I’m curious about another game you did during your Atari days,Gossip.Was
that game ever released?
Yes, it was released, but it was released just as Atari was going down in flames, so
nobody had any opportunity to see it.Gossipwas an immensely important game in that I
tackled interpersonal relationships. I had realized very early that computer games had
an emotional sterility about them, and I spent a long time thinking about that. I finally
decided that the crucial factor was the absence of characters, of people. And I remem-
ber writing an essay, way back then, entitled “People not Things,” arguing that
computer games were very thing oriented, and that we had to focus our energies on
people. So I attempted to design something around people and interpersonal interac-
tion. AndGossipis what I came up with. A very simple design, but way ahead of its time
in terms of its goals.
So what was the gameplay like?
It was solely about what I call circumferential relationships affecting radial relation-
ships. Basically the idea was that you had a group of eight people, and your goal was to
be popular. This was just before the high school prom, and you wanted to be elected
king or queen of the prom, and so you were doing your politics. And the way you did this
was by calling people up. It had a really cute interface. There were eight people sitting
in two rows of four; they looked like panelists on a game show. You were the one in the
upper left corner. And you would use the joystick to select one of the other seven play-
ers, and then you pushed the button and the telephone would ring at that person’s
station. He’d pick up the phone. Then you would use the joystick to point at another
person. And then, once you’d selected that other person, you’d push the joystick up or
down to show a facial expression ranging from a big smile and nodding your head up and
down all the way to a big frown and shaking your head from side to side. These were
expressions of how much you liked or disliked this person. So you’d point to someone
and say, “I like them this much,” and then your interlocutor would say, “Well, I like them
this much.” Then your interlocutor would tell you things about what other people were
saying: “This person likes him this much, and that person likes him that much.” And
the idea was, you would try to read the social clustering and decide which clique are you
going to join so as to ingratiate yourself to everyone else. To some extent this involved
a certain amount of deception. You’d tell everyone, “Oh, I like you very much” and
you’d say, “Oh, if you hate him, then I hate him too.” But you could get caught at it, and
that would really hurt; you did have to be quite careful in all of this. It was a very inter-
esting little game.
What was the mind-set like at Atari during the video game crash?
There was a sense of catastrophe. It turns out that it was solely a matter of momentum.
That is, all that really happened was that Atari went bust. Atari did a lot of things really
wrong, and those are what led to its going bust. It’s just that in going bust, it discredited
an entire industry, and so many companies that hadn’t done anything wrong and were
perfectly healthy, they went bust too. It was just a matter of an industry collapsing
because its lead company was greatly discredited. It was kind of silly in many ways.
262 Chapter 14: Interview: Chris Crawford