WRT interview with Chris Crawford
WRT interview with Chris Crawford: well-known game industry critic and interactive storytelling evangelist. Yes, that’s right. We’ve interviewed Chris and it is a podcast!
Chris Crawford has been pursuing the design of new worlds using new media for two decades. He wrote The Art of Computer Game Design whilst leading the games research group at Atari. He has designed and programmed many games and written many books on software. His latest book, Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling, took a year to write and Crawford considers it the most important book he has ever written. The book covers the debates around interactive storytelling (IS); different approaches to IS, conflicts and potential points of reconciliation; what interactivity is; the paradigm shift needed to understand and create interactive stories; approaches to software actualisation; the market and predictions. He attempts much bridge work between industry and academia, ‘techies’ and ‘artsies’….
In the current media climate of convergence, participatory culture, mobile gaming, iPodfiction, iPodart, blog fiction and so on, audiences are not only familiar with technology and interaction, they crave it; and producers are scrambling to satisfy their desire. This book, and Crawford’s just released software, is poised at the cusp of a commercially viable and creatively unique form of entertainment.
Christy Dena (me) interviews Chris Crawford to find out just what is different about interactive storytelling and his software. I had a cold (and so a blocked nose) and I giggle a bit too much, but otherwise, I think you’ll really enjoy with chat with Chris:
[currently broken, will be repaired shortly] or
or download the mp3.
Relevant Links:
- Chris Crawfords’ company: Storytron
- Storytron blog
- Chris Crawford’s personal site: Erasamatazz
- Wikipedia entry of Chris Crawford
- Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling [amazon]
- The Art of Computer Game Design [amazon]
- The Art of Computer Game Design [online]
- Chris Crawford on Game Design [amazon]
Mentioned in Podcast:
- Previous WRT (text) interviews: Gnoetry: Interview with Eric Elshtain; Gimcrack’d: Interview with Chris Klimas; Lightwriting: Interview with Ken Wronkiewics; Ink: Interview with Kym Buchanan.
- WordPress plugin for Academic Citations
- Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern’s Facade
Let us know what you think of the podcast and the interview by commenting here or at iTunes.
April 30th, 2006 at 6:52 am
[…] In a recent podcast at Writer Response Theory blog I heard this: "This is a revolution we are making, we are creating a new medium, a new industry […] We gonna change the world here". […]
May 1st, 2006 at 4:32 am
Responses to Chris’ podcast at Chris’ blog.
May 2nd, 2006 at 5:48 am
[…] I have to admit I got all a-twitter when I started listening to WRT’s interview with Chris Crawford and I got a little shout-out at the beginning. It’s tiny-tiny but still, it’s kind of cool to be on the same, er, stage. […]
May 3rd, 2006 at 10:27 am
[…] For a great introduction to Chris’ latest efforts, check out WRT’s great podcast interview with Chris. […]
May 12th, 2006 at 5:39 am
[…] I have two half posts that I’m still working over. One is my Round Table post, which I’m going to commit to having up for you on Monday morning. The second is something of a response to Christy Dena’s first podcast in which she interviews Chris Crawford (link). (Un?)fortunately, I also have some design work that I need to focus on today, so don’t expect anything weighty this afternoon. […]
May 18th, 2006 at 7:10 am
[…] To open her podcast interview with Chris Crawford (link), Christy Dena reads the following quote of Rob Cover from his paper Reconfiguring of the Author Audience Relationship: The rise of interactivity as a form of audience participation is by no means the latest trend in media history, nor something that disrupts a prize synergy between author/text/audience, but a strongly held and culturally based desire to participate in the creation and transformation of the text that has effectively been denied by previous technology of recorded media production and distribution. […]
September 6th, 2006 at 12:26 am
[…] “The Movies” was brought to us by Peter Molyneux of Lionhead Studios (acquired by Microsoft in April 2006), the makers of “Black & White,” the entertaining and literal “god game, and “Fable” (over 2 million units solid). (Molyneux, who is the head in Lionhead, has been called the “inventor” of the “god” game.) Despite its sales, Fable seemed to fall short of expectations. Nonetheless, the lions have certainly found a new audience and potentially a new genre with the addition of a deliverable, distributable content. (“The Movies” was the highest selling IP over the most recent Christmas period). So here is the latest stab at interactive storytelling, a program that provides opportunities for generating stories interactively: what I will call Output-Oriented Games (OOGs). “The Movies” is a combinatoric writing tool that seems to reach for some of the goals Chris Crawford outlined in his latest book, Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling (2004) and even his recent podcast with Christy. It is “Interactive Storytelling Technology” or rather interactive technology for generating stories, although an entirely different way (that he ,who declared that video games are dead, may no doubt find blasphemous). Crawford only has The Sims to analyze for his book. The Movies takes a tycoon game and mashes it with Machinima, as Andrew Stern has pointed out on GTxA.Crucial to Crawford is the size of the grain that is combined. (See more in this classic post on GTxA). If in Cent Milles Milliards de Poems a combinatoric grain is an individual line of poetry, in “The Movies” the grain is an individual sequence of computer-animated footage. These short scenes can be customized in many ways, most notably changing the actors, set, and costumes. […]
October 18th, 2006 at 3:44 pm
[…] Chris Crawford […]
December 15th, 2008 at 4:28 pm
[…] WRT interview with Chris Crawford at WRT: Writer Response Theory […]