iDevGames

First, a confession: not long ago, I was too young (and ignorant, if you will) to know of Chris Crawford. If, like me, you commence reading ‘Game Design’ without knowing him, you will read the same book that I did, one in which a self-centered man with a nagging grudge against the whole industry writes about why his old Atari games are better than the modern games of today. Then I realized that Chris Crawford has supposedly been around for quite a while (since 1976) and my picture of him transformed into that of a grumpy old man trying desperately to make a comeback. Since I am still going to rate this book a ten-out-of-ten in spite of that, I was clearly wrong in my initial opinion. My only defense is that I started out by flipping open to the chapter “Random Sour Observations”, which must have set me in a bad mood. I just found the review notes I wrote on my first day with this book, and I feel like I’ve grown a hundred years with experience since then. Bound up in a very nice small format (unusually small for a computer book) is the greatest source of distilled and compressed genius I have ever come across, and mind you, I have a big book shelf.

The book is implicitly divided into three parts. The first is a brilliant discourse on game design in its most abstract cloak. The first chapter, “Definitions, definitions”, maps out the way from art to game, paving the road for a very clear appreciation of what gaming is only about. While this material is available in many game design books, most will only move through art, play and games, a few will paint puzzles into the picture and a handful will mention entertainment. Chris provides a seamless taxonomy of creativity from the most basic form of cave paintings to the game industry of today, and he stops at every station on the way. Devoting a chapter each to play, challenge, conflict and interactivity, he establishes a rock-solid definition of what constitutes a game, but also-and even more valuable-a definition of what a game is not. He delivers a clean run-down of inestimable worth.

At first, I was randomly hopping around the book, making sour remarks in my notebook about Crawford’s navel-gazing self-promotion. However, a desultory reading of this book gets harder every time you pick it up, because each time you read another twenty pages in a go, and I had serious trouble putting it away for more than a few seconds at a time. You see, no matter how disturbed I was by the book, I learned something on every page. After I decided to read the book from start to end, it didn’t leave my hands very much. Crawford’s negative tone is really just honesty and unclouded vision coming from almost thirty autodidactic years in the industry, and sometimes, it just hurts. But he’s right. He’s right.

Being a multi-aptitude person, Crawford makes this a textbook on many things, not just games. The second part clearly shows that there is no glass wall between games and the real world—they are the same thing. There is no earthly knowledge that cannot be applied to game design and there is no game design knowledge that can’t be applied to everyday life, and of this I have already made great use. Crawford is not your regular antisocial engineer, but includes a chapter on creativity. It is one that actually boosts creativity, which even Dr. Phil couldn’t pull off in a hundred years. It is a completely divine chapter, to the degree that it deserves a book of its own.

The third part of the book is a run-down of the games that Chris Crawford produced and designed. With my initially angry eyes, this looked like the ultimate ego trip: “I don’t want to read fourteen chapters of bragging about turn-of-the-century Atari games!” Moreover, I didn’t want the advice on the kind of arcade and board games he presented. However, when I had gotten to understand Crawford and where he’s coming from, these chapters proved to be the hard advice and hands-on knowledge that the abstract first half of the book lacked-regardless of genre. And it is not self-promotion; while he doesn’t hide his pride in describing the blazingly brilliant design desicions he made, he isn’t afraid of pointing out his own errors. He is a surgeon equipped with breakneck irony and self-sarcasm going ballistic on his own children in these chapters, and with X-ray vision and a very sharp scalpel, he teaches game design the hard way-although he already made the mistakes for you back in the Eighties. Very generous, that.

But then again, it doesn’t stop there. There’s more to this book than a explanation of gaming and a backlisting of Atari titles. Oh, yes. Interspersed between the pages is deep knowledge and experience about the whole industry, on people management, anecdotes, and programming, as well as a a little programming advice. The advice on piracy and cracker protection is not only very interesting and useful—it brings out the predator in anyone! And this is only a sample of what’s in the book; while reading it I found myself saying more than ten times: “This is the best part of this book!” Also, sprinkled over the margins of the pages are little lessons, numbered one through ninety-six, with the boiled-down content of the surrounding text. They are a very nice touch to the book, not only as a summary of the pages, but also as a road map for random reading. Just browse them until you find an interesting lesson, and then hit the text.

It’s funny—Crawford was almost ten years into the industry when I was born, and I lived all my life without hearing his name. After a week, I’m indebted to him. There’s clearly something special about this man. The thought-provoking material in ‘Game Design’ makes my head spin and I wonder why the games around me are so flat in their designs. These ideas impress me, but why do I feel reluctant to implement them? It might very well be that the medium as a whole is too young to support them, but then again, Crawford’s first book had a twenty-year life span. While this isn’t the ultimate book on game design (no book ever will be), it will most decidedly still be around in twenty years. If we extrapolate the evolution of gameplay in the last twenty years, the ideas herein will endure at least a hundred years.

As if this wasn’t enough, Chris is a tremendous author. He makes the pages sing, infusing this abstract subject with the kind of joy and sorrow that is usually reserved for bestseller novels.

Beware, though—if you’re not into abstract reasoning, the first half of the book will leave you confused. If so, however, you’ve got half a book left, packed with very hands-on stories of Crawford’s own game design solutions. Still, if you are a beginner game programmer who sees game programming and the very production phase as the primary obstacle now, then maybe this book isn’t for you. But, if you are the least bit interested into overcoming the difficulties of making a good game, as opposed to making any game, missing this book isn’t an option. If you are interested in game design, then you really should turn your entire book shelf to face the wall to keep you from straying from this bible.

I often hear that there’s nothing like experience, and that experience can’t be bought. Well, here it is: some twenty years of premium experience, only $39.99.

Related Books:

• ‘Chris Crawford on Game Design’ and ‘The Art of Interactive Design’ by Chris Crawford
• ‘Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design’ by Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams

• ‘Game Design: Theory and Practice’ by Richard Rouse, Richard Rouse

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