I Really Blew It (2020)
erasmatazz.com
erasmatazz.com
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:
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!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.
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):
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.
I can't help but read this and think about my own path in life and especially family.
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.
This is why it's so hard to innovate when you don't test your theories in the market of ideas. It's why you don't tend to see Lone-wolf Geniuses revolutionizing the relevant field (whether the field is physics, or game design). Even a genius like like Grigori Perelman, of Poincaré conjecture fame, who comes close to embodying this 'lone-wolf' stoic ideal, needed to use techniques developed by others in order to prove the conjecture.
> Perhaps I missed something, but most of my friends have been on the lookout and I have had a number of games referred to me; none of them came close to Balance of Power in algorithmic sophistication.
So it's not like he missed the simulation genre evolution, he just disagrees with the direction that evolution took. And he suggests it's because the time has not yet come for his ideas.
An obvious retort is: maybe people don't (and won't) want to play games with sophisticated algorithmic simulation because they are boring. He doesn't seem to offer any good argument about why his ideas are "good but too early" as opposed to merely "bad". As such, I find his post not very persuasive.
I wonder if there is perhaps a bias here in that it is easy to overestimate the algorithmic complexity of the code you wrote, whereas it's easy to underestimate the complexity of code you can't see.
Now I know almost nothing about game development so have no dataset myself or ability to understand the arguments either way.
I think we're seeing an increasing short term move to more complex, black box, DL trained models that will get behavior similar to the processes he seems to emphasize, and then we'll see a swing back to taking those gains but converting them into the type of readable algorithms like in his old games.
But I have no idea. Just complete 2 second conjecturing on my part.
Regardless, thoroughly enjoying reading his site and find his Object <=> Process gradient cycle to be crystal clear and fascinating and important idea.
These processes can almost always be reverse engineered, and they are actually quite understandable and readable.
Unless there is something I'm missing with his process/object distinction, admittedly I don't think I've parsed it with a great deal of clarity.
The point of a game is not algorithmic sophistication, it’s fun (to simplify in the extreme). If the game isn’t fun it doesn’t matter how fancy or impressive the logic powering it is. If you want to blaze new trails in modeling and computation, games are the wrong field to do it in as any advancement will tend to be overshadowed by whether or not the game itself is a good game. Sure there are enthusiasts that will be interested in internals, but fame in the realm of games comes with great game design, not algorithmic sophistication.
It’s like an artist inventing a new shade of green and using it in his work in combination with other colors and complaining that no one acknowledges the sophisticated formulas he had to use to produce his special shade of green.
I am automatically skeptical of anyone that tries to defend their art by referencing science, but in this case, as an indie developer with my own fair share of failures and lots of experience in development, I'm not just skeptical; I'm pretty confident that I know why this person failed, and why they'll continue to fail unless they change their thinking.
Although I will say, in fairness to the author, that I have not read any of his books, seen his lectures, or played his games. So maybe he really is a genius game designer with ideas too advanced for any of us to appreciate.
EDIT: okay now after reading another comment with more background information about the author, I feel like a dick for the tone I used here. But I'll leave the comment up anyways because, well, I feel like it's still useful advice (at least the first paragraph)
>> Perhaps I missed something, but most of my friends have been on the lookout and I have had a number of games referred to me; none of them came close to Balance of Power in algorithmic sophistication.
Isn't that indicative of his problem. For all his talk about caring about a particular game design philosophy so much so that he devoted decades to talking about it, he's not even aware of what's out there. Why are his friends suggesting games to him? Why isn't he referencing games like EU4 or Victoria II and breaking them apart and pointing out in which way they differ from his design philosophy? But he's not excited about the field or ideas that come from others because he figured out the right answer in the 1980s ... and it's on everyone else to acknowledge this.
The problem is that his examples from his own work, his references to subsequent work and it shortcomings, and, well, everything else is either isolated atomic details (like the two formula references) or sweeping generalities with no specifics that it's hard to tell really what specifically he sees as missing, and whether or not it is actually missing, or he's overlooking something or judging unfairly.
edit: although I think the gist I see here is unneeded complexity
He genuinely just seems to be unaware that these other games exist, which really doesn't surprise me because there's so much stuff out there, and because the strategy genre's become (with a few high-profile exceptions) a sort of under-the-radar AA-grade experience, where people are putting out solid games with good presentation value, but they're not carpet-bombing the world with marketing, or trying to sell them at Walmart. I'm an avid gamer and there are entire genres, with multi-million dollar titles in them that I'm mostly (or completely) oblivious to.
There are just a lot of games that, despite having production quality that beats the pants off a lot of 90s/00s games, no longer bother doing "push" advertising that intrudes into your life, because it's just no longer economical to do.
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.
"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...
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
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.
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.
"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."
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".
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.
[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 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.
Also, a couple lines of CSS would be enough, no need to load 70 MB of JS.
As you say, variable width and proper viewport support are easily fixed with a line or two of CSS, and if he did that it would work as well on mobile as it does on desktop.
Nostalgia can be blinding. I love plain HTML pages too though.
> this is perfectly readable on a phone
There's some jQuery driven magic at the bottom of the source for that.
I wasn't saying that all nostalgia is blinding, nor that it is the only thing that blinds.
A 2px blur filter would be blinding.
Don't think the people who spent years to typeset a book centuries ago were dumb.
They thought hard about what they were doing.
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”.
The early successes he had made him overconfident. I don't see the formulas he displays as anything sort of revolutionary.
Any computer game today have systems way more sophisticated than that, or even old systems like the "sims" engine(original CimCity, Spore), Civilization series, doom, mafia, a flight simulator or Age of Empires to name a few. All those systems have incredible internal mathematical models.
He risked anything he had on his vision. His vision came sort. He does not accept reality. Even today he believes his visions are right and the world is wrong.
The "I blew it" is not acceptance of his failures. It is an acceptance of the failures of society that was not prepared for his revolutionary ideas. Society was not yet prepared for his genius. He made the mistake of valuing society more than what is worth.
Why is it that judging someone as a genius or not comes so easy to everyone?
I find making that assessment incredibly challenging.
Some because their ideas were wrong, but some also with innovative and correct ideas, many of which were reinvented and some probably even never reinvented and lost to obscurity.
Why would I care about someone whose latest accomplishment was half a decade before I was born? The complexity of modern games is so incredibly high that his equations look like toys.
I once had an idea of making a simulation game about constructing dyson sphere. Now that dsyon sphere program exists do I claim credit for that even though I never communicated with the developer of that game?
That's the behavior Crawford is engaging in. He's shutting himself off and blames other people for his problems and he never wants to rely on anyone else for his successes. The superiority complex is exactly the thing that is holding him back.
"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.
Over time I’ve been fortunate enough to meet people sufficiently better at mathematics than me to crush any hope I had of solving significant problems in quantum theory. So at least I’m not wasting my life there.
But now I’m focused on other goals that seem more suited, but how do I know I’m not an idiot here too? Maybe I’d be better helping a genuinely smart person achieve their goals.
I’ve had encouragement from a few people who know me well, which helps. I respect them so their validation is encouraging.
Are there any other ways to assess yourself to ensure you’re not (amongst other things) out of your depth without being aware of it?
Do you enjoy that work and thinking about it? Sure, you may not make groundbreaking discoveries, but there is a lot of space between groundbreaking and implementation. If you can understand the groundbreaking work and see the applicability to other problems, you are in a good place.
It's not a waste of life if you enjoy the work and are adding some value (e.g. someone's paying you for your output, or some other measure of value).
>"how do I know I'm not an idiot here too?"
Who judges what is an idiot? There's raw talent, the ability to synthesize information, the ability to retain a breadth of knowledge and draw connections between ideas, the ability to communicate ideas, and many other dimensions of "smart".
You can have a truly unmotivated genius that will achieve and contribute much less than someone who is just "smart" but has the work ethic. Einstein had both. That's why he is so rare.
> "Are there any other ways to assess yourself to ensure you’re not (amongst other things) out of your depth without being aware of it?"
Again, IMHO, if you are still learning things and feeling out of your depth, then you are in a good spot. If you don't understand the topic, then you've either missed a step between the fundamentals and what you're working on or maybe you've hit the limit of your ability. But truly hitting that limit is rare - most times people could return to learning the basics and a few more intermediate items, return to the problem, have a "breakthrough", and keep going. Progress is not linear.
But it makes sense - as you work on more and more difficult problems, it takes longer and longer to make visible progress. If it were easy, it would have been figured out already. While making progress, it never feels like you're making a big accomplishment day after day.
I think working on goals that are "more suited" could stick you in a place where you've under-achieved to feel "smart" and have not achieved what you could have. Personally, I'd rather be failing (in a way that isn't life altering or career ruining) consistently to make sure that I'm not under-performing or selling myself short. It's an uncomfortable place to be, but that's where you find personal growth and progress.
Last thing - to be successfully measured, it means someone needs to have covered the territory, solved all the problems, figured out and ranked how difficult the problems are, and then put them out there to judge others. If you want to compete in a space that is that mature, have fun, but it seems like you may be operating in a place where the measuring stick isn't built yet.
either
- he was born to the wrong era
- he didn't spend the time to create the demand for the ideas he peddled
In any event: If you want to post something about how "he's not that smart": the problem is actually you. The dude's a legend, is incredibly bright, but can't articulate that well.
But please, by all means waste your bandwidth being angry at an old man rationalising the long list of life decisions they have behind them
It is like how Einstein refused to acknowledge quantum mechanics, and if Einstein wrote a post about how his ideas are so much better than those who studied quantum mechanics and that he was just born in the wrong time then Einstein would be ridiculed as well. Not because Einstein isn't smart or didn't add a lot of value, but because that kind of post is ridiculous.
>In 2018, Crawford announced that he had halted his work on interactive storytelling, concluding that it will take centuries for civilization to embrace the required concepts.[1]
"No, it's the children who are wrong."
Being married has taught me that in life you can be right all the time, or you can compromise and be happy. I can appreciate the people who are unbreaking in their resolve to make the world a better place, but his particular philosophical hill is not one I'd choose to die on.
20+ years later, MS Flight Simulator is about the only thing around. And while a good app, it's nothing like Falcon 4.0.
For example, I recently bought the F-14 DLC. A fan-made manual that takes you through the basics, in a mere ~500 pages (!), can be found here: https://www.mudspike.com/chucks-guides-dcs-f-14b-tomcat/
Lots of manuals for other aircraft on that site too, check it out.
It's really hard to work on the right things, and we should appreciate people having been steadfast in the direction they are heading in.
You can be smart, but if you focus on external variables, if you choose to limit the efforts you'll put forth to create value out of your ideas, or spread knowledge that has value, or you put your ideas out there and they fail but you just blame everyone else - it doesn't really matter how smart you are or even if the ideas have value. It matters that you've taken whatever influence you have over the end result and handed it over to everyone else.
Similarly, there's just not a lot of value of idly lamenting that your ideas are great but not recognized by others. That the world is "populated by idiots."
Certainly, many of us have had ideas we cherished that didn't take off - most of us have seen smaller successes compared to Chris' game sales in the early 80s. That kind of success could certainly alter anyone's perception. Perhaps my own humble life has prevented me from becoming too focused on my own genius, but I also recognize the perspective from moments in my past. At this point, I feel like I'm fortunate to have a brain that works well enough to have the career I have, as well as the home life I enjoy. It's not going to make me super wealthy or even slightly famous, but I can extract a lot of joy out of my life. And it will not benefit me to complain that the potentially good ideas of my past will not be realized. But it's certainly possible as the balance of years ahead shrinks in comparison with years past, I'll find myself more focused on what could have been and wish the world did more to appreciate me.
Throngs of his peers in the same disciplines are, or have been, "that smart". Not everyone is celebrated as a genius.
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 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.
Does one of you know the title of the book? That sounds fascinating.
Edit: nevermind, I found it here: http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/my-books/balance-of-power-...
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."
1: https://www.zachtronics.com/podcast/
2: https://www.zachtronics.com/podcast-files/Zachtronics-Podcas...
Yes, I probably am a genius—but the issue is meaningless.
-----
BORN WINNER, SELF-MADE LOSER
There was a time when I thought
I might have done something by now;
But that was long ago, and over the intervening
Decades I have shifted from prodigy to late-bloomer
To non-bloomer; I have passed my peak without having peaked
Or even begun the ascent, and unless there is something inherently
Salutary to the energy I expend in frustrating myself then
My sacrifices have all been in vain.
-----
I recommend listening to Matt Johnsons reading of them: https://open.spotify.com/track/3XrxjjUHhJ5tFVRki44ljA?si=d1f...
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun
I've played Eastern Front and Balance of Power (on Atari ST) but they weren't my cup of tea--I was into graphics and animated gameplay. Similarly I preferred Risk to Avalon Hill board games. I did have a friend/roommate who was really into Balance of Power, he would play it all the time, over and over. I didn't 'get' it, but he obviously did.
From Wikipedia entry[0]
> I dreamed of the day when computer games would be a viable medium of artistic expression — an art form. I dreamed of computer games encompassing the broad range of human experience and emotion: computer games about [...] All of these things and more were part of this dream, but by themselves they amounted to nothing, because all of these things have already been done by other art forms. There was no advantage, no purchase, nothing superior about this dream, it's just an old rehash. All we are doing with the computer, if all we do is just reinvent the wheel with poor grade materials, well, we don't have a dream worth pursuing. But there was a second part of this dream that catapulted it into the stratosphere. The second part is what made this dream important and worthy: that is interactivity.
I feel some of this too, like the poor quality games that came out with CD-ROM, and each new technology recently VR that initially only scratches the surface. I do see this has been improving steadily with the diversity, budgets, and mind share that video games are gaining. I do see the art form in many recent 'game' titles so don't despair the future of gaming.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Crawford_(game_designer)
I can relate to having friends that were into more intelligent games than me, although in my case it was was worse. (Me: WOW! DUKE NUKEM 3D HAS SWEARS!). Hopefully my tastes eventually matured.
"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."
Some of these trees are a lot "older" than others. They have more rings to them. Perhaps a 50 year old might have some trees in their brain that you would expect to find only in a person 500 years old. For that person, when that tree is in charge, it must feel a lot like they are very ahead of their time. The solution is patience and to go chase a ball or drink a beer and put another tree in charge for a bit.
You don't have to make everyone think your game is great, but you have to make at least a fraction of people think so. Even just 10 000 dedicated fans of the genre is more than enough to keep an indie developer going, but he couldn't even manage that.
So out of: 110,000,000,000 people Truly remembered are how many writers, scientists, inventors? How many names of famous people and their ideas average person really knows? Million? Hundred thousand? Thousand? Maybe hundred or more likely ten-ish? Einstein, Tesla, Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Dickens, Twain, Mozart, Goethe ... forgive me for this random list, how many names could you write on the list?
And this is for educated people, what about those who are not?
I am trying to say that our ability to absorb ideas is the bottleneck, so over time many good ideas will simply die, and then maybe, just maybe they may re-appear after some time. Ideas the same way as businesses will only succeed if authors find a way, the compelling story, so they become simple enough to become viral and start spreading independently. But like with everything live, it will need fertile ground, energy and bit of luck... actually great portion of luck ;/
My impression that far from being ignored, such ideas are actually applied - though they do not necessarily involve his ideas, as it's unclear whether they contribute much novel except from that particular application in the game Balance of Power, since the key concepts and methods (e.g. Jay Forrester's work) significantly predate the game and were widely published long before Chris Crawford's writings. Since Crawford seemingly does not "integrate" with that field of research, it also makes sense that people writing simulations like that (which are actually quite common in certain genres of gaming and also non-gaming use-cases) would not rely on his work but on the similar, but more developed practices of others.
What a cope - damn your ego.
I don't want to believe that a man of his age is so self-aggrandizing, so lacking in humility. "Oh, it's nothing wrong with me - it's them! I'm actually a messiah!" Complete and utter anti-wisdom.
If you write a sob story then don't paint a huge target around yourself as the main problem and antagonist in your story.
I played Balance of Power. It has no rivals.
Have some goddamned respect people.
And remember that, unless something worse happens, you'll be old too one day.
Personally, I played a lot of XCOM which is a similar world map UI with random alien invading events you react to.
So anyway, writing the books might have been a waste, but people seem to copy the game format quite a bit. Very influential. Probably should have written more games instead of the two books.
We don‘t know which works are going to be important for future generations. And just putting out a „PDF on the net“ will be gone in 20 years if there is no publishing house maintaining the original copy.
Arxiv could also take on that role. But not for the last 300 years of existing research in the publishers archives.
Didn't they?
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.
Sometimes I feel like we're under the tyrannical yoke of algorithms.
Not modern algorithms that display ads, but like super-simple ones.
E.g. consider a basic rope pulley or some simple gears. Rig some of those up and suddenly it becomes easier to move a weight. Why? Because Work = Force x Distance and you're increasing the distance for the same amount of work so force goes down.
.... okay, I understand the maths, but why does turning a small gear more quickly than the big gear make it easier? Forget the equation that models this for a moment - intuitively my brain does not grok why it gets easier to move something by pulling a bit more rope than usual. Most explanations from the teachers at school was something like "Because physics", but I am still not comfortable understanding intuitively what precisely is going on with the physical forces without just shrugging and and going back to the mathematical model W=F*D ruling our lives without really understanding why.
...so I guess I just have to see the universe in numbers like this guy, and so am also a genius ahead of my time?
Levers and pulleys are simple devices that move one thing a certain distance while another thing moves a different distance, but transfer the energy while doing so. They let you transfer the same amount of energy over a larger distance, so there's less energy-per-distance (force), so your muscles can cope with it. (They have to do more contraction-expansion cycles, but it's easier because there's less energy going into each of them.)
Warning: This is probably wrong because I am conjuring this from my mind without looking up any resources.
You have rope. The rope can carry 50lb. You want to lift something that weighs 100kg. You cut the rope in half and attach two ropes to the stone and the ceiling. Now you got a 100lb weight attached on two 50lb ropes. The cross section area of the rope is 1 square inch (random number). The rope happens to hold exactly 50lb per square inch. We write this down as 50 psi. But wait. Since we added two ropes we have increased the cross section thus we have 100lb hanging on 2 square inches of rope. We are still within 100lb/2i^2 = 50psi. What if we have 4 ropes? 100lb/4i^2 = 25psi and so on. The amount of force each rope applies on the stone is shrinking. Since 1 rope = 1 square inch we get 25 pounds of force on each rope.
Now lets go back to pulleys. There is no meaningful difference between statically attaching rope (although one end has to be attached) and letting it hang off a pulley or letting an object hang off a pulley. The end result is that you have effectively attached the rope 3 times to the ceiling and what you are holding is only a faction of the cross section area that is actually holding up the stone. You have to pull more rope because there is 4 times as much rope and the wall is just holding the rope at a fixed point.
Crawford, Eastern Front and Balance of Power were a big deal in their day. These were always niche games, but for those in the know, they were brilliant.
You can read more about this period of videogame history in the freely available online book "Halcyon Days": https://dadgum.com/halcyon/
Feel free to disagree with Crawford, but please don't do it out of ignorance. Know your history. Otherwise you'll be like someone who argues Charlie Chaplin has no business arguing about cinema, because he doesn't ring a bell to you and who watches silent black & white movies anyway?
If there's one thing I take out of this: how easy we forget the history of computing and videogames. Past celebrities and heroes get forgotten, unlike with book and movie authors.
This sentence gets to me. He's _so close_ to right, it's just that the answer is from a world so different than where he lives.
In management consulting, I learned the exact same thing, _except_ that the best way to understand the system is through _social relations_ (read: office politics), not math. Such an understanding inevitably leads you, when you hope to create change, to FIRST establish a need, and THEN pose a solution.
He didn't blow it. He just needs to learn to establish the need.
> there’s no sense of desperation, ... People are still bewitched by the progress
People are desperate for "artistic expression". But needs don't exist in a vacuum.
Talk about out of touch. I can't imagine being so deep in your own head to think that this is the sort of thing that is comparable to Einstein's theory of relativity, or Mendel's genetics. "Not in the same league, but at least in the same sport". Unadulterated hubris, the whole article.
And what is the frontier that he thinks he has carved out? Games as art? Mathematics as art? And he doesn't recognize anyone else as making strides in that area?
If he has something to say, then yeah, he sure did blow it, because he is clearly incapable of explaining himself in a way that anyone cares to understand. More likely, he's just a guy who ran out of ideas 35 years ago and can't let it go.
Creating navigational charts was the application. Human error propagated and it was a big problem at the time. That is how he got funding.
I also take exception to the claim it was never built, as that is not entirely true either.
For anyone interested, I recommend the 1990 book by Doron Swade. It is excellent. I stumbled across the difference engine at the science museum in London while I was reading that book! I didn't realize the author was from there until after the fact. What a lovely coincidence. Such a fascinating device, the difference engine will always have a special place in my mind.
Some games today do this, but it's rare.
Game systems being treated as art (as opposed to the story/visuals/sound) is rarer still.
Incidentally, the reason he chose to present simple formulae in the post was that he wanted to show elegant simplicity, not dazzle with mathematical wizardry.
Regardless, you don't need to dunk on someone who is already dunking on himself, hard, harder than most of us are even capable of, just because in your opinion he isn't doing it in quite the right way.
I've given up anyone 'getting' me or appreciating what I do a while back, after I realized I don't really care to fully understand others, nor do I have the capacity it seems, and it doesn't matter! I don't even understand myself, and it's fine.
The author strikes me as having a genuine childish emotion of not getting that toy he/she wanted. It's genuine, it's real, but my goodness, when are you going to grow up :)
I think Crawford has been barking up the wrong tree with his storytron thing ( http://www.ifwiki.org/index.php/Storytron ) for decades but good for him for trying.
After people over 100 years ago realized materials could compute, some were immediately theorizing about objects we now call ‘smartphones’.
It was a learning curve for me to realize it isn’t yet worth pursuing some technology efforts because society won’t be ready for them for another 10-15 years. (usually readiness is some combination of baseline technologies available, competencies, etc.)
Atari had a corporate research outfit, a building not far from Corporate HQ where some luminaries like Alan Kay were seeded, and they were very plugged into the question of "Well, if we can't make shooty games, what can we do?". To answer this question they bought a lot of Vaxes and LISP machines and hired a bunch of other researchers you've definitely heard of. There was a lot going on. Atari also hired Chris Crawford to run a small group of game developers, presumably because "Your games look educational and this grants us legitimacy, do more of that."
It was not a happy group (judging from the sidelines; a couple of my housemates worked in it) and its output reflected the group's turmoil. Infighting and bickering, game demos that were largely retreads of prior not-very-much-fun efforts, attempts at new forms of non-shooty games. My favorite mini-game was Gossip, a game involving facial expressions where you held conversations with virtual people and tried to get them to like each other. An anonymous member of the team turned the internal math on its head and changed the goal to "make everyone hate each other". The thing is, the politically incorrect version was MUCH more fun than the original. Crawford should have taken the hint. I don't think he ever knew how to do fun.
I think it's important because, even if you have some really good ideas, and maybe this guy does, if you can't hold a mirror to them they will just end up hitting a wall. Ideas only improve if they can beat themselves up.
Isn't this just the "worse is better" principle? Does it really matter if others weren't as algorithmically sophisticated?
Keep your passion alive, wait for the right time or find a better soil. Like moving to a different country because culture will react better to your ways and proposals (a very regular issue in France for instance)
Excuse me, but: what? 'The computer' is and has been, in fact, a medium of artistic expression. For millions of people. For multiple decades. Has this person been living in a cave?
Hopefully his fortunes will improve.
Life, the universe, and everything.
So I'll thank this visionary for spawning this interesting discussion thread, which in turn has me contemplating my existence.
his games aren't even his pride but his 'design philosophy' which is immediately understood by anyone who attempted to make a game. the irony is he brushes his actual achievements aside because he saw the matrix and thought this is totally me
Is this write up supposed to be tongue in cheek? This is the most basic concept almost everybody understands.
This is bad advice for Crawford in the same way it would be bad advice for a mathematician or physicist. On the other hand they do need to be right, productive, and persuasive, and he wasn't the first two, and hasn't been the third for many years.
- Is a genius. Outside the bounds of usual intelligence and thus unrecognizable for average people.
- He however is not able to use his genius to create value in any way. He specifically mentions failing to teach others to do so but this is because they are unable to comprehend his genius.
- Finally he his also not able to signal his genius (in any of his numerous publications) in such a way that someone who does have the tools/skills(money/better communication) to exploit this enormous unused potential is willing to do so.
If it's a duck but:
- nobody thinks it looks like a duck,
- it doesn't quack and
- it isn't able to produce any offspring that
- can quack or
- look like a duck
Well, he did create (at least) two video games that were well received -- in fact, I remember that "Balance of Power" got amazing reviews when it came out.
So not entirely barren in production.
I'm guessing that he's unhappy that people, when taught his ideas, don't follow them closely enough?
From the initial game setup (options) screen:
> People who play this game without reading the manual are wasting their time.
Cannot judge by this emulator but I agree... started playing and had no clue how to "do" things. But then I read on Wikipedia[1]...
> It was praised for its inventive non-action gameplay that was nevertheless exciting and distinct. It has been named by Computer Gaming World as one of the most innovative computer games of all time.
Apparently at some point events will start to take place, and then you'll get a chance to choose how you react.
[0] https://classicreload.com/balance-of-power.html
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_Power_(video_game)
I think you are right on this mainly being about his super valuable teachings not being utilized and this specific post not being about the author thinking he's a genius although he does think so[0].
Thus underpinning his actual conceit of genius.
> To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.
I also can think of times where "my" ideas were realized in the real world - but in no way can be credited to me, because other people also had those ideas, and someone implemented them. Was I a genius because I had these ideas, or did I just have some similar experiences and knowledge to others that had those ideas that (all but) inevitably will generate such an idea over a given timeline?
To really see how he views himself in comparison to others...
> I don't want my success or failure to be determined by the idiots who populate this planet.
I think really there's a fear here to put his ideas "out there" to go through the gauntlet of other smart people. If they never become popular, you can keep telling yourself how significant they are and it will not be disproved. But if you work to get your idea out there, and it still fails, maybe the idea had less value or significance than you assigned it. (Or you can still blame the "idiots on this planet.")
But maybe that's not the issue as much as:
I think the larger issue is that he really doesn't make the case (and maybe that's not the point) that these ideas are in fact as great as he makes them out to be. He mentions then and then goes on to mention some basic math, about the matrix... that's not convincing and raises all sorts of questions in my mind.
1. He made some commercial and critical successes. 2. His writings are studied in game design academia. 3. His reason to pursue what he is pursue, is a good one, he gave some awesome speech on GDC about it when he was about to quit the normal industry and attempt this, long story short, he is upset with the AAA-style games and wanted the game industry embrace the fact they can make interactive art, and should take more risks. 4. He created GDC in first place!
By the way, his goal is not completely nuts, "AI Dungeon" for example is close to what he wanted, he has a text to explain why he doesn't consider it a fully valid attempt though: the fact it is entirely AI generated using deep learning, what he wants is to create a tool that the end result is like AI Dungeon (For players) but that is actually some kind of authoring tool, where game designers can actually be creative and create something fun.
I personally think his goal is a cool one but I have no idea how to make it possible without heavy-handed AI in the middle.
“A change of perspective is worth 80 IQ points”