Well, maybe not forty years. But back in 1983 I published through the Atari Program Exchange the source code for my hit game Eastern Front (1941). I had put a lot of time into that source code package, documenting the code carefully and including lots of explanatory material so that readers could fully understand how it worked. There were a great many useful ideas in the source code, and I expected to see people using the ideas in subsequence software.
Much to my surprise, only one person, Kellyn Beeck, used any of the ideas in a product (Ghost Ship). As far as I know, nobody else ever applied any of the ideas in any product.
Balance of Power
A few years later I published my next big hit, Balance of Power. This was a big hit and got lots of press coverage. The next year, Microsoft Press asked if I was willing to write a book about it. I agreed, and it was published shortly thereafter. The book went into great detail describing the concepts behind the game as well as the algorithms used in it. Once again I was hopeful that people would use some of the ideas laid out in that book. Once again, nobody did, at least not as far as I know. In the 30+ years since the publication of that book, there have been a number of games about geopolitics, and from what I have seen, none of them have the depth of simulation in Balance of Power. Some of them have been fairly good, but I never got the impression that anybody was improving on my work.
Balance of the Planet
This is another simulation game I built, about problems of ecology and economics. It was organized in a hypertexty format to demonstrate how everything is interconnected. The equations used in the simulation were manipulable by the player who wished to improve upon the simulation. I felt that these two design elements — the hypertexty presentation of complex interconnected phenomena, and the organization of the underlying equations in such a way as to permit the user to delve deeper into the simulation — were important ideas that deserved further development. So far as I know, however, nobody ever used them.
The Journal of Computer Game Design
This is a periodical I published for ten years during the period from 1987 to 1996. I wrote more than half the material in it. Here’s the index page for the collection. Most of my contribution was rather theoretical in nature, but I also included a great many specific suggestions for game designers, such as Applause instead of Victory, Geometric AI for Patton Versus Rommel, Pac-Man = Zork, Synthetic Creations, How to Build a World, How to Build an Inverse Parser, Copy Protection Methods, Segmentation Considerations, Flawed Methods of Interactive Storytelling, Personality Modeling, Towards a Linguistic Approach to Game Design, and Little Languages. There were also plenty of small ideas scattered throughout. Yet I cannot recall any case of anybody explicitly implementing ANY of these ideas. I’m sure that some of the ideas I published must have worked their way through the collective unconscious of the community and emerged elsewhere, but I wouldn’t know about those.
Lectures
I have given hundreds of invited lectures all over the world. Here’s a map of places where I have lectured:
I’ve also given lectures via Skype to a bunch of other places. In these lectures I have hammered away at a number of ideas. The single most common point I have made I call “Crawford’s First Law of Software Design”:
Whenever designing any piece of software, the first question you must ask, and the question you must keep asking throughout the development process is, ‘What does the user DO? What are the verbs?’
I have seen little sign that this idea has gotten through to the game design community. I do occasionally see somebody refer to ‘verbs’ in describing a game design. It would seem that the idea has fallen on deaf ears.
Erasmatron and Storytron
These were my grand attempts at building interactive storytelling systems. Both failed. I deserve most of the blame for each of the failures; listing my mistakes would take a long time. But a secondary factor was the inability of people to jump onto the bandwagon and build story worlds. There were three people who made serious efforts to master the technology, but none of them quite succeeded, in one case because I mothballed the technology before he was finished. The important point, though, is that there were ONLY three people who made a serious attempt. Everybody else looked at it and backed away.
Erasmatazz.com
Lastly, there’s this website. Here you will find a mountain of ideas, as well as suggestions for game designs. There are about 3,000 pages of text here. That’s a lot of stuff! Yet I don’t get much feedback on it, and the site gets only a few score actual readers per month.
Conclusions
The moral of this story is that I have spent forty years trying to teach people how to design good games, and I have accomplished almost nothing. Yes, I have certainly inspired lots of people to aim higher, but when the rubber hits the road, they really can’t figure out how to actually implement all my grand and glorious admonitions. I’m like an inspirational speaker who gets people all worked up about how they can conquer the world, but never actually tells them how to do so.
Why have I failed so badly? Here are some hypotheses:
1. I’m a misunderstood genius. Gollygee, I’m just so astoundingly smart that nobody else can understand my cosmic genius. Nope, I don’t buy it. That’s egotistical vanity, not honest assessment. I’ve said and done enough dumb things to know better.
2. I’m a lousy teacher. Yes, my ideas are great, but I just can’t communicate them to others. I don’t buy this one, either, because I know that I’m a good teacher. I’ve been successful at explaining lots of complicated ideas to people. You should hear my explanation of black holes someday.
3. I’m wrong. I’ve flown off into Cloud Cuckoo Land, convincing myself of a wild, crazy set of ideas that have no connection to reality. I don’t buy this hypothesis, either, because there’s too much consistency within my ideas and with outside reality. There are just too many connections between what I’m talking about and a zillion other facts from the real world. It all fits together beautifully. It’s intensely frustrating to me to see such a tightly interconnected reality, and know that others cannot see it.
4. My wife Kathy offered another hypothesis that, while not primary in importance, is probably a contributing factor: I don’t sell my ideas. I don’t engage in any self-promotion. I don’t seek out lecture opportunities; all of my lectures are given in response to a request. I’m not interested in publishing books, because while they attract attention, they don’t have the bandwidth or permanence of websites. I just lay out my ideas here on this website, and allow the world to take them or leave them as it wishes. This surely has inhibited the takeup of my ideas. It doesn’t matter; I’m no prostitute.
5. This last hypothesis is the one I’m clinging to for the moment: I’m working outside the world view of society. This one is difficult to understand. Every culture has its intellectual context, a world view that guides all thinking within that culture. Most cultures have world views that are broad enough to handle almost any new idea, but every now and then an idea comes along that simply doesn’t fit into a culture’s world view.
A good example is the concept of zero. You will find this hard to believe, but the concept of zero was simply beyond the grasp of most people. It was developed by several mathematicians in India around 600 CE. It wouldn’t have gotten anywhere but for the fact that it made possible the numbering system we now use. Before that, all numbering systems were based on counting. You counted things: 12 sheep, 9 bushels of grain, 16 people. For much counting, you could use your fingers. You can’t count nothing; where’s the finger for zero? Numbers all started at one. Anything less was simply nothing. You can’t have a number for nothing because you can’t count what doesn’t exist.
The concept of zero makes sense only in the context of a numeration system based on decimal places. Remember your teacher in grade school talking about ‘the ones place’, ‘the tens place’, ‘the hundreds place’, and so on? The concept of zero makes sense ONLY when you use it in a number like 905. We have 9 in the hundreds place, nothing in the tens place, and 5 in the ones place. Thus, the concept of zero makes sense ONLY when you use this way of using numbers. All by itself, it makes no sense. People had to absorb two ideas simultaneously in order to grasp what zero means, but they weren’t used to the notion of two conjoined ideas. That’s why it took centuries for Europeans to learn to use Hindu-Arabic numerals.
Here’s another case in which the culture’s world view prevented it from grasping some concept: free will versus determinism. If God controls the universe and decides everything that happens, how can he blame you for any sin you commit? He made you do it! You can only be responsible for your actions if God can’t control them, but if God can’t control your actions, how can he control anything? If he can’t control anything, then why do we even bother worrying about this impotent wimp of a God?
Christian theologians wrestled with this conundrum for centuries. Floods of ink were spilled debating its resolution. Mighty debates thundered along for centuries. They never really figured it out. The problem lay in their world view: they couldn’t imagine a reality bereft of a God. Atheism provides the only resolution of the conundrum, yet atheism was utterly alien to their world view, so they simply couldn’t figure it out.
An easier way to understand the concept of world view is to consider the history of science. Science is perpetually expanding its world view as it makes new discoveries. This means that scientific discoveries that don’t fit into the current world view simply don’t make sense, even when they’re right. The classic example of this is the research of Gregor Mendel in the 1860s. Basically, Mendel worked out the basic laws of genetics all by himself. The problem was that the theory of evolution was just establishing itself and nobody saw much need for figuring out the details of how traits are transmitted from one generation to the next; they figured that the traits of the father and the mother just sort of mixed smoothly together in the child. It wasn’t until several decades after Mendel’s death that people realized that they needed a better explanation of genetic inheritance. They reproduced Mendel’s work and then realized that he had beat them to the punch by several decades.
Gregor Mendel was no cosmic genius; he was a moderately smart fellow who just happened to approach the problem from a different angle. Perhaps he worked outside the world view of the scientific community because he wasn’t steeped in that world view.
If Albert Einstein had attempted to publish his ideas in 1885 rather than 1905, they wouldn’t have been published—scientists would have dismissed his ideas as crazy rubbish. The scientific world view in 1885 simply excluded the possibility of Einstein’s ideas about the photoelectric effect and relativity. But twenty years later, his ideas made sense in the world view of the time.
Another example comes from China’s rejection of Western rationalism. China’s intellectual history concentrated on social and ethical issues, not scientific ones. China never developed logic, science, or technology the way that the West did. China did develop lots of technology, but not by the scientific methods used in the West. Rather, China’s technological progress was based on endless trial and error leading to a long line of incremental improvements. China never accepted the Western concept of rationalism. What broke the world view was the atom bomb; when Mao realized that China desperately needed scientists who could keep up with the West, he opened the doors to scientific education. Slowly, Western rationalism has been penetrating the Chinese world view, but China still has a long way to go.
I could go on and on with examples from the history of ideas. (An excellent introduction to intellectual history is “Ideas” by Peter Watson.) The basic concept is simple: An idea has to be more than right to be embraced by a culture; it has to fit into the cultural context.
Thus, I find myself in the position of others who came up with ideas that just didn’t fit into the cultural context. I don’t think that my oddball point of view reflects towering genius; I just happened to have some experiences in my intellectual upbringing that led me in an oddball direction. I’m the intellectual analogue of the weird genetic mutation that just happens to come along a bit ahead of its time.
Gregor Mendel, when asked by a friend about the disappointing response to his research, wrote “My time will come.” I share his confidence. I know that my ideas are valuable and that, as civilization begins to understand what computers truly mean, people will come to understand the ideas I have been promulgating. Writing was invented over 5,000 years ago, and the implications of writing are still being worked out by civilization. I expect that the implications of computers will take a bit less time to be worked out.