Chris Crawford Interview

The Escapist has a lengthy interview with Chris Crawford conducted by Max Steele. Crawford, generally seen as one of the all-time greats of game design, is responsible for games such as Balance of Power and Eastern Front, as well as the book The Art of Computer Game Design, and the annual Game Developers Conference. He abandoned the games industry proper in 1993, attempting to really solve the problem of interactive storytelling. It's a goal that he hasn't yet reached, and he thinks the only people who have really come close are Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern with their recently released freeware game Facade.

The man known as the Dean of American Game Design toils alone, unfunded and underappreciated, in a forest in Oregon. He has renounced games; or perhaps, one might say, games have renounced him. Who is Chris Crawford, and why does he toil alone? Is he Don Quixote, a dreamer slaying dragons that exist only in his own imagination? Is he Albert Einstein, an unsurpassed genius fruitlessly spending his winter years chasing an impossible, grand theory while his peers reap high praise for incremental improvements in proven fields? Or is he Miyamoto Musashi, a peerless master soon to emerge from the wilderness of his isolation with brilliant insights into his craft?