clearly, that the end game is going to have Mordred revolt. No matter what happens,
Mordred is going to revolt at some point. And when he does, all the other actors are
going to choose up sides. Some of them will go with Mordred, and some will stay with
you. There will be a big battle, and the side with the bigger battalions wins. The deci-
sion to go with Mordred or stay with you will be based on all the things you’ve done up
to that point.
I’ve come up with another concept forLe Morte D’Arthurthat I’m tempted to go
with, which would incorporate some of the elements of the currentLe Morte D’Arthur.
In this one, you’re not playing as Arthur, you’re playing as Merlin, and you’re a trans-
plant from the future. Your task is to modernize Arthurian society and thereby prevent
the Dark Ages from happening. You’re trying to build up this society and get it operating
on a more efficient basis and teach them a little bit about sanitation and education and so
forth. Along the way all the nobles are developing their resentments against you, and
they try various plots to discredit or kill you. And, once again, Mordred revolts. The end
result feels more purposeful, less meandering.
So the player is led in a direction more than in the current version.
We’re not asking you to be creative or come up with new social innovations, we’ll sim-
ply present you at various points with opportunities to initiate new innovations, to say,
“All right, do you think it’s time to teach these people sanitation, or do you think it’s
time to teach them how to use the stirrup?” And each one takes time. And there’s still
this steady plot that develops as you help this society pull itself up by its bootstraps. But
there’s still an awful lot of interaction going on. What we’re developing here is a concept
of “semi-plot” or “pseudo-plot” or a “skeletal plot” that can proceed in the way that a
plot is supposed to. You still have a plot, but it doesn’t hijack the whole story and domi-
nate it as it does in a conventional story.
So the player has more involvement than they would reading a book, but not
total freedom either.
Yes. The idea is that you want to use dramatic constraints, not artificial constraints.
This is a drama. It’s got to evolve by certain rules. We’re going to apply those rules
here. It should not incur resentment on the player’s part that he can’t pick his nose
while talking to Arthur. That’s not dramatically reasonable. Some argue that if you don’t
give the player full freedom to be creative, it just doesn’t work. I disagree with that
entirely. So long as you give him all dramatically reasonable options, or even most of
them, you’re doing fine.
So you’re quick not to call your Erasmatron system a game of any kind. Why is
that?
The differentiation is two-fold. The first reason is marketing. Right now, computer
games meanQuake, Command & Conquer, or something like that. The associations
with that term are all about shoot-’em-ups, resource management, and those associa-
tions are very clearly defined in the public’s mind. If I call this a game, they’re going to
apply associations that are misleading. Moreover, the term “game,” if you look it up in
the dictionary, has more column inches than most words. I compared it with words like
Chapter 14: Interview: Chris Crawford 275