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Chris Crawford kickstarts a new game

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The game itself is not among the rewards? Weird. (I only skimmed the page and didn't watch the video)

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The game itself is not among the rewards?

FIRST SENTENCE: Our goal with this project is to make available for free a serious game that we think has great educational and civic value.

(just teasing) ;)

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It's free and yet we still don't get it as part of backing it? What horse shit.

The game actually sounds pretty interesting, though I have a feeling I'd like it more if it wS exactly what they described but not trying to teach me something... Ill be playing it more for the hilarious results.

That aside, it's a cool subject and think I'll kick a few bucks their way.

Edit: played the alpha and have some more thoughts on it, but it's what figured out above. I'll go into detail tomorrow when I'm not typing on my phone.

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For some reason I mixed up Chris Crawford with Chris Sawyer and I was about to run and get my credit card until I realized my error. Chris Sawyer should make another game.

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Yeah, I was expecting Sawyer too. A new Transport Tycoon or Locomotion would be sweet, I tell myself.

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So it looks like he probably won't make it, which is too bad because I think it's a pretty cool idea. I just think he isn't too good at marketing or making a kickstarter that appeals to people that go to the site.

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I think that he went around all wrong with the pitch.

He is asking for 150k, less then most game Kickstarters, but still a hefty sum. For that much, people expect professional grade.

This is not professional grade:

Carbon%20Dioxide%20Tax%20Income.jpg

This is a picture I could make with Powerpoint.

Ive never played a Chris Crawford game, and while Im not doubting his talents as a designer. Im really doubting his presentation. The whole shtick of not being heard of is sort of a turn off. I get what he is trying to do, but it paints the picture of a dated product; of a crotchety old man who is trying to get back into the business. Once you see the logo and game art, and the fact that he couldnt even be bothered to get a real domain, and instead links you with a jumble of numbers to have you play the game, that picture is just about painted FOR you.

Also, saying that all this money will only keep the site around for 5yrs seems like a poor message. No one wants to invest in a product that already has an expiration date. If you are gonna take 5yrs of operating costs up front (and it actually sounds like 150k should provide 10yrs of operating costs, and half the money will go towards advertising) then do something smart with it. Dont advertise something that has no ability to make money back, monetize the game in some way.

Also, what is the benefit of running this off a website? Its not like this game is doing WolfRamAlpha levels of simulation, im sure anything with a CPU faster than 100mhz could crunch the spreadsheet numbers here. Why not make the game downloadable? This game has no textures, no music, no 3d models. Its 99% text and 1% crappy stock images. I bet that would compress down to a 5mb RAR file. Last time I checked that are tons of ways to distribute a game like that for next to free. And if he isnt doing any sort of advertising/monetizing/account based add-ons, then why not make it downloadable.

And where is he getting these numbers? Id love to see any sort of detail into the costs. Is he expecting a million people to play this game every year? 100,000? 10,000? To be honest a realistic number of players could be quite low.

I think a deep simulation about the environment could be something really useful, if you could get people to play it (people that arent already onboard the save-the-planet train). But I think he just went the wrong direction completely with the business decisions here.

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I really don't see the appeal of this at all. You set sliders and hope that Chris Crawford's interpretation doesn't totally defeat your expectation. It's like a Paradox game with less (no) play.

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I backed the project so I could comment on it. I wrote a couple comments back and forth, and the problem is that Chris just dosent want to listen. I addressed issues of the pitch, how its misleading, and the look of the game. He just blew off all the comments and stuck by his guns. I know its always difficult to take criticism on your own content, but you need to. If everyone is telling you something, then you need to realize that maybe they are right.

He has yet to concede to any criticism that people have posted. At best he skirts around the issue, and usually just continues to talk about how he thinks people need to adapt their expectations.

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I learned of Chris Crawford's existence just a month ago. This video did little to convince me that he isn't the original Peter Molydeux. If you do a Google image search for him you'll find a picture of a dude wearing a gigantic blue hat and the most stoned expression of all time.

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It's a little disappointing to see, as there is no way this is going to succeed, but not without reason. The shitty presentation is definitely an aspect and then there's his stubborn refusal to accept that that side of things is actually important to his success. Then there's the disdain he has for the only group of people who would've probably gotten him his money. His target audience, environmentalist orientated folk who don't normally play games. It's selling milk to kids who don't like to drink milk; I don't think that's going to work.

I backed this project on the basis of Crawford's name alone, as I have a great deal of respect for the man. Had this been a project by someone unfamiliar I would've glanced at it a moment and moved on, sorry to say.

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It's a little disappointing to see, as there is no way this is going to succeed, but not without reason. The shitty presentation is definitely an aspect and then there's his stubborn refusal to accept that that side of things is actually important to his success. Then there's the disdain he has for the only group of people who would've probably gotten him his money. His target audience, environmentalist orientated folk who don't normally play games. It's selling milk to kids who don't like to drink milk; I don't think that's going to work.

I backed this project on the basis of Crawford's name alone, as I have a great deal of respect for the man. Had this been a project by someone unfamiliar I would've glanced at it a moment and moved on, sorry to say.

I agree. I think that there was potential here. But yeah, he totally failed to be perceptive to todays audience and marketing. He came off as so dismissive of anything that didnt mean the original pitch. Every time someone suggested better visuals or some sort of graphics-related comment he would ramble on about how this game wont have any "dancing dolphins" (which in itself is a strange and dated metaphor for the games seriousness). Someone recently commented on his most recent update, saying "Are you completely underestimating the value of good presentation?"

But coming from a guy whose only major project in recent years is that Storytron engine, its not that surprising that he has trouble staying modern. He needs to majorly modify his pitch, redo the video, and drop the goal a huge amount. I would say 30k is doable, but anything past that is just too much for this project. At this point he has put so much time into it that it would seem to be worth getting even that small of an amount, instead of getting nothing at all. And once its launched there is always the potential of making money of it in other ways (ads, donations, maybe something akin to expansion packs).

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That thing doesn't even seem to be an interesting simulation.

Set some policy sliders and whatch what their effect over 60 years is? Who imagines policies staying put for 60 years?

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Every time someone suggested better visuals or some sort of graphics-related comment he would ramble on about how this game wont have any "dancing dolphins"He has yet to concede to any criticism that people have posted.

Yeah, that's the frustrating bit: I don't think he understand how core to educational tool the presentation is...actually, how your present your information as well as the causality or correlation links between those is pretty much the difference between education and information.

I pointed to him the shortcomings of his presentation and suggested he should look at the wave of infographics from the past few years; and I was disappointed that the extent of his imagination around this aspect was 3D pie charts and smiling/frowning face. Ah well.

To FesteDaFool and RoutineMachine: you should be a bit more curious about Crawford - at least check his Wikipedia page -; the guy has some pretty solid and seminal achievements both in terms of released games and academic works on game design.

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Oh, I know about him. I even read one of his books, saw the dragon speech. He is a lot of talk, and that's the comparison I draw with Blow. I generally agree with his take on game criticism.

I am surprised he's no longer working on an interactive narrative engine. He seemed pretty set on that.

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Guys, it turns out the problem wasn't the terrible presentation, it was that Kickstarter has sold out:

"As it turns out, my model was only right for what Kickstarter used to be," said Crawford. "That is, Kickstarter used to be a semi-charitable operation in which people could assist worthy creative projects that might not make it commercially, but still ought to be done. But in the area of games and comics, this is no longer the case.

"What's going on now, which I did not comprehend at the time, is that Kickstarter is a marketing channel [for games], so instead of buying a game after it's made, people just pay for a game before it's made. It works in that context, but I had entirely the wrong context in mind, so Balance of the Planet's Kickstarter became a dismal failure."

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This guy just really cant admit that he was wrong.

Also I forgot about the game Fate of the World, but multiple Gamasutra commenters pointed it out - and they are right that Balance of the Planet effectively is Fate of the World. Except Fate of the World has much more of a game to it, dosent look like a 5th graders powerpoint presentation, and from what was demonstrated of Crawfords game, Fate of the World also appears to have more depth.

After reading this post-mortum I have no more interest in supporting Crawford. Your project failed. MISERABLY. Many many people said over and over - make your game look better, change your pitch, tinker with the simulation a bit. He refused and he continues to make up reasons why, and ignore the things people have been shouting at his face. If he relaunches a new campaign he will have to do without my donation.

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Given that the Gamasutra interviews and project updates are essentially "my failure has re-confirmed my existing opinions about things," I would have very little faith that his simulation wouldn't just be a polemic for his views on how to deal with climate change.

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"An interesting exercise is to read a brief sentence or two of the description, and every single one says something along the lines of, 'This is a platformer – with a twist!' or 'Here we have an RPG with new rules for magic.' They all describe themselves as, 'It's this category of game, with these changes,' and that in itself bespeaks how set in its ways that community is."

This says more about human nature than it does about games or Kickstarter.

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I really admire Crawford for his drive and tenacity: he basically forged ahead in one creative direction for a good 20 years, not knowing if it lead anywhere for sure. Doing that, he advanced the field of interactive and simulated narratives in some ways, and failed on others; but the whole undertaking isn't something everybody has the balls and vision to do.

It's a shame that these enduring qualities seem to have turned into bitter denial and are now preventing him from learning from his past projects and this very Kickstarter: if he looked at other non-Video game Kickstarter he would see that the spirit he's talking about his very much alive (that's the only reason I backed him); and that this failure is his own.

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