Chris Crawford on Game Design

Low-Interactivity Entertainment Designs

Let me now turn to low-interactivity products. They have a dismal history. Low-interactivity entertainment is not a new idea. In the first big boom of computer games, from 1981 to 1984, a number of low-interactivity games were attempted. One of these was Alien Gardens, published by Epyx. You were a kind of alien bee flitting through a garden of alien flowers, trying to pollenize them. It was a very low-key game, definitely low in the interactivity department. All you could do was buzz around and, every now and then, try to touch a flower, which might kill you or reward you. Unfortunately, the difference between flowers was arbitrary. The game made no sense and ranks as one of the great turkeys of computer ...