Crawford's work is worthy of study, as is the causation for why he experienced external failure. It embodies the "simulationist" aesthetic of game design: given enough modelled parameters, something emergent and interesting will happen. This was a trend of the 20th century: computers were new and interesting, and simulations did work when you asked them to solve physics problems and plan logistics. Why wouldn't it work for narrative?
But then you play the games, and they're all so opaque. You have no idea what's going on, and the responses to your actions are so hard to grasp. But if you do figure it out, the model usually collapses into a linear, repeatable strategy and the illusion of depth disappears. You can see this happening from the start, with Gossip. Instead of noticing that his game didn't communicate and looking for points of accessibility, he plunged further forward into computer modelling. The failure is one of verisimilitude: The model is similar to a grounded truth on paper, but it's uninteresting to behold because it doesn't lead to a coherent whole. It just reflects the designer's thoughts on "this is how the world should work", which is something that can be found in any comments section.
Often, when Crawford lectured, he would go into evo-psych theories to build his claims: that is, he was confident that the answers he already accepted about the world and society were the correct ones, and the games were a matter of illustration. He was likewise confident that a shooting game would be less thoughtful than a turn-based strategy game because the moment-to-moment decisions were less complex, and the goal should be to portray completeness in the details.
I think he's aware of some of this, but he's a stubborn guy.
cossatot 3 hours ago [-]
This is evident in his description of programming in his later years:
Time and time again I would send my friend Dave Walker an email declaring that Javascript (or something else) was utterly broken, incapable of executing the simplest program without errors. Dave would ask to see the source code and I would present it to him with detailed notes proving that my code was perfect and Javascript was broken. He’d call me, we’d discuss it, and eventually he’d say something like, “Where did you terminate the loop beginning at line 563?” There would be a long silence, followed by the tiniest “Oh” from me. I’d thank him for his help and hang up. A week later, I’d be fuming again about another fundamental flaw in Javascript.
Many of us are stubborn and will work hard and long, without much positive external feedback, under the assumption that our vision is correct and the audience, if one even exists, is wrong. Much fundamental progress has been made this way: Faraday, Einstein, Jobs, etc. But of course many times one simply is wrong and refusing to see it means throwing years away, and whatever else with it (money, relationships, etc.). It's a hard balance, especially for the monomaniacal without much interest in balance. Finding out how to make solid (public, peer-reviewed, evidence-based, whatever) incremental progress towards the paradigm shift seems to be the way if one can manage.
anyfoo 3 hours ago [-]
That quote about JavaScript is... huh. I do not understand how you can even begin coming to the conclusion of "JavaScript [is] utterly broken, incapable of executing the simplest programs without errors" when obviously, JavaScript (which I do not like, by the way) is productively used on a large scale (even back then), and constantly under scrutiny from programmers, computer scientists, language designers... it's just baffling.
It reminds me of when I was around 10 years old or so, maybe slightly older, and playing around with Turbo C (or maybe Turbo C++) on DOS. I must have gotten something very basic about pointers (which were new to me at the time) wrong, probably having declared a char* pointer but not actually allocated any memory, leaving it entirely uninitialized, and my string manipulation failed in weird and interesting ways (since this was on DOS without memory protection, you wouldn't get a program crash like a segmentation fault very easily, instead you'd often see "more interesting" corruption).
Hilariously, at the time I concluded that the string functions of Turbo C(++) must be broken and moved away "string.h" so I wouldn't use it. But even then I shortly after realized how insane I was: Borland could never sell Turbo C(++) if the functions behind the string.h API were actually broken, and it became clear that my code must be buggy instead. And remember, I was 10 years old or so, otherwise I don't think I would have come to that weird conclusion in the first place.
Nowadays, I do live in this very tiny niche where I actually encounter not only compiler bugs, but actual hardware/CPU bugs, but even then I need a lot of experiments and evidence for myself that that's what I'm actually hitting...
smaudet 43 minutes ago [-]
Other languages have problems, but before some basic libraries (jQuery/Underscore) and language enhancements (Typescript/Coffeescript), it was arguably quite simplistic, and parts of the language were straight up anachronistic.
If you've ever been unfortunate enough to have to wrangle a VB script routine, it was (less bad) like that. If not, I would go find some assembly code and teach it yourself, and then imagine that instead of side effects in registers there were random effects on your code/visual state.
And like assembly code, you could now imagine that the same code might behave wildly different on different machines in different browsers.
So a bit of "old man"isms, but also I imagine his JavaScript was tainted by the early days. It's better in some ways now, worse in different ways, I don't mean to say that is the worst or the best, just to offer perspective on where it came from.
tangus 1 hours ago [-]
>I do not understand how you can even begin coming to the conclusion of ...
Obviously he's not serious, he's playing the part of the out of touch old man.
anyfoo 1 hours ago [-]
Ah, okay. Maybe it’s more obvious in context, or maybe my hyperbole detector is broken.
smaudet 40 minutes ago [-]
I can imagine grumpy an old man frustrated by a different paradigm shouting at his computer.
We all become that eventually, hopefully we can all be as poetic and humble (and honest) about it.
yuchi 44 minutes ago [-]
Just as a small note I did not get that too.
bitwize 3 hours ago [-]
"Am I so out of touch? No, it's the audience who's wrong!"
I played it as a cold war kid and was fascinated by it. Mid 80's, post War-Games, this game blew my mind. It simulated the world.
The lesson I remember was that conflict in the Cold War was not zero-sum. One side would win and one side would lose. There were (in this game) no win-win outcomes. But - and this is the key point - the value of each win or loss was unequally felt. For the US to back down in Indonesia was disappointing. To back down in West Germany was fatal.
Oh - and also the notion of graduated escalation & de-escalation. Playing the game well requried using escalation wisely. Sometimes you escalate (a bit) to see how they respond & judge the value of a conflict to your opponent. Sometimes you escalate (a lot) to signal to your opponent that a given conflict is very serious to you.
I don't know if I ever had _fun_ playing the game - but of the hundreds of games I played as a kid this one stuck with me.
All this with something like 64k of memory - brilliant!
gyomu 3 hours ago [-]
I was not familiar with Chris Crawford other than vaguely being aware of the name. Reading this post and others on the website (like https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035048/http://www.erasma...), it’s hard to not get the overall picture of “person says everyone else is doing it wrong, without having done it right themselves”.
What I mean by that is that there are game designers like Jonathan Blow who have their own theories on what is a great game and are extremely critical of the industry not following those theories, and then have released games that succeed at demonstrating those theories. In Jonathan Blow’s case, you can disagree with the man, but you can’t disagree with the fact that The Witness is a wildly original, successful game (1M+ copies sold) that has a cult following.
That does not seem to be the case for Crawford’s work. Lots of theories, lots of indictment for the industry doing it wrong, but no actual demonstration of what “doing it right” would mean.
Saying that no one gets it and civilization won’t be ready for many centuries (as the article I linked above does) feels like kind of a cheap rhetorical cop out.
For what it’s worth, I disagree with his indictment of the video game landscape as being narratively poor. Lots of video games with great interactive narratives out there, and there are many players who have been deeply moved by such games (of course, which games that might be varies from person to person).
I think a good antidote when one finds themselves in those thinking patterns is to listen to what others have to say, and not dismiss them as not getting it because they don’t follow your particular (unproven) theories.
socalgal2 2 hours ago [-]
> I disagree with his indictment of the video game landscape as being narratively poor.
I think he would say they are narratively poor by his defintion that the narrative must be generated by the game/player combo and not just pre-programmed. People love "The Last of Us" for it's narrative but that narritive is something that can arguably be conveyed via book or movie. Crawford wanted something where the narrative itself was generated.
And no, he wouldn't count the choices players make in the average game. Whether to get go west or east. Whether to get the a sword first or the arrow. He wanted the story and character dialog to change. Few if any games do that. Of course today with LLMs it's likely some games will soon / have already done it to some degree and will do better in the future.
Going back to his older work, you'd need to feed a context to the LLM about each characters motivations and then update that context based on player actions so that as the game progresses the way each NPC interacts with the player, and other NPCs, changes in a way that's consistent with each character's intrisict motivations and their interactions with others.
gyomu 1 hours ago [-]
People come up with complex shared narratives in multiplayer sandbox games like Minecraft/Roblox/Kenshi/etc. all the time.
In the single player realm, there are games like Dwarf Fortress, Caves of Qud, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, etc.
Point is, the landscape of what "narrative" means in video games today is broad and deep. If none of those are even remotely like what Crawford thinks is "right" - and he's not able to design a game that meets his standards himself - I'd argue his definition of "right" might just not be workable in the first place.
There's a kind of people who want video games to have all of the possibility, depth, and meaning of real life. A game where you could do anything, be anyone, but still have consequences matter and be far reaching (like "Roy: A Life Well Lived" in Rick & Morty). Well, that exists, it's called real life, but you're not going to recreate it on a computer screen.
AndrewDucker 6 hours ago [-]
This feels quite sad.
Someone who clearly wanted to make a difference, but mostly seems to have not just made games.
He made game tools, but then didn't actually use them to make games. And then he blamed everyone else for not being ready for what he was making.
Giving up after only one released work just seems like such a shame.
abetusk 5 hours ago [-]
The posts author and site operator is Chris Crawford [0]. He said so in the post but Wikipedia confirms that he was mostly active from 1980s to 1990s with at least 15 titles to his name, not including other tools that he built and not including game design books that he authored or wrote for.
A whole person -- flattened into little bits gleaned from some text, glued together with assumptions and world-building -- dismissed as "blaming" and "giving up" "after one game"
The YouTube link in the other post has a top comment of "The best speech in all of gaming history delivered by what must be considered the Socrates of gaming.", to give you a sense of there may be more depth to this person than "giving up after 1 game".
If nothing else, it indicates the crowd perceives more depth, which will be enough to make you ponder if you missed something.
I suggest re-reading the article with a different set of assumptions -- when faced with a contradiction, first, check your premises -- it's likely the guy worried about declining programming skills and pointing out the ease at which he was dismissing JavaScript due to simple errors, is being self-aware and sarcastic.
Once you're freed via engaging with your own thinking, instead of rushing to do public judgement, it is a quite beautiful meditation of working on something that fails to get the mindshare you hoped for, and a all-too-familiar to all of us reminder of the cognitive dissonance required to be okay with that, even when you'll never be okay.
stevage 4 hours ago [-]
Also he says he was 70 on 2020 before embarking on some of those big projects. I hope I'm half as active then.
drewcoo 1 hours ago [-]
I just saw a gen-Z kid choose to play Ms. PacMan instead of Zaxxon. This is heresy on the level of playing Buck Hunter instead of Tempest or even Galaxian. Some games we all know but some are legend.
ludicity 3 hours ago [-]
I've been reading Crawford for quite a few years now, and got into DS9 at his recommendation. I had to skip the last paragraph because I haven't finished his latest game, but I've quietly admired his weirdness and dedication to the craft. Some of his criticisms of storytelling in games have also been frequently opaque to me, but I still believe there's something behind even the statements I didn't understand.
Some of his reflections on growing old, remembering his first crush, and even just noodling about home improvement are incredibly beautiful too.
Those are all asides, but what I mean to say is that his other posts are worth reading.
jccalhoun 50 minutes ago [-]
He's always seemed very frustrated with the gaming industry and I hope he's happy in his day to day life. I remember running across Crawford's works and storytron back around 2000. I thought he was wrong then but I hoped he would find success. After all this time it is hard not to think that he's spent years tilting at windmills.
What he describes feels so familiar to me... the ideas and projects I've cared about most have usually landed flat. And because the ideas matter to me I try over and over, hoping that there's something I can change or explain or improve that will make the difference. Like him I also can get lost in the tools, making the thing-to-make-the-thing instead of making the thing. Sometimes that's a necessary prerequisite, but I think it can also be a defense mechanism... a way to avoid approaching an ambition that intimidates me, or that I think will reveal what I lack.
I was not familiar with Chris Crawford before this, though I think I'll look into him more. Reading his idea of People Games [1] I wish he was a younger man with a bit more time to revisit these ideas with new technology. There are new interactive mediums to discover with LLMs, and it's mediums that he's clearly been trying to create all this time...
Quoting his excerpt:
"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 tragedies, or self-sacrifice; games about duty and honor, patriotism; a satirical game about politics, or games about human folly; games about men's relationship to God or to Nature; games about the passionate love between a boy and girl, or the serene and mature love between husband and wife of decades; games about family relationships or death, mortality, games about a boy becoming a man, and a man realizing that he is no longer young; games about a man facing truth at high noon on a dusty main street, or a boy and his dog, and a prostitute with a heart of gold. 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.
"Let me explain to you why interactivity is so overwhelmingly important. Let me talk about the human brain. You know, our minds are not passive receptacles, they are active agents. It’s not as if we have a button on the side of our heads and they come along and push the button and the top of our heads flips open and then they take a pitcher full of knowledge and pour it into our skull, and then they close the top of our head, shake well and say, «Congratulations, you’re educated now!». [...] All the higher mammals learn by playing, by doing, by interacting [...]
"The interactive conversation is effective, but the expository lecture is efficient. That’s the trade-off we make. And over the centuries, we humans have learned that the gains in efficiency outweigh the losses in effectiveness. And therefore we choose expository methods. But the sacrifice remains real! We haven’t ever solved that problem. It’s been with us since the beginning of history. Every single artist has faced this, every communicator, every teacher, every novelist, every sculptor, every singer, every musician, every painter, every single artist through all of human history has been forced to sacrifice effectiveness for efficiency… until now. Because now we have a technology that changes everything. [...] That is the revolutionary nature of the computer. It allows us to automate interactivity to achieve both effectiveness and efficiency. That was the most important part of my dream."
But then you play the games, and they're all so opaque. You have no idea what's going on, and the responses to your actions are so hard to grasp. But if you do figure it out, the model usually collapses into a linear, repeatable strategy and the illusion of depth disappears. You can see this happening from the start, with Gossip. Instead of noticing that his game didn't communicate and looking for points of accessibility, he plunged further forward into computer modelling. The failure is one of verisimilitude: The model is similar to a grounded truth on paper, but it's uninteresting to behold because it doesn't lead to a coherent whole. It just reflects the designer's thoughts on "this is how the world should work", which is something that can be found in any comments section.
Often, when Crawford lectured, he would go into evo-psych theories to build his claims: that is, he was confident that the answers he already accepted about the world and society were the correct ones, and the games were a matter of illustration. He was likewise confident that a shooting game would be less thoughtful than a turn-based strategy game because the moment-to-moment decisions were less complex, and the goal should be to portray completeness in the details.
I think he's aware of some of this, but he's a stubborn guy.
Time and time again I would send my friend Dave Walker an email declaring that Javascript (or something else) was utterly broken, incapable of executing the simplest program without errors. Dave would ask to see the source code and I would present it to him with detailed notes proving that my code was perfect and Javascript was broken. He’d call me, we’d discuss it, and eventually he’d say something like, “Where did you terminate the loop beginning at line 563?” There would be a long silence, followed by the tiniest “Oh” from me. I’d thank him for his help and hang up. A week later, I’d be fuming again about another fundamental flaw in Javascript.
Many of us are stubborn and will work hard and long, without much positive external feedback, under the assumption that our vision is correct and the audience, if one even exists, is wrong. Much fundamental progress has been made this way: Faraday, Einstein, Jobs, etc. But of course many times one simply is wrong and refusing to see it means throwing years away, and whatever else with it (money, relationships, etc.). It's a hard balance, especially for the monomaniacal without much interest in balance. Finding out how to make solid (public, peer-reviewed, evidence-based, whatever) incremental progress towards the paradigm shift seems to be the way if one can manage.
It reminds me of when I was around 10 years old or so, maybe slightly older, and playing around with Turbo C (or maybe Turbo C++) on DOS. I must have gotten something very basic about pointers (which were new to me at the time) wrong, probably having declared a char* pointer but not actually allocated any memory, leaving it entirely uninitialized, and my string manipulation failed in weird and interesting ways (since this was on DOS without memory protection, you wouldn't get a program crash like a segmentation fault very easily, instead you'd often see "more interesting" corruption).
Hilariously, at the time I concluded that the string functions of Turbo C(++) must be broken and moved away "string.h" so I wouldn't use it. But even then I shortly after realized how insane I was: Borland could never sell Turbo C(++) if the functions behind the string.h API were actually broken, and it became clear that my code must be buggy instead. And remember, I was 10 years old or so, otherwise I don't think I would have come to that weird conclusion in the first place.
Nowadays, I do live in this very tiny niche where I actually encounter not only compiler bugs, but actual hardware/CPU bugs, but even then I need a lot of experiments and evidence for myself that that's what I'm actually hitting...
If you've ever been unfortunate enough to have to wrangle a VB script routine, it was (less bad) like that. If not, I would go find some assembly code and teach it yourself, and then imagine that instead of side effects in registers there were random effects on your code/visual state.
And like assembly code, you could now imagine that the same code might behave wildly different on different machines in different browsers.
So a bit of "old man"isms, but also I imagine his JavaScript was tainted by the early days. It's better in some ways now, worse in different ways, I don't mean to say that is the worst or the best, just to offer perspective on where it came from.
Obviously he's not serious, he's playing the part of the out of touch old man.
We all become that eventually, hopefully we can all be as poetic and humble (and honest) about it.
I played it as a cold war kid and was fascinated by it. Mid 80's, post War-Games, this game blew my mind. It simulated the world.
The lesson I remember was that conflict in the Cold War was not zero-sum. One side would win and one side would lose. There were (in this game) no win-win outcomes. But - and this is the key point - the value of each win or loss was unequally felt. For the US to back down in Indonesia was disappointing. To back down in West Germany was fatal.
Oh - and also the notion of graduated escalation & de-escalation. Playing the game well requried using escalation wisely. Sometimes you escalate (a bit) to see how they respond & judge the value of a conflict to your opponent. Sometimes you escalate (a lot) to signal to your opponent that a given conflict is very serious to you.
I don't know if I ever had _fun_ playing the game - but of the hundreds of games I played as a kid this one stuck with me.
All this with something like 64k of memory - brilliant!
What I mean by that is that there are game designers like Jonathan Blow who have their own theories on what is a great game and are extremely critical of the industry not following those theories, and then have released games that succeed at demonstrating those theories. In Jonathan Blow’s case, you can disagree with the man, but you can’t disagree with the fact that The Witness is a wildly original, successful game (1M+ copies sold) that has a cult following.
That does not seem to be the case for Crawford’s work. Lots of theories, lots of indictment for the industry doing it wrong, but no actual demonstration of what “doing it right” would mean.
Saying that no one gets it and civilization won’t be ready for many centuries (as the article I linked above does) feels like kind of a cheap rhetorical cop out.
For what it’s worth, I disagree with his indictment of the video game landscape as being narratively poor. Lots of video games with great interactive narratives out there, and there are many players who have been deeply moved by such games (of course, which games that might be varies from person to person).
I think a good antidote when one finds themselves in those thinking patterns is to listen to what others have to say, and not dismiss them as not getting it because they don’t follow your particular (unproven) theories.
I think he would say they are narratively poor by his defintion that the narrative must be generated by the game/player combo and not just pre-programmed. People love "The Last of Us" for it's narrative but that narritive is something that can arguably be conveyed via book or movie. Crawford wanted something where the narrative itself was generated.
And no, he wouldn't count the choices players make in the average game. Whether to get go west or east. Whether to get the a sword first or the arrow. He wanted the story and character dialog to change. Few if any games do that. Of course today with LLMs it's likely some games will soon / have already done it to some degree and will do better in the future.
Going back to his older work, you'd need to feed a context to the LLM about each characters motivations and then update that context based on player actions so that as the game progresses the way each NPC interacts with the player, and other NPCs, changes in a way that's consistent with each character's intrisict motivations and their interactions with others.
In the single player realm, there are games like Dwarf Fortress, Caves of Qud, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, etc.
Point is, the landscape of what "narrative" means in video games today is broad and deep. If none of those are even remotely like what Crawford thinks is "right" - and he's not able to design a game that meets his standards himself - I'd argue his definition of "right" might just not be workable in the first place.
There's a kind of people who want video games to have all of the possibility, depth, and meaning of real life. A game where you could do anything, be anyone, but still have consequences matter and be far reaching (like "Roy: A Life Well Lived" in Rick & Morty). Well, that exists, it's called real life, but you're not going to recreate it on a computer screen.
Someone who clearly wanted to make a difference, but mostly seems to have not just made games.
He made game tools, but then didn't actually use them to make games. And then he blamed everyone else for not being ready for what he was making.
Giving up after only one released work just seems like such a shame.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Crawford_(game_designer)
A whole person -- flattened into little bits gleaned from some text, glued together with assumptions and world-building -- dismissed as "blaming" and "giving up" "after one game"
The YouTube link in the other post has a top comment of "The best speech in all of gaming history delivered by what must be considered the Socrates of gaming.", to give you a sense of there may be more depth to this person than "giving up after 1 game".
If nothing else, it indicates the crowd perceives more depth, which will be enough to make you ponder if you missed something.
I suggest re-reading the article with a different set of assumptions -- when faced with a contradiction, first, check your premises -- it's likely the guy worried about declining programming skills and pointing out the ease at which he was dismissing JavaScript due to simple errors, is being self-aware and sarcastic.
Once you're freed via engaging with your own thinking, instead of rushing to do public judgement, it is a quite beautiful meditation of working on something that fails to get the mindshare you hoped for, and a all-too-familiar to all of us reminder of the cognitive dissonance required to be okay with that, even when you'll never be okay.
Some of his reflections on growing old, remembering his first crush, and even just noodling about home improvement are incredibly beautiful too.
Those are all asides, but what I mean to say is that his other posts are worth reading.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMg2_teHVTs
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajz_1TqccYA
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBrj4S24074
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFPs9MUvR3U
I was not familiar with Chris Crawford before this, though I think I'll look into him more. Reading his idea of People Games [1] I wish he was a younger man with a bit more time to revisit these ideas with new technology. There are new interactive mediums to discover with LLMs, and it's mediums that he's clearly been trying to create all this time...
Quoting his excerpt:
"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 tragedies, or self-sacrifice; games about duty and honor, patriotism; a satirical game about politics, or games about human folly; games about men's relationship to God or to Nature; games about the passionate love between a boy and girl, or the serene and mature love between husband and wife of decades; games about family relationships or death, mortality, games about a boy becoming a man, and a man realizing that he is no longer young; games about a man facing truth at high noon on a dusty main street, or a boy and his dog, and a prostitute with a heart of gold. 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.
"Let me explain to you why interactivity is so overwhelmingly important. Let me talk about the human brain. You know, our minds are not passive receptacles, they are active agents. It’s not as if we have a button on the side of our heads and they come along and push the button and the top of our heads flips open and then they take a pitcher full of knowledge and pour it into our skull, and then they close the top of our head, shake well and say, «Congratulations, you’re educated now!». [...] All the higher mammals learn by playing, by doing, by interacting [...]
"The interactive conversation is effective, but the expository lecture is efficient. That’s the trade-off we make. And over the centuries, we humans have learned that the gains in efficiency outweigh the losses in effectiveness. And therefore we choose expository methods. But the sacrifice remains real! We haven’t ever solved that problem. It’s been with us since the beginning of history. Every single artist has faced this, every communicator, every teacher, every novelist, every sculptor, every singer, every musician, every painter, every single artist through all of human history has been forced to sacrifice effectiveness for efficiency… until now. Because now we have a technology that changes everything. [...] That is the revolutionary nature of the computer. It allows us to automate interactivity to achieve both effectiveness and efficiency. That was the most important part of my dream."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Crawford_(game_designer)...