“The real issue is not whether or not technology will improve, but whether or not technological limitations are the primary constraints on the game designer...I maintain that artistic immaturity is an even more crippling limitation.”

    Sounds familiar doesn't it?  The only odd part of this sentiment is that anyone had any question at all about whether the technology would improve.  Well, there's a reason for that.  It was written in 1982 by Chris Crawford in The Art of Computer Game Design.  This was before the crash, before arcades died, before the NES, and back when you hoped your game would be the next Space Invaders not the next Halo.  With a growing interest in game design, I decided to take a look back at some of the earliest writing on the subject.  And I found that many of the problems, questions, and challenges raised by Crawford then, still confound game design now.

    I took this trip back in time to get a good look at the basics.  And I wasn't disappointed.  I've never designed a game, but the boldness of Crawford's first step for game design is so appealing that I wonder how often it's followed:  “A game must have a clearly defined goal. This goal must be expressed in terms of the effect that it will have on the player. It is not enough to declare that a game will be enjoyable, fun, exciting, or good; the goal must establish the fantasies that the game will support and the types of emotions it will engender in its audience.”

    This is the first step of someone who truly believes in the potential of the blank canvas in front of him.  Before thinking about genre or environment (or even more limiting thoughts of a sequel or a license), asking, “What do I want the player to feel?” is both a demonstrated belief in the art of games and a challenge to the designer who dares to answer it.  Many great games have mined the same emotions over the years, but players also appreciate moments and entire games which surprise them with their own emotional responses.  For examples, look at the reviews of Flower.

    As a result of his own search for the basics of game design, Crawford laid out the motivations for why anyone plays any kind of game at all.  Among these he lists: proving oneself, social lubrication, and exercise.  We can still see these motivations at work in the mainstream popularity of  games such as Guitar Hero, Wii Sports, and Wii Fit.  Coupling this thought with another observation of his paints a pretty good picture of one current phenomenon. “Just as rock 'n roll was the entry point into the world of music for an entire generation, so will skill-and-action games be the entry point into the world of games for the whole population.”  Now, these two are coincidentally (perhaps) merged in the form of Guitar Hero and Rock Band, which are now responsible for introducing millions of people to an experience akin to playing music and also to playing video games.

    Crawford digs even deeper for the primary and original motivation to play games.  He says games predate mankind because animals play to train themselves for their adult lives.  So, games' original use is as an educational tool.  Now, increasingly games are said to be carving out their piece of what art is.  Games can lay claim to being educational tools and a unique art for one and the same reason: interaction.  Any discussion of games as art naturally mentions it because games demand interaction and the player to invest himself in it.      Crawford calls for an interaction that lets players “generate causes and observe effects.”  This is both games'  educational and artistic potential.  This is how a game can reveal worlds to us; not in the degree of detail in its graphics but what those graphics reveal about the world in reaction to us.

     Additionally, Crawford makes the excellent point that the interaction of cause and effect is the only reason non-interactive stories have any value either- “Indeed, the entire concept of fiction ('an untruth that is not a lie') only makes sense when one realizes that the facts presented in the fiction are themselves unimportant. The cause and effect relationships suggested by the sequence of facts are the important part of the story. For example, we care not whether Luke Skywalker and the Death Star really existed. We saw that Luke Skywalker was good and pure, and that the Death Star was evil, and that Luke Skywalker destroyed the Death Star. The cause and effect relationship suggested by the story was that good overcomes evil.”   Cause and effect are now the experiences of the player and the playthings of the game designer.

     Looking back at Crawford's predictions from 1982 is amusing and both encouraging and discouraging.  After having made “Gossip” a game about it's titular subject, he said, “Many other art forms devote a great deal of attention to interpersonal relationships. It is only a matter of time before computer games follow a similar course.”  Well, maybe it took longer than he thought.  These games do exist and in a number of different forms (The Sims, Animal Crossing, MMORPGs, etc.) but most games still stick to violence for their central game mechanics because “it is the most obvious and natural expression for conflict.”  I don't believe there's anything inherently wrong with violence in games, but it has limited games.  Backlash from concerned parents and legislators has only helped to make most of the population see games as violent toys with little appeal for them.

    Crawford was predicting a time when games would be both embraced and changed by the mainstream and maybe we are witnessing it now.  Most interestingly, Crawford saw the time of games hitting the mainstream as also the time that “a host of baby markets following in the train of the mass market” would form. And that “while the baby markets will never be as lucrative as the mass market, they perform two valuable services. First, they provide a testing ground for new ideas that, if successful, will be swallowed up by the voracious mass market.”
We see this happening too.  Games as a whole need these baby markets, this indie scene, as an engine to try bold, new ideas because budgets of bigger games are too big to take risks. While, indie games need to be new and risky to stand out at all.  Smaller games have been made all this time but they are now getting more attention because they are so needed and because they are getting into more people's hands because of downloadable content on consoles and the harnessing of the ubiquity of platforms such as Flash.  So, the barrier between a small game and its audience today is little more than awareness and a short download time.

    The greatest barrier to games hitting the mainstream was also what Crawford listed as the biggest constraint on the game designer:  input devices.  I think he underestimated the barrier of the input devices and overestimated the charm of interactivity over the comfort of passivity.  And with the death of arcades outside of Japan and a reliance on violence to express conflict, games were confined to mostly appealing to a certain segment of the population.  So, games were mostly made only to appeal to this same audience again and again and could rely on players having a lot of background knowledge and expectations about how games are played and thus designed. 
   

     We have great reason to believe games are changing now, in a way different from how they've mostly changed since 1982.  It's not the technology, so much.  It has mostly got out of the way while still advancing.  Making predictions is a great way to look foolish, but Crawford's willingness to do so has left us with what may again be timely advice for small teams of developers looking to create new experiences for new audiences.

The Art of Computer Game Design is a free read here.