power.
We all have our time and place. Seems like his time is long gone and he struggles to acknowledge it.
I keep seeing startups almost succeed. They got everything "right", there's nothing they did wrong, but for some reason it didn't take off. While others don't even get the basics right and yet it soars. There doesn't seem to be any reason for it. Or at least none that I can see.
We don't know why something "goes viral". We can't predict that, can't control it. Just try to make the most of it if it happens to us.
There's a vast pool of people all trying to do things, in every discipline. For reasons we (and they) don't understand, some of them "succeed" and are popularised. We hear about them. The rest are mostly ignored. We don't hear about them. There's nothing we can particularly identify as making an individual succeed or not. Like everything in life, the process doesn't care about individuals. It's the genetic approach - spread the population over a large area and let the successful ones survive to the next generation. The rest of them die bitterly regretting their failure in blog posts.
It reminds me a lot of myself. I'm always sitting with a feeling like I've got some special perspective, that I'm the only one trying to 'figure it all out' and I'm always on the verge to, and when I do it will be incredible. And as I get older at the heart of it I feel something much sadder - a fear and a loneliness. An inability to engage and stand my ground with the people around me. Though that could be just me.
Hopefully his fortunes will improve.
I was a graduate student, and I met some fairly miserable professors toiling away. It's hard having ideas and then lacking the social skills to bring them forth. The social skills help with relevance, but also relating the internal ideas with external ideas and building real momentum.
There is a lesson here for anyone young.
The mistake here is to assume genius internally. Rather, it is better almost categorically to assume you are an idiot and then talk with others without the ego. "Hey, here is an idea" and many times others will not get it, and that's ok because communication is exceptionally hard.
However, if you want people to call you genius, then all you have to do is be around people and then help them with their ideas. "Have you tried X?" in an applicable way, and people will respond because you bridged the gap between their problems and your deep understanding.
As an example, I have a lot of dumb projects that excite me. One of them, which I refer to a large number of times, is my dumb programming language for board games ( http://www.adama-lang.org/ ). When people don't get it, is it their failing or mine? The truth is that it is a mix of both, but it is mostly mine because I have the burden to communicate effectively.
This article kind of reminds me of a professor I knew, but I'd describe him as the opposite: big on vision, self-promotion, and the whole social game, while not having the ability to back it up with good ideas or implementation. And for both the author and the professor I know, I'd say the social side is the source of their success, rather than its limit. Not everyone can take simple ideas that are semi-common sense to people skilled in the area, and build career success from them as an independent researcher.
I always suspected the professor was bipolar, because in addition to the brimming energy and excitement about taking over the world with his vision, there were down days too where he got angry at the world for not believing in him etc.
But maybe some of the developers of complex strategy games mentioned him during GDC or other conferences?
Maybe one of the calculations that should be added to the model is that owners of computers in the 80's were a very different bunch from the people having computers today.
I just imagined an alternate reality: What if they did? What if all software did? That'd be kind of interesting if development was more explictely collaborative in that way. I guess open source works like that to a degree but still not everything is documented. We've lost a lot of history in our piles of code. Maybe some day obsessive histotians will be digging through chat logs found on hard drives dug out of landfills. Imagine how incomplete that story would be.
I think a lot of IP law is hostile to that sort of free flow of ideas.
This is probably the answer! I was a little kid then, but my uncle played them and I remember that game and some others like it... they were all offshoots of war game board games.
People have moved on since, or maybe better put the market has grown and the number of people interested in nerdy strategy games has not.
The budget to make an analog game is considerably less, especially at "wargame quality". Selling 1k units at $30-70 of a unique system on a marginal topic is sustainable in a way that a digital version is not (and may never be; print-on-demand quality is improving, but the cost of cross-platform development and supporting digital distribution is rising). And the most interesting adversary in asymmetric, multiplayer, non-zero-sum situations often remains another human even given unlimited programmer and compute time.
Also, the field of wargame design is professionalizing, and the major clients with the "big" budgets (governments and NGOs) generally want dynamic, transparent, refereed games. Sometimes those have some digital support for the referee, but only for time or communication efficiency, not to increase the mathematical sophistication of the simulation. Think Excel spreadsheets, not SVMs.
The idea itself is hardly as exceptional as the author wants it to be.
This whole thing to me sounds a bit like a textbook case of the author having spent his life as the smartest person in the room, but only because he's been in the wrong room his whole life. To use an analogy: I suspect he's not Mozart... He's a very decent musician or composer that's spent his life in a community college orchestra and never ventured out into the world to interact with people that can eat him for lunch.
SimCity came out around this time and was inspired by the book Urban Dynamics, which contains complicated models based on systems of differential equations which feed into one-another. Considering that, the work referenced seems elementary, to the point of not even needing to be explained.
As it turns out, those complicated systems are the foundation of fun for an entire class of games. Most strategy games, from SimCity, Civilization, Factorio, or Off World Trading Company consist largely of balancing growth across various interlocking systems.
Is this an appeal to the efficient market hypothesis, or do you have some actual evidence to support this statement?
I misremembered, it's not just the strong form that is refuted, but the weak form as well!
There are a lot of these games. And the techniques behind designing a "good" geo-political strategy game are very well understood by now. It's also a market that is cheap to develop for, because these games don't typically rely on expensive, cutting-edge art assets.
It's reasonable to assume that the market for these games is saturated, as mature, well understood, low capital investment markets tend to be.
There's a lot left to be discovered in terms of what control schemes and other features result in a fun experience. I have ideas on how to make a better 4x game but I would rather make a PoC than give them away for free. :)
Paradox games has several games in the million+ club, and their games are insanely complicated niche games which take longer to learn than most AAA titles take to complete.
On the other end of the spectrum is Off World Trading Company. That game is the essence of great strategy distilled down into little more than the fundamentals.
The fact that everyone here is saying his ideas have continued, but keep naming the same two or three games made by only a couple gaming companies, in a niche genre proves how right he is. If you want any form of deep interactivity play a deep strategy game, anything else besides that in game design is still about as interactive as pacman.
His point is that after 35 years and literal orders of magnitude improvement in processing power, the average game is still modeled using incredibly simplistic logic and makes for empty interactions. And take a look at most any top selling game and it's true.
Your average squirrel in the park has more interesting behavior or interaction than most game characters. It's essentially just been "better graphics, bigger explosions" for three decades now. None of that precludes dynamic interactions.
He's essentially arguing for Probabilistic Programming without using the term. And saying it should be at the heart of all games, no just deep strategy games. Actually a step further he says it should be at the heart of any interactive software
The second link below gives a pretty good overview of his thoughts on interactivity and how to model human and system behavior. Lesson 7 (how to express ideas mathily) while simple, was mildly interesting. Some of the others are better, but are harder to read standalone, build on prior items.
Essentially it's a summarized course of how to model the essentials of human behavior in a system. Not ground breaking, but at the same time, way more advanced than anything you see in the vast majority of games.
If I were writing a simple game, I'd skim link 2 for ideas I could steal and easily apply to up he interest factor. You definitely could build some interesting mechanics with these ideas.
[1] http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/game-design/crawfords-laws...
[2] http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/course-description-2018/in...
[3] http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/course-description-2018/ho...
I can't remember where I read it, but a critique of his work from... 5? years ago, was essentially "the dragon is already dead, but Crawford can't accept it because his sword didn't slay it." Generously, at some point he lost sight of the goal in favor of the tool. Less generously, he saw the holodeck, wanted specifically that, and came up with the tripartite dragon as the dog to wag.
I don't find it particularly groundbreaking to use a set of ad-hoc functions as interactions. He seems so focused on the idea of functions and complexity that he's missing much of the point of why people play games and solely focused on strategy games. In my opinion, a lot of the best games are the simplest games because I play them to take my mind off of other things. It's not about having a lot of complexity, it's about having interesting complexity.
This was written with such self-aggrandizement that it is not super enjoyable to read. It is easy to see why the ideas of someone who projects themselves as a genius is having trouble relating to people who may not believe him to be one. The usefulness of ideas seems to have some respect to how well they fit into the way other people want to use them. He's not focusing on how other people would use them but rather on how he wants them to be used. He seems to have missed the transition from systems-oriented design to human-oriented design.
I haven't grasped this at all from the article but let's assume that's what he said.
In that case I think he's 100% wrong. Many games are fun precisely because they are clear cut and straightforward with no probabilities or randomness. Best competitive games avoid random components altogether.
> Obviously things aren't entirely your fault all the time
I prefer using the word 'control' over fault, because fault has so many negative connotations. Things are not entirely in your control all the time, but many times they are. How a person responds to situation is always in their control. The classic one which you refer to is blaming others when a failure occurs - communication or otherwise. And yes, it is completely empowering and changes how one acts as a leader or team member.
Excellent point. I completely agree. I'll have to keep that in mind in the future.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/27/us/navy-seals-edward-gall...
Also, AFAIK, Jocko have never addressed the issue you linked. It might be because he simply doesn't know enough to comment. He left the military in 2010 and this incident happened in 2017. Do you have anything to attach him or EO directly to it?
You should probably try to give credit for the idea where credit is due.
By the way, this is an important part of the growth of junior engineers into senior engineers. I've noticed junior engineers tend to identify obstacles as blockers. When asked about progress or estimates, they just talk about the blockers. Completely out of their control. Senior engineers find workarounds, solutions, alternatives.
Love your comment on junior vs. senior engineers. Very insightful!
Sounds about right, genius is about serving. It's a weird status to have.
Alan Alda's book _If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?_ does a great job of outlining exactly this problem that a lot of scientists seem to have with communication. He also personally narrates the Audible version, if that's your thing.
> However, if you want people to call you genius, then all you have to do is be around people and then help them with their ideas.
I believe that if your goal is to be called genius, you're already damning yourself.
From Faust:
I'm just getting my teeth into web programming but your interest fits in with what I'm looking at (its very early days so can't say more).
Thanks for sharing
I've made dozens of languages and studied thousands more.
One easy tip: show ~10 lines of code near the top of the page, above the fold.
Without that, you'll probably never get a critical mass of discerning critics to care, because they're too busy.
I'm very interested in your lang, both because I like langs and like creating board games, but gave up b/c I couldnt find code.
I always encourage junior devs to include some lines of code to do a "hello world", or a screenshot if it's something graphical, or both, _as early as possible_ in the README, so as to show the casual reader what their project is all about.
Have you tried converting games to your language, or read other literature on codifying game rules? It's much more popular to use declarative or logic based designs to state how a game can evolve. General Game Playing competitions, where the goal is to write AIs that can compete at _any_ game, use a Datalog variant to declare their rules. Extensions of this enable modeling complex games like Dominion (https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AIIDE/article/view/12669/1251...).
Pattern matching is another promising way to model and rapidly prototype games, with the most approachable version probably being PuzzleScript.
For instance, I've build the entire back-end for Battlestar Galactica ( https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/37111/battlestar-galacti... ). I can't release a product around this as the IP is not mine, but it is a good foil. I play a bunch of games, and it's hard to boil down every game into a concrete set of rules.
So, my strategy relies first on getting (1) data synchronization, (2) privacy, (3) multi-user transaction flow , and (4) durability of state on solid ground. Once the foundation is good, and the foundation can grow into other domains (like converting Excel worksheets into web apps) then I can ask what models, idioms, and ideas do I want to layer on top of it.
The hard part, it turns out, after the back-end works is getting a usable UI. This is my current focus, and I hope to have results sometime this year with my silly approach.
Ego may be in the way, but this is a rather missed take. Obviously the author was focusing on his idea, rather than getting people calling him genius.
Crawford comes across to me as an eccentric artist, not a game designer, and with the accompanying ego. This has helped the industry, such as when creating (C)GDC. But, like many artists, he has strong opinions on what qualifies. I personally don't enjoy games that are "games as art", but I respect their place. Crawford doesn't seem to view "games as games" with such respect.
http://www.erasmatazz.com/personal/self/sixty.html
http://www.erasmatazz.com/personal/self/seventy.html
"Whitehead argued that reality consists of processes rather than material objects, and that processes are best defined by their relations with other processes, thus rejecting the theory that reality is fundamentally constructed by bits of matter that exist independently of one another."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_North_Whitehead
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_philosophy