Chris Crawford has always been one of the most forward-looking and prescient gaming commentators, and looking back upon his writing it’s remarkable just how far ahead of the pack he was. Trip Hawkins’ EA may have claimed to have seen farther but it was Crawford who actually did. In 1981, he was anticipating the negative effects of anti-piracy solutions on consumers and, in an era of crude blobs bleeping obnoxiously, he was heralding the awesome potential of games as participatory art.

He’s developed games and written books about game development but his finest hour was the speech he made at the Computer Game Developers Conference in 1992. Even 19 years later, The Dragon speech (video: part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) remains one of the most exhilarating and dejecting works you’ll ever read, hear or see about gaming. It is at once a glorious paean to gaming’s importance and a strong condemnation of its failure to achieve its ultimate potential. It’s Crawford at his very best with everything on display: the intelligence, the arrogance, the bluntness, the humour, the passion, the theatrics and most importantly, the insight.

Here’s what he had to say about game difficulty:

“Think in terms of a scale of difficulty with simple games at the bottom and hard games at the top. But the scale applies to people as well with inexperienced people at the bottom and very expert game players at the top. Now any given game falls somewhere on this scale but it doesn’t fall at a single point. It actually has a window. There’s the lower level of difficulty and the upper level of difficulty. When you first start playing a game, you normally start off below the lower level and what happens? You get stomped, the game clobbers you and you lose. But no problem, you come back and try it again and you learn and you get better. You start climbing the ladder and as you climb the ladder pretty soon you climb above the lower level of difficulty and you climb into the fun zone where the game is challenging and interesting and fun. You keep playing so you keep learning and you keep climbing the ladder and as you do, the day comes when you climb above the upper level. Now the game is too easy to beat. It’s boring. You don’t play it anymore. You put it aside. And then what do you do? Well, you buy another game. But this game is going to be a little more difficult than the previous one. It’s going to be higher up on the scale so you’ll climb up through that game and put it aside and buy another game and another and another. You’re just going to climb up that ladder, improving your expertise. And the result is something I call games literacy.”

(The downside of being so far ahead of the pack is when the pack does finally catch up it will have completely forgotten those who were there before, resulting in inadvertent rediscoveries of old discoveries. What Crawford described as the ladder of difficulty is now known as the Chick Parabola.)

Though that may seem like a simple observation, and one hardly worth pointing out since it would appear to be fairly obvious, it’s actually a very important one as it informs a lot of behaviours, patterns and expectations in gaming.
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Playing Majesty 2: the Fantasy Kingdom Sim is like watching an impersonation. In exceptional cases like Andy Kaufman’s masterful send-up of Elvis, the impersonator could be so good it’s impossible to return to the original without recalling the ersatz version, but with most there’s always the niggling sense in the back of the mind the imitator is merely exploiting the original’s cachet.

Majesty 2, the Ino-Co-developed sequel to Cyberlore’s unusual real-time strategy title, is a decent enough impersonation both in presentation and gameplay. The Sean Connery-sound-alike royal adviser returns and the tax collector mimics Paul Lynde once again (though not always successfully – “Tex-x-x collector!”), and some of Majesty 2’s campaign missions take inspiration from the first game’s expansion.

In some respects, it must be said Majesty 2 is actually better. Yet the improvements made suggest the well-meaning Russian developer missed the true import of the first game and would have been better off doing its own thing instead of inviting unflattering comparisons.

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Alan Emrich, then Computer Gaming World’s Online Editor, gave Master of Orion an XXXX rating when previewing it in 1993 as a cheeky way of describing the essential elements of the strategic conquest game: eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate.

(The term was changed to “4X games” to accord it some decorum, which is a good thing because the phrase “XXXX strategy games” brings to mind “Sid Meier’s True Anal Stories” and nobody needs the associated mental imagery.)

But four Xes might also describe the experience of playing any given 4X game. The player must explore the complex ruleset, experiment to realise their strategies then extend those strategies to cope with playing the game at higher difficulty levels.

The fourth and final X of the player experience is exhaustion, which inevitably sets in after sinking dozens if not hundreds of hours into campaign after campaign. No matter how deep and expansive the 4X game, there eventually comes a moment when the one-more-turn compulsion is replaced by ennui.

Even the Civilization series, the standard bearer for 4X gaming, is not immune to this. Anyone who has been with the series since the first game is entitled to feel a little jaded two decades later. The rules may be tweaked, new mechanics may be added, the presentation may be improved but the Civilization experience is fundamentally the same and at some point the thought of having to rediscover Pottery for the umpteenth time simply crushes the spirit.

Fortunately, Firaxis anticipated this so the fourth game in the Civilization series was deliberately designed to be highly moddable and this led to some outstanding fan-created variations on the basic Civilization formula.

(Image source.)

Fall from Heaven 2, developed by a team of 15 led by Derek “Kael” Paxton, is arguably the best of the lot. It’s the perfect mod for those who appreciated everything Civilization IV brought to the table in 2005 but couldn’t get much into it because they’ve just played too much Civilization. The mod’s greatest achievement, and it is a considerable one, is returning the joy of exploration and experimentation to the jaded Civilization player.

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The Atari ST is almost a forgotten machine these days, unsurprising since it was primarily popular in Europe, and both gamer and media attention is usually focused with laser intensity on the American and Japanese gaming scenes to the exclusion of all else. A full-fledged personal computer whose stand-out feature was its affordability, the Atari ST was a fine gaming machine for its time and many a talented game developer worked on it including Peter Molyneux, David Jones, Jez San and, of course, the Bitmap Brothers.

The Bitmap Brothers not only took the EA “developer as artist” credo to heart, they pushed it further to become self-described rock star developers complete with sunglasses, leather jackets and cocksure attitudes. They were perhaps a tad overrated and it’s telling that, unlike their notable peers of the era, the Bitmap Brothers had trouble transitioning out of the Motorola 68000 game space. (The PC version of their 1993 game, The Chaos Engine, was excoriated in Computer Gaming World with “Gamers wishing they could turn their Pentium into a Super Nintendo so they can play a home video rip-off of some 1980 arcade hit need look no further …”) Their arcade-inspired games were enjoyable and had some neat ideas but they weren’t especially innovative. Yet when the Bitmap Brothers did think outside the box, they did manage to come up with one of the best two-player games of the early 90s.

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