{"id":369,"date":"2006-06-18T15:23:00","date_gmt":"2006-06-18T19:23:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/?p=369"},"modified":"2006-08-16T14:02:40","modified_gmt":"2006-08-16T18:02:40","slug":"a-sense-of-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2006\/06\/18\/a-sense-of-history\/","title":{"rendered":"A Sense of History"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been listening regularly to the PC Gamer Podcast<\/a> for the last month or so, and it is getting a lot better. The addition of a single female voice helps a little in distinguishing which male is which, and since the voice is the learned Kristen Salvatore, even better. There is a better sense of an agenda and many fewer in-jokes. So, kudos to the guys at PCG for giving me a reason to keep listening.<\/p>\n

But the most recent episode caught me short when Editor-in-Chief Dan Morris said that he wasn’t sure who Chris Crawford was.<\/p>\n

This admission came by way of commentary on gaming’s Jeremiah once again emerging from the wilderness<\/a> to say that gaming has lost its way and that it can only be saved by innovation, whatever that means. The PCG discussion followed the expected form of talking about what innovation there was in the industry, a recognition that there is a lot of me-tooism in the industry and some curiosity that Crawford can make these claims when he cops to not really following the game industry that closely.<\/p>\n

But the EIC of computer gaming’s number one publication saying that he didn’t know who Crawford was stuck with me. True, he hasn’t made a game in a very long time. But this is the founder of the Game Developer’s Conference. One of the fathers of war and strategy gaming on the computer. The first real analyst\/practitioner of electronic game design.<\/p>\n

I’m not going to say that these credentials mean that his opinions on the current industry automatically have merit. I think he’s a bit of a crank, divorced from the market pressures that exist today and blind to all the great stuff going on in the industry.<\/p>\n

I will say that a man of Crawford’s stature should at least have his name recognized by computer games journalists\/analysts. If this is the fate of Crawford, who emerges from his cabin to rant every year or so, what has become of the reputation of the late Dani Bunten, probably the single most creative and wide-ranging talent of the early days of the hobby?<\/p>\n

In a way, this is a result of the now-ism of the hobby. It’s mostly about “what have you done for me lately?” which is perfectly reasonable if you see your job as a critic to simply be reporting on what is on the shelves. But not knowing what has gone before makes it impossible to recognize how far game design has come.<\/p>\n

It is the mirror image of Crawford’s problem. He was powerful and important when the industry was in its infancy; a time when everything was new and everything seemed possible. Games had little hope of going mainstream. So he sees everything around him today as a pale shadow of those glorious days of invention and creativity. Could there be a time in the near future when journalists forget when there were no RTS games? When MP was either absent, unreliable or hotseat? When Sid Meier made flight sims?<\/p>\n

The historian in me naturally thinks this sort of stuff matters somewhere along the line. No, your average gamer doesn’t need to know this; your average American doesn’t need to know about the Shay’s Rebellion to be a good citizen, either. But a little perspective on where the hobby has been can give game journalists and critics some clue as to how it has gotten where it is.<\/p>\n

In other words, to know Crawford, you must know his opinions on Balance of the Planet and why he thinks it failed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been listening regularly to the PC Gamer Podcast for the last month or so, and it is getting a lot better. The addition of a single female voice helps a little in distinguishing which male is which, and since the voice is the learned Kristen Salvatore, even better. There is a better sense of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-5X","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=369"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}