Table of Contents
Why a Journal of Computer Game Design?
Chris Crawford
Was Pong our Fred Ott’s Sneeze?
Doug Sharp
The Interaction Circuit
Chris Crawford
Visual Impact
Kellyn Beeck
Should You Get an Agent?
Chris Crawford
Whence Come Computer Game Designers?
Chris Crawford
Call for Articles
Chris Crawford
Editor Chris Crawford
Subscriptions The Journal of Computer Game Design is published six times a year.
To subscribe to The Journal, send a check or money order for $30 to:
The Journal of Computer Game Design
5251 Sierra Road
San Jose, CA 95132
Submissions Material for this Journal is solicited from the readership. Articles should address artistic or technical aspects of computer game design at a level suitable for prefessionals in the industry. Reviews of games are not published by this Journal. All articles must be submitted electronically, either on Macintosh disk or via modem. No payments are made for articles.
Why a Journal of Computer Game Design?
Chris Crawford
Computer games have been with us for nigh unto fifteen years now, and in the last seven years we have seen a growing community of professionals working in the field of computer game design. After the wild go-go years of 1981-83 and the even wilder crash of 84-85, things have stabilized. There are now several thousand people around the world working on the creation of computer games.
Despite the fact that many of us know of each other’s existence, we have no means of communicating our ideas to one another. We have no forum for discussion, no way to individually or collectively express ourselves. The regular computer magazines refuse to publish material on game design. Even the magazines devoted to computer games are uninterested in design issues, preferring instead to provide reviews and strategy tips.
The lack of an appropriate forum hurts our community deeply. It deprives us of the opportunity to hone our skills through open discussion. Each of us must learn this craft the hard way — alone. Each of us must repeat the mistakes of others, for there is no way to communicate our mistakes to those following in our footsteps. The only way we can learn from each other right now is to look at each other’s work, an exercise akin to studying architecture by looking at buildings. If you don’t look inside and study the internal mechanics, you really don’t learn as much as you’d like to learn.
A second problem we face is an utter lack of familiarity with the realities of doing business. There are so many variables in our business, so many difficult choices to make. Which target machine should we support? How large a royalty should we ask for? What kind of advance is reasonable? How many units should a good game sell? This type of information is readily available to publishers, but we designers seldom get more than a few morsels of information. We enter negotiations in a state of ignorance. That’s no way to run a business.
Then there is the matter of perceived professionalism. This is a personal peeve of mine. I have gotten sick and tired of reading silly articles in the press about computer games. Sometimes they wax gloriously enthusiastic about some stupid game that I know to be seriously flawed. Other times they quote some publishing house executive (who has never designed a game) on matters of game design. Or what about the handling of big name people from other fields who try their hands at game design? The problem here is that the press and the public do not perceive that computer game design is a serious profession requiring talent, expertise, and experience to master. The common perception is that computer game design is a fun hobby that kids play at before they grow up to become real programmers. And who are we to complain? We have done nothing whatever to combat this misperception.
The most important price we have paid, though, is in the lack of a sense of community among ourselves. We are a social group, with common interests, common problems, and common needs. We need to work together to address our common problems. We are competitors, that is true, but we compete for territory in a universe bounded not by physical limits but by the limitations of our own creativity. There is plenty of room for all of us.
Purpose
This is the pilot issue of The Journal of Computer Game Design. The purpose of this Journal is to foster the development of the art of computer game design. It is a forum for game designers to talk to each other and the world. Such a forum, I hope, will give us the opportunity to tackle some of the problems cited above.
Operation
I will publish this Journal every other month. Each issue will be 12 to 16 pages long. Subscription rates will be $30 per year. Free copies of the Journal will be sent to all major computer game publishers and magazines.
Editorial Policy
I see my role as Policeman of the Forum, not Guardian of the Truth. Truth will be provided in its many flavors by the subscribers. More on this later.
What kind of articles do I want? Well, what kind of articles do you want? We need articles on theoretical issues in game design: the role of conflict in games, characterization, artificial intelligence, and many more issues. We need “Designer’s Reviews” of subfields in game design, tracing the development of each subfield as expressed in the latest games in that subfield. We need opinion pieces to sort out our attitudes on such issues as copy protection, relations with publishers, and the best way to organize a design team.
We must recognize that almost all of what we do is intensely subjective, and is therefore resistant to the type of absolute proof that we would like in matters that are felt intensely. My role, then, is to encourage forceful and fair debate. I will wield my red pen (red mouse?) against only the most outrageous and patently wrongheaded opinions. The broad diversity of opinion in matters related to game design demands a laissez-faire approach to unconventional opinions.
I will, however, exercise my editorial powers more aggressively with material that fails to live up to its potential. Regardless of whether I personally agree or disagree with an article, I want to see it present its case well. I expect this requirement to cause considerable consternation to those game designers whose mastery of English leaves something to be desired. To you I say: “Your opinions are important; we’ll have to work something out”.
Another area in which I will exercise negative control is in matters related to individual publishers, designers, or games. I will not permit this Journal to become a vehicle for any person to vent ill will against any publisher, person, or product. Indeed, I am nervous about any material that refers to any publisher, person, or product by name. I would prefer to keep the discussion at a higher level of generality, referring to individual cases only as examples.
The “Journal-as-forum” view implies that the bulk of the editorial content will be provided by you, the subscribers. This actually takes three forms. First is the matter of editorial direction. While I will not abdicate my editorial responsibilities, I will be needing your ongoing suggestions for articles for the Journal and the best mix of topic areas.
I will also be reaching out and touching you, asking for an article submission. By subscribing to this Journal, you are acknowledging a weak commitment to make a contribution to the content of the Journal. I may not hit you up this year; I may never hit you up. It depends on how many articles are submitted. But don’t be surprised if you receive an imperious letter demanding to know when your article for the Journal will be ready.
Finally, we can all profit from “articles-in-aggregate” — polls. There are a number of matters of intense interest to all of us that cannot be handled individually. The best example of this is the delicate issue of income. Wouldn’t you like to know how much money a typical game designer makes? We could answer that question through an anonymous poll of the readership.
The Pitch
So here it is: the pilot issue of The Journal of Computer Game Design. It isn’t as good as I’d like it to be — far too much of the material comes from my own hand. I expect it to get better as we get a broader base of submissions from the readership. And now I ask you to subscribe. I want $30 of your money for a year’s subscription. I think that I can justify that expense to you on the value of the ideas and opinions you’ll read here. I know that I can justify the expense as a contribution to the formation of a nucleus around which our professional community can begin to crystallize.
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Was Pong Our Fred Ott's Sneeze?
or Lessons and Red Herrings from the Silver Screen
by Doug Sharp
[Doug has a background in teaching and literature, and did a great deal of conversion work for CDC’s Plato system be he cocreated ChipWits, a delightful program that illustrated concepts of programming. He also designed and programmed Cinemaware's The King of Chicago, published by Mindscape.]
In 1894 a gentleman named Fred Ott sneezed his way into cinema history. Fred Ott's Sneeze, filmed by Edison's Kinetoscope, is generally regarded as the first film. Within decades the cinema was producing enduring masterpieces. Can we hope the art of computer games will develop as quickly?
Certainly computer games will replace cinema and television as the popular art form, perhaps in our lifetime. What game designer wouldn't like to be accorded the status of a movie director? Which of us wouldn't like to show our ability to make great Art despite the corrupting influences of fame, power, and money?
It is a commonplace in our little industry to draw parallels between our medium and the cinema (the cinema being more prestigious than television). When trying to pump up my own image in a group of people who have just learned what I do for a living and who don't know whether to laugh or change the subject, I compare games with movies, hoping they will equate my position as a computer game “director” with that of a movie director. Yes, I'll say, it's an exciting time to be working in computer games. It's like the early days of the silent movies, when people didn't really know what the heck to do with the medium. At least I'm that honest.
I have lurked in discussions in BIX's game design forum about just where today's computer games stand alongside the timetable of cinema history. When will we have our Birth of a Nation, our M, our Citizen Kane?
I currently labor for the Cinemaware line, so this media metaphor is close to my heart (and purse). In designing and programming The King of Chicago, I had to decide what it meant to make a computer game be cinematic and how the project fit into my career as a software artist.
Being cinematically semi-literate (except for an intimate acquaintance with the history of ganster movies) I would make myself look foolish if I were to attempt to review movie history. I would also play false to the thesis that emerged as I began to write - that the differences between the history of cinema and the future of computer gaming are more interesting and pertinent than the similarities. So in place of a comparative historical survey grounded in solid research and long reflection and offered in a spirit of selfless rationality, I offer this hodgepodge of wild opinions and hasty conjecture suspended on jets of hot air and tainted with blatant self-promotion.
Was Pong* computer gaming's Fred Ott's Sneeze? As much as I would like to bear balm for all our egos (I am an optimistic, cheerful fellow, much given to praise), I have to cast my bucket of ice water. I believe our Fred Ott's Sneeze lies decades, perhaps centuries, in the future, when the first AI personality consistently passes a Turing test.
I don't assert this to devalue the work of our generation of game designers, nor to get myself off the hook from trying my damnedest to do great stuff, but to supply some corrective perspective to thinking about what is possible and what is desirable in the work ahead of us.
One (admittedly arbitrary) measure of the maturation of cinema art is the time between Sneeze (1894) and Welles' Citizen Kane (1940), considered by many critics the film of films. It is tempting to hope that our art form might develop along a similar timescale so that young, healthy designers among us might live to create works of high computer gaming art. Regrettably, I foresee a maturation timescale for computer gaming more like that of literature — the millenia between the first gratuitous lie told around a campfire and, say, Homer.
Cinema has changed remarkably little since its beginning. The first audiences sat and watched a film; now we sit and watch and listen. Force Fellini or Lucas to work with the movie technology available in 1904 and the result might well be a gripping film. The full power of the cinematic medium was available within decades of its birth.
While the relationship between the film audience and the film is virtually unchanged in a century, I grope and boggle when I try to imagine how players will interact with computer games in half that span from now, when some of us will still be working. When I try to formulate the relationship between a player and a "mature" computer game the best I can speculate is that the game will live — inhabited by sentient, richly complex beings. I have little hope of playing such a game, much less writing one.
There is much fun to be had and much good work to be done in the meantime, but I must differ with those who would be keepers of the holy flame of computer gaming art. Anyone who is seriously concerned with advancing computer gaming should enroll at Stanford or MIT in AI to do the hard work needed to make these glorified calculators think. Those of us left trying to make a career out of producing commercial computer games had best be tolerant of the successes and failures of our cohorts and humble in our aims and claims.
This isn't to argue for lower critical standards in our field. We sorely need better criticism. Nor do I argue for humility to deflect criticism from my own work. As a Cinemaware designer I proudly stand for the triumph of form over substance and the scavenging of old art forms in pursuit of cheap effects and filthy lucre.
One of our most noble tasks is to divert the fortune spent on cinema and television into feeding the growth of our art (and artists). Our machines will surpass film and television in graphic and aural quality well within our working lives; therefore we should have at our disposal the full range of cinematic effects, at a minimum. The modeling of computer games after films is an important experiment, because how can we surpass film as an art form if we cannot equal it?
Computer games can be classified as a visual/temporal medium, as can drama, cinema, and the tube. Most mainstream artworks in those three media tell a story with actors. Storytelling and acting are skills I am committed to exploring in my games. I doubt that I can exhaust the possibilities of dramatic games in my working career.
I know I won't progress far in this genre without a plan to improve my software tools and gain creative experience over a number of products and decades. I had been working on an actor animation and drama scripting system for over a year before I signed with Cinemaware. The King of Chicago is the first game I developed with my Dramaton/Narraton game production system.
My Dramaton system is designed to create synthetic actors who can show facial emotion while moving in a three dimensional environment of settings and props. I feel it is crucial to the commercial and artistic success of interactive narration to develop convincing graphic characters.
My Narraton system is designed to implement what I call modular narrative, which I describe in cinematic terms. Imagine a projectionist sitting in a projection booth surrounded by hundreds of film clips, each of which concerns dramatic interactions among a cast of actors, and each of which the projectionist has memorized. The Narraton projectionist assembles a meaningful story by choosing and running a sequence of clips.
In the case of The King of Chicago there are 278 clips ranging in length from 30 seconds to 6 minutes, containing over 8 hours of scripted action, and including over 20 different endings. Unlike film clips, most of the Narraton clips are filled with hard and soft branches. Since a game lasts from 5 to 90 minutes, a player should feel that the story space is quite large.
I am uninterested in linear storylines punctuated with puzzles. I am similarly uninterested in recreating verbatim the narrative devices of the cinema. I intend to steal only what is appropriate to our interactive medium.
Narraton is designed to facilitate game production by creative teams of artists, musicians, scriptwriters, and programmers under the direction of a designer. I anticipate systematic coordination of creative people to be one of the greatest challenges facing game designers as bigger budgets and higher standards create an army of specialists in our industry.
Both Dramaton and Narraton are designed to be machine independent. Currently running on Macintosh and Amiga, they will soon be up on the Apple GS and are easily portable to other 16-bit machines. From the start the system was designed to scale up as a production and delivery tool on storage-intensive systems such as CDI. I estimate that 60% of the Dramaton/Narraton code which let me produce The King of Chicago will be reused in my next project. I feel that this portability and extensibilty are crucial to my economic success as a game designer, and will allow me to concentrate on developing more complex characters, player interfaces, and story spaces.
My career game plan, my plan for contributing what I can to the art of computer games, is to return again and again to the same problem: how to tell a story with a computer. Each time I return I will have better tools and more experience as an artist. While I admire designers who tackle a fresh problem with each project, I couldn't make the progress I need to make if I took that approach.
I believe that, while our generation of game designers will never get to use the full power of our chosen medium, the power to create life, we can and will surpass cinema in expressive power and entertainment value. Striving to stretch our art through exploring the uses of cinematic effects is important at this stage in the artistic and commercial development of computer gaming.
I end in a paradox and a fit of optimism. We may never get to produce computer gaming's Fred Ott's Sneeze but I expect to play and hope to design games which equal Citizen Kane in artistic merit.
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*I didn't choose Pong out of ignorance of computer gaming's hallowed history, but because it made a pretty title. I know Mssr. Jacquard played tic-tac-toe with his looms and Lady Ada Lovelace was debugging a whist game when she shuffled off.
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The Interaction Circuit
by Chris Crawford
One useful way to view the nature of computer games is through the concept of the “interaction circuit”. This is the flow of information between the player and the computer in the course of a game. Consider first the flow of information between artist and audience in any other artistic medium:
Artist ======> Audience
Artist talks, audience listens. It’s a one-way flow of information, presumably justified by the vast intellectual and moral superiority of the artist. With a computer game, though, we have something entirely new and, I think, much superior:
I call this little diagram “the interaction circuit”, and it illustrates the nature of the relationship between the game and the player. A closer examination of this circuit suggests some guidelines for good game design.
I believe that the quality of the game-experience is in some way monotonically related to the amount of information flowing around this circuit. In other words, the more stuff that moves around this circuit, the more intense or interesting the game will be to the player.
Now, how do we achieve this goal of maximal information flow through the interaction circuit? The trick, I think, is to maximize the performance of each of the four nodes in the loop. We want to design each of the four nodes to offer maximum horsepower for driving lots of information around in the loop. We also want to insure that no single node acts as a bottleneck in the information flow. I shall examine each of the nodes in turn.
I begin with the topmost node, “computer talks”. This is primarily what happens on the screen, with the possibility of additional information transfer through the medium of sound. This is the easiest node for computer game designers to understand, because it is most like the old-fangled means of imparting information (“I talk, you listen”). For this reason and others, this node is the one that gets most of the attention from the designer and most of the resources of the computer. Some games devote almost all of their total resources to this single node. It’s a real shame, too, for this is the most uncomputerlike aspect of computer game design. Why do people bother making computer games that are really little more than movies or novels, especially when they’re such lousy movies or novels? An old military maxim is “Fight on the ground of your own choosing”, meaning that one should fight only under the circumstances best suited to the particular strengths of one’s own forces. It seems foolish to me to try to compete with movies with our graphic displays, or novels with program code, instead of utilizing the one thing that they don’t have: processing power.
The second node is “human thinks”. A game designer is tempted to write this one off; after all, that’s not my department, right? Well, no, it isn’t, but that doesn’t mean that we can ignore it. Exactly what is the human going to think about? What part of his brain are we going to stimulate? In the early years of the industry, we appealed exclusively to that least human of brain structures, the cerebellum. Later on, we decided that we would appeal to the analytic skills with puzzles and wargames. I suggest that there is a great deal more human mental activity that we have not yet touched in our games, and further that, if we can learn how to challenge the most personal aspects of human thought — namely, intuition — we will accomplish a great deal more with our games.
Sadly, the emphasis on technical expertise in our profession tends to mask the need for greater emphasis on human thought. Programmers who have memorized the syntax of every command in UNIX do not understand the fundamentals of linguistics. Designers who know all about the fine points of display techniques on CRTs do not know the difference between a rod and a cone. People who can talk all day about bus architectures blink when you mention the corpus callosum. I think it would behoove us, as mediators of the human/computer interaction, to balance our knowledge of both parties.
The third node is “human talks”. This is the node that is, in so many games, the real bottleneck that plugs up the free flow of information through the circuit. Imagine a typical shoot-em-up computer game in progress: the computer is saying things like, ‘big green spaceship flying through space, brilliant yellow fireballs arcing toward you, red and orange explosions, black space, stars...’ What does the human player get to say in response? ‘Up’, ‘down’, ‘right’, ‘left’, or ‘fire’. How can you get any kind of rich interaction with so limited a set of inputs?
There are, of course, lots of excuses for not providing richer inputs to the human player. Perhaps the human is restricted to an input device such as a joystick that does not naturally say anything more than the aforementioned five verbs. There is also the serious problem that the human player must be able to learn any interface language that the game uses. It is much easier to understand the computer’s output than to master a new input system, especially when the former is visual and the latter is essentially tactile. These excuses, however, mean only that game designers must focus much more attention on the problem of facilitating the player’s input into the game. A properly designed game allows the player to say just as much back to the computer as it says to him. Ideally, the player would have exactly the same expressive language available to him as is available to the computer; this, however, is difficult to achieve in practice.
The fourth node in the interaction loop is “computer processes”. This is the artificial intelligence used in the game, and it plays a vital role in closing the loop. The computer’s processing is the only thing that relates the player’s inputs to the computer’s outputs. That relationship must make sense, it must be interesting, and it must be believable. If I say to the computer-character Jezebel, “Jezebel, my love, I must do my duty on the field of honor,” Jezebel had damn well better burst into tears. It will certainly require a hefty amount of processing for Jezebel to figure out the meaning of my statement and her reaction. Yet, without that processing, the loop is broken. Again, many games are weak in this area and suffer for it.
The interaction loop is not the definitive or final means of assesssing a computer game. It is a useful mental tool that can expose some of the flaws in a design. It suggests to me that a great many game designers would do better to concentrate less attention on the “computer talks” node and more attention on the other three.
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Visual Impact
by Kellyn Beeck
[Although Kellyn made his professional game-design debut only this last winter with the release of Defender of the Crown for the Amiga, his credentials extend much further back. He wrote and produced television news documentaries for a number of years, learning a sense for the visual display of information that few programmers develop. Kellyn bought himself an Atari 400 in the early years of the personal computer boom and went on to design and program a game called Ghost Ship in assembly language for that machine. Its topic was the campaign of the battleship Bismark and utilized all the major features of the Atari computers. Sadly, Kellyn’s program was never published; after some peregrinations his design for Defender of the Crown was published by Cinemaware.]
Great movies have visual impact; why not computer games? Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon share the unforgettable visual impact of Arthur Edeson's black-and-white cinematography. Gone with the Wind etched William Cameron Menzies' sweeping vision of the burning of Atlanta into the American consciousness. Movies rely on images to communicate with audiences; for the most part, the success of a movie depends upon the skill with which the director uses images on film.
This fact stands in sharp contrast with the path to success in another visual medium: the personal computer.
Since its appearance as a new medium ten years ago, the personal computer has been used primarily to process text and numeric data. During this time the images on computer screens have remained primitive compared with those of established visual media like movies and television. The majority of successful software makers have relied instead on the computer's one unique characteristic--interactivity--to entertain people and help them accomplish their work. Since most computers have been used in offices, most improvements in software have centered on applying interactivity to text and data processing. The development of graphic displays and graphics interactivity took second place. After all, it's more difficult technically to manipulate pictures inside a computer than it is to process numbers and text.
For an industry trying desperately to reach a mass audience, the failure to develop high-quality interactive graphics is tragic. Americans are used to the image characteristics of television and cinema, and a new medium must at least equal these expectations to gain mass market acceptance.
But computer technology is catching up. New 68000-based computers have made it easier for computer games to deliver high-quality graphics displays. The next step will be DVI (Digital Video Interactive) and CD-I (Compact Disc-Interactive), combining television-quality video with the processing power of the computer and the huge storage capacity of a CD. Then, movie-like visual impact can be included in the computer game designer's toolbox. And, just as important, computer games can have the visual characteristics necessary to meet the expectations of a mass audience used to television and cinema.
The Visual Challenge
Game designers may wish to ignore the computer's improving ability to process pictures and sound. But we can't ignore it forever. Until the audio-visual capabilities of computers improve enough to compete with movies and television, computer games will remain a step below the mass media. So when the big electronics firms finally deliver computers with TV quality video and CD quality audio, we will be faced with both an opportunity and a challenge.
The challenge will be to develop entertaining ways for game players to interact with "real-life" pictures. And included with the challenge is an opportunity for computer games to gain mass-market acceptance. When the audio-visual capabilities of computers catch up with movies and television, game designers at last will be able to reach a mass audience, along with its intrinsic artistic and financial opportunities. It will be relatively easy to make games with the vacuous "gee whiz" quality of the early computer games. Much more difficult will be the challenge of making games that are fun and intellectually stimulating at the same time.
Game Depth Versus Visual Impact
In the meantime, we need to spend time learning how to use graphics in ways that further the development of computer game design. Then we'll be better prepared to face the challenge of television-quality graphics.
Computer games already have entered an era in which realistic-looking images are possible, if time-consuming, to create. The game designer is faced with a fundamental choice: whether or not to devote precious development time to graphics processing at the expense of game play. He must decide whether such graphics should be used and how they can be incorporated in his design without sacrificing game depth.
It has been suggested that better games can be designed only without the encumbrance of useless cosmetic trappings. Let's consider an example. If a designer creates a great espionage game, but implements it without using television-quality graphics, the player can experience the life of a spy mentally through the realism of the game's simulation, text descriptions and representational graphics. But imagine how different the same game might be with realistic graphics, true-to-life images which enable the player to experience the world of the spy visually, without sacrificing the rich detail of the original simulation. The player then could step into the spy's shoes to see and experience his world first hand.
But the designer's life isn't that simple. Picture next what the game would be like if the pretty pictures used a disproportionate amount of the computer's resources and forced the designer to compromise the depth of the espionage game; instead of a great spying simulation, the consumer gets little more than a glorified arcade game. For a vivid example, you need only compare the Amiga and Commodore 64 versions of "Defender of the Crown." The Amiga version shipped in time for Christmas with finished graphics but unfinished game play. The Commodore 64 version represents the finished version of the game, and it divides the computer's resources more evenly between graphics and depth of game play. Try both versions and you'll agree that the experience of viewing the Amiga version's terrific graphics doesn't make up for the loss of game play.
In this context, the decision to use graphics becomes one of relative value. Which will most effectively enhance the player's suspension of disbelief, the inclusion of another full-screen picture or the addition of an artificial intelligence routine? The answer depends in part on the topic of the game. A game about global politics would be improved less by the addition of realistic-looking pictures of insurgents and nuclear weapons than by the inclusion of another AI routine; on the other hand, a game about the romantic world of medieval England can bring a colorful page of history to life if it includes movie-like scenes of tournaments and sieges.
Before long, technological improvements will enable computer games to use television-quality graphics displays as a matter of routine. Then, personal computers will be equally capable of providing interactivity and visual impact. No longer will we as game designers be forced to choose between graphics and game play. We'll have twice the weaponry of our poorer cousins, the film directors, who'll be forced to settle for visual impact alone. But this power also brings responsibility. We'll need to give careful thought to wielding this two-edged sword in every game we design, making sure we deliver great interactivity as well as powerful visual impact.
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Should You get an Agent?
by Chris Crawford
Some of us have agents; others don’t. Should you get an agent? The answer depends on your own strengths and weaknesses. If you see yourself as primarily an artist or a programmer, then you probably should get an agent; if you see yourself as primarily an entrepreneur, then you probably shouldn’t.
What does an agent do?
An agent performs a variety of services for his/her client. An agent will first advise you on the relative merits of your various options. That is, the agent should be able to tell you what kinds of options will probably sell, and what options probably won’t. This can be a painful experience if you are out of touch with the commercial marketplace, but a good agent will warn you if you contemplate actions unlikely to yield fruit.
Once you decide upon your course of action, your agent will try to sell it to a publisher. A good agent will have both contacts and credibility with all the major publishers in the industry. This is important; an agent can get your game a better hearing than it would have gotten if you were working on your own.
If all goes well, a publisher will express interest in your product and initiate negotiations to acquire it. Your agent will carry out these negotiations, making sure that your interests are protected. A good agent will insure that the negotiations proceed smoothly, quickly, and in your best interests.
Once the contract is signed, the agent can perform further services during the development period. Sometimes disputes arise during development of software; a good agent can help resolve these disputes and prevent them from escalating into deal-killers.
Finally, after the game is completed and the publisher is shipping it, the agent insures that the royalties are paid in a fair and timely fashion. Few beginning game designers realize how difficult it is to collect their royalties. All too often the payments end up being delayed by 30 or 60 days, or perhaps one finds mysterious deductions for odd reasons. An agent can help reduce these problems.
An agent can also perform a valuable service by telling you when your own expectations are out of line. Many good software deals have fallen through at the last minute because the designer foolishly insisted on some ridiculous or impossible requirement. An agent can save you from yourself. Similarly, an agent can lay to rest your darkest fears. Ignorance often breeds paranoia, and it is all too easy for the green game designer to see dark shadows lurking behind every minor snag. An agent can allay your fears with assurances that you can trust. After all, the agent is on your side.
For these various services, an agent will take 10% or 15% of your gross income. Is it worth it? That depends. If you are a solid businessperson, understand contracts, negotiations, and accounting practices, and you are assertive enough to make things happen the way they should, then you probably don’t need an agent. If you fall short in any of these areas, an agent can well be worth the money. I am a weak businessman, understand contracts moderately well, do not understand negotiation or accounting practices at all, and am a total wimp when it comes to assertiveness. My agent takes 15% of my gross income and is worth every penny he gets.
How to choose an agent
An agent will be your business partner; choosing a good one is absolutely vital to your success. Here are some factors to consider in choosing an agent:
How good a reputation does this person have in the industry? If you know any acquisition editors at any publishers, call them and ask for their opinions on the agent. Don’t assume that agents and publishers have an adversarial relationship; praise from a publisher is a good sign. Ask the agent for a list of his/her clients. This list should have an impressive collection of authors. If the client list is short or contains a lot of unknown authors, this agent does not have a great deal of credibility in the industry. Call some of the agent’s clients and ask them how satisfied they are with the agent’s work. Ask the agent to provide a list of some of the software deals that s/he made. If they’re all for unknown products or products that failed in the marketplace, that’s a bad sign.
Now talk to the agent. Can you work with this person? Do you feel that information and ideas flow freely and smoothly between the two of you? Or is there some warping of thought, some distortion of ideas as they pass between you? This is vitally important — the most important skill of an agent is bringing two parties onto the same wavelength. If you can’t get onto the same wavelength with your agent, s/he will never be able to get you onto the same wavelength with a publisher.
Finally, the most important question: deep down inside, do you TRUST this agent? If not, do not, under ANY circumstances, sign on with him/her. Trust is the stock-in-trade of agenting; if you cannot feel confidence and trust, neither will a publisher.
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Whence Come Computer Game Designers?
Professional computer game design is definitely one of the odder avocations to which a bright young person can aspire, and the realization of such an aspiration is made more difficult by the absence of any apparent path the leads directly into the field. After all, there are no academic programs in computer game design, nor even any such thing as a “Chris Crawford’s College for Famous Computer Game Designers” to which an eager young hopeful might send his money for a useless diploma. You can’t sit in a drugstore in Silicon Valley hoping to be discovered. How then do people get into the business of computer game design? I put the question to several noted game designers, and here is how they answered:
Keelyn Beeck [designer of Defender of the Crown]
Kellyn describes himself as a lifelong game addict; he played Risk and many of the early Avalon-Hill games as a boy. In college he majored in Journalism, after a semester-long fling with Computer Science. His first job was for a television station as a reporter and features producer. In 1980, he bought an Atari 400. It was only a matter of time before he tried his hand at computer game design and his first effort, Ghost Ship, was so impressive that it earned him a job with Epyx in 1984 even if the game itself was never published. He left Epyx in 1985 to do freelance work and shortly thereafter began work on Defender of the Crown.
Dan Bunten [designer of M.U.L.E., Seven Cities of Gold, Robot Rascals, and more…]
Dan has been an avid player of games since childhood, but he was never satisfied with the games that he had. He recalls boyhood redesigns of two old Milton-Bradley games, Battle-Cry and Broadside, the better to suit his notions of what made them fun. In college he majored in Industrial Engineering, which involved heavy use of systems simulation with computers. His very first job had him writing a simulation of garbage truck routes. At night he wrote games on the mainframe, just for fun. (Presumably of a garbage truck wandering through the city, gobbling garbage cans, avoiding pursuing scavanger-ghosts?) When personal computers became available, Dan jumped in; he bought his first machine, an Apple II, in 1978. He sold his first game in late 1979, but made no money from the effort. After several more designs he linked up with Strategic Simulations and did several games for them before going to Electronic Arts.
Chris Crawford [hey, that’s me!]
I too played games heavily as a boy, but my real love affair started in 1966 when a friend introduced me to Avalon-Hill’s Blitzkrieg game. After that I played the Avalon-Hill games avidly, and then the wargames of Simulations Publications, Inc (SPI). All through college and grad school I played these wargames intensively even as I studied physics. Convinced that computers were the only way to solve some of the problems of wargame design, I wrote my first game in Fortran on the computer at the school where I was teaching physics. When microcomputers first came out, I decided that I must have one. In those days, personal computers required that you be pretty handy with a soldering iron, so I taught myself digital electronics and learned how to build boards, interface circuits, power supplies, and the like. I got my first computer in January 1977, taught myself 6502 machine language, and had my first game up by February. After several more games, I landed a job at Atari in 1979 as a professional computer game designer.
Jon Freeman [designer of Archon, Temple of Apshai, and numerous other games…]
Jon’s interest in games considerably predates most other game designers — he was playing Avalon-Hill games in 1959 and remembers buying early versions of Tactics II, D-Day, and Waterloo. In the early 60’s, while still in high school, he designed his first game and sent it off to Milton-Bradley (they didn’t take it). He continued playing games avidly and designing his own all through the 60’s. At the same time he began a career as a writer, selling his first novel in 1971 and a book on boardgames that was published in 1975. All through the 70’s Jon played the Starving Artist, supporting himself with occasional writing and odd jobs, but continuing his avid interest in all forms of games. In 1979, he joined with Jim Connelley in designing Starfleet Orion, one of the very first strategy games released on a microcomputer. Thus was born Automated Simulations, which lives on as Epyx. Jon has been designing computer games ever since.
Doug Sharp [designer of ChipWits and The King of Chicago]
Doug played his first computer game in 1962 when he tried out a simple reaction-game that his father had made on the mainframe at work. His first attempt exposed a bug in the game. He wrote his first computer program at about the same time, a short program in assembly language. But his real love was literature, and although he studied Astronautical Engineering at Stanford, he soon left to work on a novel. He studied literature and art for the next few years, including a six-month stint at Oxford. He found work as a fifth-grade teacher, still working on his novels, still showing no interest in computers or games. But then in 1980 an Apple II showed up at his school and he started taking it home, teaching himself 6502 programming. This led him into a lucrative series of contracts converting Plato educational software to microcomputers for CDC. He finally got far enough ahead to work on his own game, a collaboration that led to ChipWits.
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Call For Articles
You are probably quite sick of reading the words of Chris Crawford by now; after all, they occupy about three-quarters of the total space in this Journal. I assure you that, notwithstanding my well-deserved reputation for stealing the spotlight, this disproportionate allocation of space was truly not my intention. At least two third-party articles that were planned for this issue were aborted, one by an act of God, the other by an act of an editor-who-thinks-he-is-God.
This Journal needs your articles! If you read something in these pages with which you strongly disagree, put together a rebuttal article. Perhaps you have an idea you’d like to share with other professionals in the field — write it up for the Journal!
Articles can be short or long; the primary consideration I will apply in judging articles for inclusion is their information density. A long article had better say a lot of interesting things; a short letter need not be so informative.
And while you’re at it, be sure to tell your professional acquaintances about the Journal. I can only reach so many people directly; word of mouth will reach more people than I can. Besides, the more subscriptions I get, the sooner I can lower the subscription rate to a more reasonable and less conservative figure, or at least improve the quality level to better match the price.