My conquer-the-world game,Guns & Butter, was really more about macro-
economics. In fact, during development, it was calledMacro-Economic Conquest. I think
it’s reasonably successful as a game to teach about how history really develops, but
that’s all. It was certainly one of my poorest games, no question. It really didn’t have
that much creativity. There were some cute ideas, but where that game had cute ideas,
Siboothad thunderclaps of genius. For example,Guns & Butterhad this nifty little algo-
rithm for generating continents. I also developed a wonderful algorithm for giving
names to states and provinces, and I’m very proud of that algorithm; it’s very clever.
But this is mere cleverness, not creative genius.
Guns & Butterhas some interesting ideas about balancing complex systems.
But you think it did not work?
No, it didn’t work, largely because I completely blew the handling of trade and alliances.
That was a disaster. I think if I’d given that game another six months it probably would
have worked out just fine, but I rushed it.
Balance of the Planetseems to be an extremely educationally oriented game. Was
that your intent?
Oh, absolutely. I had no intent
whatsoever to make something
that was fun. My feeling was,
“OK, there are all of those
shoot-’em-ups and so forth, and
I’m not going to try to compete
with those things. I’m going to do
a game that taps into another
area of humanity. So I’m going to
do pure simulation, and I’m going
to make that simulation very
realistic and very educational as
well.” We knew Earth Day 1990
was coming up, and we thought,
“We’re going to release this
thing in time for Earth Day.” And I felt that would be one of my contributions. Again,
Vietnam generation, Earth Day, and all that jazz.Balance of Powerwas about the Viet-
nam War, andBalance of the Planetwas about Earth Day.
Will Wright’sSimEarthcame out just shortly afterBalance of the Planet. It’s inter-
esting to compare the two. Of course, his is more of a toy and yours is much
more goal oriented.
SimEarthwas not one of Will’s better efforts. He’s done brilliant stuff, but I think he
didn’t have a clear purpose withSimEarth. It was kind of, “OK, here’s this planet, and
here are these geological processes, and here are these life forms, and ...” There was
no design focus to it. He seems to have said, “Let’s takeSimCityand do it to the whole
Earth.” That kind of extrapolatory approach to design never works well. And it didn’t
270 Chapter 14: Interview: Chris Crawford
Balance of the Planet