Think about Eastern Front (which I haven't played) or Balance of Power (which I have, on the Amiga). There are tons of games that are similarly built, in whole or in part, on such mathematical models: SimCity, Rollercoaster Tycoon, the Civ series, any number of turn-based and real-time strategy games going back to the 8-bit era. Even RPGs use mathematical rules, with a handy dose of chance, to decide the outcome of different kinds of attack.
There's even a whole (I seem to remember) chapter in Stephen Hill's "Amiga Game Maker's Manual with AMOS Basic" on building "simulation games" using simple mathematical models.
Whilst I respect Chris Crawford's contribution to the video games industry I don't understand this perspective at all.
What an entrance.
> With Balance of Power, I could write a simple equation for the number of fighters who would join an insurgency against the government:
> `Fighters = Political Immaturity * Population * Previous Success of Insurgency`
> Here, `Political Immaturity` is a constant I defined for each country based on my estimate of how much people respected the rule of law.
I mean, come on…
It's incredible how many people keep missing the man's point. Almost making it for him. His point is the gaming industry is still completely filled with mindless NPCs and simple boolean interactions. He calls out God of War in another article as an extreme disappointment.
The fact that everyone here is saying his ideas have continued, but keep naming the same two or three games made by only a couple gaming companies proves how right he is. If you want any form of deep interactivity play a deep strategy game, anything else besides that in game design is still about as interactive as pacman.
His point is that after 35 years and literal orders of magnitude improvement in processing power, the average game is still modeled using incredibly simplistic logic and makes for empty interactions. And take a look at most any top selling game and it's true.
Your average squirrel in the park has more interesting behavior or interaction than most game characters. It's essentially just been "better graphics, bigger explosions" for three decades now. None of that precludes dynamic interactions.
Though there's undoubtedly still plenty of room for improvement. In terms of how smart computer characters move and act, I think Robin Hood, the Legend of Sherwood (2002) still stands out: there, when a guard spots you, they first become curious and come check you out. When they're sure they've seen you, they raise the alarm and attack you, and other guards that hear them, join them. When a guard finds a dead guard, they look for their boss, who then organises a search party. It's all very logical, and it results in a very exciting isometric stealth game. Especially the fact that the guards cooperate, but need to communicate over credible distances first, makes the whole thing work very well. There may well have been other games that work like this; I don't pretend to know most games, but I've never played anything else quite like it.
Is it though? Can you really blame readers if he isn't communicating clearly which, I would argue, if that's his point then he isn't.
Did he really? Or did he spend that time satisfying his own ego and tell himself it was for the sake of helping others? Certainly it sounds like he managed less actual helping others than those of us "earning a shit load to peddle ads".
"Young people these days, I am told, are illiterate and cannot understand the written word. They can learn only from video. So should I speak to them in the language they understand?
Yes, I probably am a genius—but the issue is meaningless."
The algorithms that are used by most ad recommendation services are deep enough themselves.
The ICML test of time award this year was for an adaptation of a technique used to study online decision making algorithms.