Chris Crawford on Game Design

Introduction

Twenty years have passed since I wrote my first book, The Art of Computer Game Design. Much has transpired during that time: Games have grown up. Twenty years ago, one programmer working for less than a year could produce a top-quality game. Nowadays, a team of a dozen specialists labors for several years to give birth to a commercial product. A dozen narrow specialties have sprung up: game designer, level designer, sound effects designer, 3D programmer, AI programmer, music designer, writer, and more. Budgets for games have risen from about $25K in 1980 to several million dollars today—a hundredfold increase! And the hardware on which we work has improved by at least a thousandfold.

Yet games haven't become a thousandfold or even ...