“do” and “eat” and “have” and I found that it’s bigger. Because that word is a semantic
imperialist, it just goes everywhere. It can be used for many, many different meanings,
all completely different. But then there’s sort of a switcheroo that happens. You can
apply the word “game” to a whole bunch of products and activities, but then as soon as
people associate it with a computer they say “computer game!” and all the semantic
meaning collapses down to this little bitty point. Maybe I should call it a web game, get
the whole thing on the web. Or if I do it on the Mac maybe I can call it an iGame. But I
don’t dare call it a computer game or a video game.
Why do you think facial expressions are so important for storytelling?
Because facial expression is one
of the fundamental forms of
human communication. It’s
funny; other people think graph-
ics where I’m thinking communi-
cation. What goes on between
user and computer is primarily a
matter of communication. I am
deeply desirous of optimizing
that communication. That means
designing the computer display
to most closely match the recep-
tive powers of the human mind.
And the two things that we are
very good at are facial recogni-
tion and linguistic comprehension. Accordingly, those are the two things that comput-
ers should emphasize. Computer games have neither and that appalls me. Facial
expression and linguistic comprehension are the two most important areas of develop-
ment for the time being. Nowadays you can get excellent 3D facial models, although the
expressions on them are still crappy. This is largely because the people who design
them aren’t artists, they’re engineers, and they’ve come up with these anatomically
correct heads. Every cartoonist in the world knows that you never, ever draw a face the
way it really is. For this type of thing we’ve got to use cartoon faces and not real faces.
When I was playing with the Erasmaganza, sometimes it would present me
with three different actions to choose from, and I wouldn’t want to do any of
them. In that way, it feels a bit like an old adventure game with a branching
dialog tree. Do you see that as a problem?
The real issue is not “Gee, you only get three things.” The real issue here is that you’re
not permitted to say dramatically reasonable things, and that’s a flaw in the design of
the story-world. Both of the demo story-worlds have that problem, because they’re
very tiny story-worlds. If you want to get away from that you must have a much larger
story-world. “Brawl” has about fifty or sixty verbs and “Meeting” has about a hundred.
I used to think that five hundred verbs was the threshold for entertainment value. I now
think it’s more like a thousand verbs. But “Meeting” just doesn’t give you very many
options because it’s so tiny.
276 Chapter 14: Interview: Chris Crawford
TheCorporate Meetingstory-world in the Erasmatron