Chris Crawford on Game Design

Here Come the Academics!

By the mid-90s, many computer scientists had decided that storytelling was an exciting research area, and some interesting work was being done. The games community continued to pursue its cut-scene approach, but the academics were trying a completely different tack. Actually, they were trying a number of completely different tacks.

Agent Technology

The idea here is to anthropomorphize a hunk of software. When attempting to design a big, complicated software system, let's think of that system as a little man who single-mindedly pursues our desired task. What would that little man think? What would be his motivations? How would we implement his desires? Computer users first saw agents as little “help wizards” who would ...