This week’s Escapist has an interview with the legendary game developer Chris Crawford. The man behind strategy classics Eastern Front ’41 and Balance of Power sits down with Max Steele to mostly discuss Crawford’s timeless theme – why games suck.

Well, that’s a bit of an oversimplification. He admits to not playing games much anymore. He is still talking about his Erasmotron virtual-person simulator and has nice things to say about the interactive story Facade. His disillusionment dates from the time that Computer Gaming World said that his educational decison making game Balance of the Planet was artistic, but not a lot of fun.

Crawford is squarely in the games are serious business camp. They should be used to tell us more about ourselves and our world. Look at his classic flop Trust and Betrayal – it’s all about human dynamics in a system of imperfect information. Lots of game theory stuff in it, actually. Balance of Power was about how attempts to press an opponent into a corner could lead to mutual annhiliation.

Crawford is one of those game analyst/philosophers that I’m not sure how to approach from the vantage point as a gaming enthusiast. It’s all well and good to say that games shouldn’t just have to be fun, but they should at least be compelling.

As much as he thinks Facade is a step forward, I think it’s a step sideways. The game is still programming likely responses to a range of player behavior; it’s not really dynamic interaction and as a story, it’s not very interesting. I can appreciate the technology and programming involved in Facade and how it might lead to gaming as a story telling device, but it’s not close yet.

His complaints about the critical reception to Balance of the Planet underscore what, I think, Crawford’s position on games as entertainment is:

Here we have an acknowledgement that Balance of the Planet is some kind of art, yet the review refuses to endorse it because it isn’t fun! …perhaps our reviewer would react to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony like this: “Gosh, Mr. Beethoven, your symphony made my heart soar in awe at the majesty of the universe, but you know, it’s just not fun. We need some tunes we can dance to, or catchy jingles we can snap our fingers to.

I take issue with anyone who doesn’t think that Beethoven’s Ninth is one of the most fun pieces of music ever written, but I think this comment from a 1997 essay by Crawford suggests that, for him, games are supposed to be good for you. Uplifting, thought-provoking, soul-touching things. Where games are, like most music, disposable culture to the extreme, Crawford wants them to be more.

All I can say is “Ecce ludi”. Behold the games. They are all around you. The Sims touches my heart on a regular basis, even when I am making them do something naughty. Has there ever been a role playing game as uplifting as Planescape: Torment? There is all kind of meaningful story telling going on in games, but you just have to look to see it.

Crawford is falling for the old trap that because something is not dressed up as a SERIOUS EXERCISE it cannot have serious consequences. A game can be “fun” (whatever that means) and still instruct or inspire.

This assumes that instruction or inspiration are goals that games can achieve. I know no one that isn’t touched by the beauty of Beethoven’s Ninth, but lots who can’t (or won’t) identify with the everyday problems of Sims, or who think Baldur’s Gate a silly place no matter how many demands are placed on a demigod. Because of the interactive nature of games, it is very difficult to gauge how people respond to them. Games have proven uneven teachers of content and, in my experience, if you allow outrageous behavior then players will do it, whether it be wiping out thousands of animals with no penalty in Oregon Trail or tower rushing your “ally” in Age of Empires.

In sum, I’m not sure what Crawford wants. His self-imposed exile from the industry (I’m sorry I never got to see his now legendary “Dragon Speech”) has, I think, led to a stasis in his thinking about what games are for. Were he to attend the Serious Games Summit in Washington, DC next month, I think he would see that simulations and decision trees are being put to good use in institutional circles. Even a guru has to stay current. Sometimes you have to leave Walden.

The expansion to last year’s best strategy game ships today. Rome: Total War – Barbarian Invasion moves the game into the fall of the empire and introduces religion as a controlling factor. The Senate is gone and rebellions can lead to civil wars, representing the instability of both the Eastern and Western Roman domains.

This is the first game about the decline of the empire to go into wide internation release, though the last year or so has seen this period represented in a number of smaller European titles. Fall of Rome is an online only multiplayer game that has been widely acclaimed, though I haven’t had the chance to try it myself. Great Invasions 350-1066 is the sequel to the disappointing Pax Romana. Expect an on-site review some time in the next couple of weeks. Against Rome was launched by JoWood in late 2003 but still hasn’t found its way to North America.

Despite the dramatic nature of the collapse of the great Mediterranean empire – at least in the West – the fall of Rome has never had the same pull on game designers that its rise has. Attila is at least as compelling an historical figure as Hannibal, and Belisarius as great a general as Caesar. The accompanying rise of Christianity as a religion and the struggles over dogma makes an intriguing subplot – one that Creative Assembly is handling by assigning religions to the Roman generals. A pagan governor in a Christian town is likely to cause offence. (You will find that one of the first steps to keeping order is to raze any temple that gets the population upset.)

Part of the pull is that conquering is always more fun than merely holding things together. Rome has to be big but weak in order to make a “Fall” scenario remotely accurate, and seeing all your generals make a grab for the throne is a great way to frustrate a player. You have to provide incentives for the player to control the barbarian hordes, even though their level of “civilization” is pretty low and there isn’t the variety of units or tactics open to you as a metropole dwelling Roman. Great Invasions tries to get around all of this by allowing you to control institutions like the Church or letting the player manage more than one power at once – clever, but not entirely successful.

My further opinions on Barbarian Invasion will be available on this site before the end of the week.

Age of Empires III will be released to American consumers on October 18. A Collector’s Edition will be available for $69.99 and comes with all the useless stuff that people cram into these editions. A book of concept art, a “making of” DVD, a super special manual, etc.

I’ll buy it, mostly because everyone else will and the best part of gaming is the early day sharing of likes and dislikes. The demo disappointed me on so many levels, though, that I’m not excited about shelling out the fifty bucks to stay on top of things.

This, however, is one of the major strategy titles of the year. This isn’t a marginal game, like Legion: Arena – a game I am, at this point, much more interested in seeing than a retro-feeling Age game. But not playing it would be like being a movie critic who never saw Casablanca.

After all, there is still a chance that this game could end up on somebody’s Best of 2005 list. After all, GameSpy picked the first Empire Earth as its game of the year for 2001 and it wasn’t all that great.

I am in the process of reviewing a strategy game that is all about the multiplayer. Its setup, premise and design emphasize that the game is meant to be played with and against other people. It also has one major oversight that has the potential to cripple its multiplayer base. No chat.

Since I’m still in the evaluation stage, I’ll leave the game unnamed. Plus, my explicit opinions on the game are the property of someone else for the moment. But the omission of such a standard interface tool is jaw-droppingly mad.

I’ve played a lot of terrible games – many with tiny budgets. War Times has a chat option. Pax Romana does, too. It is such a basic multiplayer tool that wargames like The Falklands War: 1982 use it. The prospect of playing any game with a multiplayer component without a chat tool is almost too ridiculous to imagine. Hell, Literati has chat.

And its not like the developer in questions is new. They’ve been around for a few years and have a nice stable of games to their credit. All had chat.

In what circumstances would you not want the players to communicate via a chat interface? Is it conceivable that you would not want players to interact? If a game can only have two players and they are locked in a duel to the death from the moment the game begins, you might be able to get away with tossing chat. You wouldn’t be able to taunt your enemies, but you always have the postgame for that. But when a game gets bigger than two people, not including chat cuts off the possibility of diplomacy and coordination.

Maybe you don’t want your players to work together. If a game is designed as a purely solo, survival of the fittest, Darwin on steroids type of strategy game then you could probably justify the choice on pure game design merits.

Information wants to be free, though, so players will get frustrated if they can’t trade intelligence or offer support against the big dog in town. Even if a game is set up as last man standing, chat allows the weaker player (usually me) to buy time through persuasion and puppy-dog eyes.

The game in question must have been designed without chat for a good reason, but I’ll be damned if I can think of it. Any game designers want to help me out here? When is communication between players something you choose to design out?

Shacknews has a note from Firaxis’ Barry Caudill and screenshots that reveal a little more about the world building tool that we will see in early 2006. Not only will the Python and XML scripting be wide open to Meier-wannabes, but the Civ IV SDK will be made available allowing for some pretty deep changes to the way the game plays, if you so desire.

The world builder screenshots look pretty straightforward, but they always do. I’ve always had little patience for my own creativity. Despite my rational nature, I don’t usually create in the logical mode that true mod-making demands. But the news that I can introduce new civilizations to the game through the editor is great, so I expect to have my Canadians up and running the world sometime in February. (I haven’t chosen the leaders yet…maybe Trudeau and Macdonald. Maybe King.)

Anyway, the delayed release of the mod kit is frustrating for many Civ-heads, but at least we are getting some news about it.

I recently finished an article for Computer Games Magazine for their Revisionist History column (now with PC games!). Part of it dealt with innovations, contributions, that sort of thing. Because, as an amateur historian, the origins of things really interest me. I’m not talking about the first RTS, or the first hex based wargame that was not derived from a board version. I mean the basic approaches to game design and game mechanics.

Computer games are full of little things that have become so common that we sometimes forget what the world was like before they were invented. Do people remember that in the first Civilization, for example, that there were no real differences between the races? Maybe the Babylonians would start with an extra settler every now and then, but the idea that factions should have distinct characteristics was not accepted as standard. Civ III gave each civ two characteristics, Civ IV will change the characteristics based on the leader.

What was the first strategy game that integrated a tactical battle mode with a grand strategic overlay? Centurion: Defender of Rome maybe?

Who was the genius who decided that left clicking would be for selecting and right clicking for moving? What about context sensitive right clicking? Drag select?

Which game had the first tech tree? Was Dune 2 the first game that had unique units, but not completely unique armies? Which game had the first unique armies? What about infinite resource points? Do they date before Cossacks?

Origin stories are inherently interesting to me. It is easy to trace the RTS legacy from Herzog Zwei to Rise of Nations or the 4x path from Empire through Rise and Rule of Ancient Empires to the more common real time games we have today. But it is often the little stuff in design that separates the good from the great. The influence of Rise of Nations on Empire Earth 2 is everywhere though the former is much better because EE2 missed the point of borders or automated resource collection.

I hope to explore some of these issues and questions, but would appreciate suggestions of more questions or even answers. If you feel up to it, some of you could even write a guest post on one of these questions.

(I’m always open to guest posts, by the way. Provided they are PG, intelligent and mostly about strategy and war games, I’d love to host other people’s ramblings.)