08.5

INTERACTIVE ENTERTAINMENT DESIGN Volume 9, Number 4, April 1996 Interactive Entertainment Design 5251 Sierra Road San Jose, CA 95132 published six times/year, $36 year, $50 outside US (((We continue Mr Crawford's essay on the decline of computer gaming, "Computer Games Are Dead.".)))
 * Dead medium: Computer Games Are Dead (Part 3)**
 * From: ChrisCr@aol.com Chris Crawford**

THE DEATH OF CREATIVITY A related factor in this == perhaps a symptom of the previous factors == is the death of creativity. I have been participating in this industry for 16 years now, and I have noted a sharp decline in the overall level of creativity in the industry since about 1990. The last truly original game we have seen is [|SimCity]. This failure manifests itself most clearly in the slavish imitation of other designs. Everybody scrambles to make a [|Doom]-clone or a [|Myst]-clone. Why must we spend so much time copying each other? Isn't there anybody out there thinking an original thought? Another way of saying this is that we just don't try fundamentally new ideas. Is the universe of entertainment confined to adventure games, shoot-em-ups, vehicle simulations, and strategy wargames? Is that really all there is to design? Some people have suggested that our standards of creativity have fallen because we have already discovered everything there is to create. Having already staked out the territory, we are now in a more mature phase where we merely examine the nooks and crannies that were overlooked in the initial creative reconnaissance of the 1980s. This argument leaves me aghast. I can't decide whether to condemn it for its cynicism, its stupidity, or its intellectual vainglory. Consider, for example, the scale of human ingenuity unleashed by the invention of the printing press. The basic technology has remained stable for over 500 years, and yet during that time we have seem an ongoing cavalcade of new ideas. First the printing press was used for devotional works, then polemic works. It was the driving technology behind the Reformation, and then became a medium for scientific collaboration. It also became a source of entertainment, expanding to bring literacy to the masses in the nineteenth century. It is now the basis for a bewildering array of elements fundamental to our civilization. And this is just a way of putting ink onto paper == contrast that with the vastly greater power of the computer! Consider the fact that the personal computer has increased in power by at least a thousandfold since its inception. To suggest that, in fifteen short years, we have fully explored the creative potential of a medium more powerful and changing more rapidly than any other medium in human history is ridiculous. Creative life and energy should be the hallmark of our industry; the creative failings of the last five years are sure signs of its morbidity. If all this creative potential cannot inspire us to mighty leaps of creative derring-do, then surely our souls are dead, dead, dead.

A DEAD COMMUNITY Another indicator of industry mobidity is the loss of the spirit of community. This is best evidenced by the steady shift in spirit at the Computer Game Developers' Conference. Here's something I wrote in the June 1988 issue of this same periodical in reference to the first CGDC: "But easily the most powerful feeling of the day was the dawning sense of awareness of community. For the first few hours, you could see people looking around the circle of faces with a sense of awe. 'My God!' their faces said, 'Lookit all these other people who are game designers just like me!' People who have spent years working in isolation suddenly realized that there are others who ask the same questions, fight the same battles, and make the same mistakes they have." Contrast this with the spirit of the 1995 CGDC. It was huge and impressive, to be sure, but the sense of anomie was overpowering. The banquet was swanky but had none of the warm communal spirit of times past; instead it had shouting, food thrown, and people ejected. What was once a communal gathering has become a carnival, a meat market, and a promenade; it felt more like a cotillion than a family picnic. Some of this change is the unavoidable result of growth, but we can't pin all the problems on growth. Some cities have developed slums, crime, and inner city decay as the consequence of their growth; other cities have grown just as rapidly without encountering these problems. Somewhere on the path from my living room to the Santa Clara Convention Center, the CGDC lost its soul. And I think that this loss is reflective of deeper trends within the community as a whole. Let's talk about morality. It seems to me that most people take an entirely too religious approach to morality, treating it as something mystical and sacred, full of absolute truths and moral imperatives. I view morality in more pragmatic terms, as a collection of rules for social cohesion. Moral systems allow people to live together in cooperating communities. Every community and subcommunity has its own local mores, its special variant moral system. Our industry is a community with a moral system, and that moral system is democratically established in much the same way that a language is established: people embrace what they like and reject what they don't like, and the collective average of everybody's choices constitutes the language and moral code for the community. Thus, moral code and language are the primary glue that holds the community together. A community with a vibrant language and a strong moral code will prosper; a community with a divided language or a weak moral code will be destroyed by its fissiparousness. I was once discussing a complex financial transaction with my financial advisor when I suggested what I thought was a simple solution to a knotty problem. He dismissed my suggestion with the slightest edge of distaste in his voice: "We don't do that kind of thing." He went on to explain that my suggestion, however innocent in intent, was similar to a ploy used by unethical persons and was therefore shunned by honorable traders. While perfectly legal, it was a violation of the unwritten moral code of his community, and as I studied the workings of the financial instrument in question, I came to understand the practical value of my advisor's prohibition. I remember another case in which I was discussing a business deal with my agent, who was a member of the New York book publishing community. As part of the deal, he wanted me to jump through some hoops, and I was rather impatient with the rigamarole. When I protested the impracticality of his request, he explained, "That's the way we do things." My protest ran afoul of an unwritten rule of his profession. Again, that rule made perfect sense in the context of the kinds of business transactions he worked with every day. It seems to me that the games community has failed to establish a solid moral code. Perhaps the gold rush mentality that we have lived with for so long has seeped into our souls and poisoned our values. In the last five years I have observed with growing dismay the steady erosion of altruism, the decline of artistic aspiration, the stealthy march of greed. But worst of all has been the moral apathy of the community as a whole, a cynical shrugging of the shoulders at the process of moral decline. Some years ago a powerful publisher brought under-the-table pressure to bear to prevent an individual from giving a technical lecture at CGDC, even though the primary subject matter of that person's lecture was his own proprietary technology that he had used in conjunction with a project involving the powerful publisher. The powerful publisher's attitude was that every aspect of their operation was a proprietary secret, even those aspects that they had not themselves created. I publicly raised the moral issue created by this case; did we as an industry want to live with this kind of moral precept? My question should have spurred a soul-searching debate about the complexities of intellectual property and how ownership of that intellectual property can spread to others through business relationships; instead it was met with utter apathy. Nobody seemed to be interested in the question. More telling is the sad story of the sale of the CGDC to Miller-Freeman. Here was the premier community event of our industry, explicitly founded and historically operated as a public service, not a vehicle for personal gain. Incoming directors were required to promise not to harbor expectations of deriving personal gain from the power that they were being given. Their stock was contractually specified to have a value of exactly $25. In the early years, there was no question as to our altruistic intent; it was woven into the fabric of our corporate culture and provided the basis of many of our decisions. It was a profoundly healthy moral rule, something that conferred great power on CGDC and a major factor in its spectacular success. In the early days everybody pitched in to make CGDC a success. But then the moral miasma of the community infected the CGDC. Greed whispered ever more insistently in our ears. I must confess before God and the universe that I was sorely tempted; I flirted with greed and explored the possibilities of being "just a little greedy". I wondered aloud whether there was not some middle road between altruism and greed. I never had the opportunity to transform my illicit fantasies into actions noble or evil, for the others kicked me out and confiscated my stock. They then decided the issue themselves by selling CGDC to Miller-Freeman for an undisclosed sum. I do not know how much they got; I am told that it was a great deal of money. In so doing, they violated their promises to others and indirectly transferred huge amounts of money out of the pockets of their colleagues in the community and into their own pockets. Even more striking was their treatment of their former partners, the previous directors of the CGDC: they gave each such person $3,000 in return for a legal waiver. This amount represents an infinitesimal fraction of what they kept for themselves. The most astounding aspect of this entire affair is the reaction of the community. When I laid these facts before members of the computer game community, the most common reaction was a cynical shrug of the shoulders. "What did you expect, Chris?" There was no sense of moral outrage, no concern that such behavior poisoned the atmosphere for everybody. Instead, some people applauded the sellers for having gotten rich. Others abdicated all moral responsibility, arguing that moral policing is the duty of the law, not of individuals. Some placed personal loyalty ahead of moral sensibility, deciding the case on a strictly ad hominem basis. Some chose to bury the matter under an obfuscatory pile of uncertainties, demanding written proof of criminal intent before they would pass judgement. Some just preferred to avoid conflict. The end result was a community-wide acquiescence to behavior that many other communities would refuse to tolerate. Some of the same people who sold the CGDC are now running the CGDA. One would think that CGDA members would demand their replacement at the earliest possible date, if only to assert the highest moral standards for their nascent organization, but in fact no such demand has materialized. Indeed, one of the sellers, Ernest Adams, is now a candidate for a full-time salaried position as Executive Director of the CGDA. When I point out the irony of this situation to members of the community, the most common response is, "If he does a good job for us, why should we care about his past?" The problem here isn't Ernest Adams or any of the other people who sold CGDC. They are only the touchstone against which the moral strength of the community is tested. The problem is with the community. A group that responds to allegations of unethical behavior with a cynical shrug of the shoulders is a moral corpse, a collection of individuals elbowing against each other rather than a cohesive community. Without a strong moral infrastructure, this community is only marking time before it fractures into defensive enclaves.