[HN Gopher] End of an Era
___________________________________________________________________
End of an Era
Author : marcusestes
Score : 196 points
Date : 2025-06-30 19:17 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.erasmatazz.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.erasmatazz.com)
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| This feels quite sad.
|
| Someone who clearly wanted to make a difference, but mostly seems
| to have not just _made games_.
|
| He made game tools, but then didn't actually use them to make
| games. And then he blamed everyone else for not being ready for
| what he was making.
|
| Giving up after only one released work just seems like such a
| shame.
| abetusk wrote:
| The posts author and site operator is Chris Crawford [0]. He
| said so in the post but Wikipedia confirms that he was mostly
| active from 1980s to 1990s with at least 15 titles to his name,
| not including other tools that he built and not including game
| design books that he authored or wrote for.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Crawford_(game_designer)
| refulgentis wrote:
| This feels quite sad.
|
| A whole person -- flattened into little bits gleaned from some
| text, glued together with assumptions and world-building --
| dismissed as "blaming" and "giving up" "after one game"
|
| The YouTube link in the other post has a top comment of "The
| best speech in all of gaming history delivered by what must be
| considered the Socrates of gaming.", to give you a sense of
| there may be more depth to this person than "giving up after 1
| game".
|
| If nothing else, it indicates _the crowd_ perceives more depth,
| which will be enough to make you ponder if you missed
| something.
|
| I suggest re-reading the article with a different set of
| assumptions -- when faced with a contradiction, first, check
| your premises -- it's likely the guy worried about declining
| programming skills and pointing out the ease at which he was
| dismissing JavaScript due to simple errors, is being self-aware
| and sarcastic.
|
| Once you're freed via engaging with your own thinking, instead
| of rushing to do public judgement, it is a quite beautiful
| meditation of working on something that fails to get the
| mindshare you hoped for, and a all-too-familiar to all of us
| reminder of the cognitive dissonance required to be okay with
| that, even when you'll never be okay.
| stevage wrote:
| Also he says he was 70 on 2020 before embarking on some of
| those big projects. I hope I'm half as active then.
| drewcoo wrote:
| I just saw a gen-Z kid choose to play Ms. PacMan instead of
| Zaxxon. This is heresy on the level of playing Buck Hunter
| instead of Tempest or even Galaxian. Some games we all know
| but some are legend.
| ahefner wrote:
| He definitely _made games_. Chris Crawford was one of the first
| known _names_ in game design, a few years ahead of
| contemporaries like Sid Meier whom I expect you 'd still
| recognize. Crawford seemed to alternate between computer war
| games, with reliable prospects for commercial success in the
| 80s, and more experimental fare about managing nuclear
| reactors, geopolitics, and such - difference being he seemed to
| get bored by the whole thing and completely disembarked in
| pursuit of whatever it was he intended to achieve via
| Erasmatron, Storytron, etc. It's fascinating to read his
| writings over that period. It seemed a sort of tragic paradox
| overshadowing all of it that, if he was so bored of
| mechanistic, algorithmic, and predictable computer game
| mechanics, maybe stop pursuing computer games as your chosen
| medium? It may have been a blind alley in the end, but someone
| had to explore it.
|
| Nevertheless, it is quite sad - however, it's difficult for me
| to relate to the experiences of someone who lived through that
| first wave of personal computing and played a notable part in
| it - perhaps through that lens, anything was possible.
| proneb1rd wrote:
| Was his video presentation ever recorded? Would be interested to
| see what kind of tools he's been building
| abetusk wrote:
| Just a quick search on YouTube for Chris Crawford yields a few
| results [0] [1] [2].
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMg2_teHVTs
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajz_1TqccYA
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBrj4S24074
|
| [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFPs9MUvR3U
| moondistance wrote:
| Chris Crawford is also famous for the Dragon Speech :)
| https://youtu.be/CBrj4S24074?si=Ph12RpW8BKsh8-qS
| vault wrote:
| dark reader screws this website so badly
| ianbicking wrote:
| What he describes feels so familiar to me... the ideas and
| projects I've cared about most have usually landed flat. And
| because the ideas matter to me I try over and over, hoping that
| there's something I can change or explain or improve that will
| make the difference. Like him I also can get lost in the tools,
| making the thing-to-make-the-thing instead of making the thing.
| Sometimes that's a necessary prerequisite, but I think it can
| also be a defense mechanism... a way to avoid approaching an
| ambition that intimidates me, or that I think will reveal what I
| lack.
|
| I was not familiar with Chris Crawford before this, though I
| think I'll look into him more. Reading his idea of People Games
| [1] I wish he was a younger man with a bit more time to revisit
| these ideas with new technology. There are new interactive
| mediums to discover with LLMs, and it's mediums that he's clearly
| been trying to create all this time...
|
| Quoting his excerpt:
|
| "I dreamed of the day when computer games would be a viable
| medium of artistic expression -- an art form. I dreamed of
| computer games encompassing the broad range of human experience
| and emotion: computer games about tragedies, or self-sacrifice;
| games about duty and honor, patriotism; a satirical game about
| politics, or games about human folly; games about men's
| relationship to God or to Nature; games about the passionate love
| between a boy and girl, or the serene and mature love between
| husband and wife of decades; games about family relationships or
| death, mortality, games about a boy becoming a man, and a man
| realizing that he is no longer young; games about a man facing
| truth at high noon on a dusty main street, or a boy and his dog,
| and a prostitute with a heart of gold. All of these things and
| more were part of this dream, but by themselves they amounted to
| nothing, because all of these things have already been done by
| other art forms. There was no advantage, no purchase, nothing
| superior about this dream, it's just an old rehash. All we are
| doing with the computer, if all we do is just reinvent the wheel
| with poor grade materials, well, we don't have a dream worth
| pursuing. But there was a second part of this dream that
| catapulted it into the stratosphere. The second part is what made
| this dream important and worthy: that is interactivity.
|
| "Let me explain to you why interactivity is so overwhelmingly
| important. Let me talk about the human brain. You know, our minds
| are not passive receptacles, they are active agents. It's not as
| if we have a button on the side of our heads and they come along
| and push the button and the top of our heads flips open and then
| they take a pitcher full of knowledge and pour it into our skull,
| and then they close the top of our head, shake well and say,
| <<Congratulations, you're educated now!>>. [...] All the higher
| mammals learn by playing, by doing, by interacting [...]
|
| "The interactive conversation is effective, but the expository
| lecture is efficient. That's the trade-off we make. And over the
| centuries, we humans have learned that the gains in efficiency
| outweigh the losses in effectiveness. And therefore we choose
| expository methods. But the sacrifice remains real! We haven't
| ever solved that problem. It's been with us since the beginning
| of history. Every single artist has faced this, every
| communicator, every teacher, every novelist, every sculptor,
| every singer, every musician, every painter, every single artist
| through all of human history has been forced to sacrifice
| effectiveness for efficiency... until now. Because now we have a
| technology that changes everything. [...] That is the
| revolutionary nature of the computer. It allows us to automate
| interactivity to achieve both effectiveness and efficiency. That
| was the most important part of my dream."
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Crawford_(game_designer)...
| lxdesk wrote:
| Crawford's work is worthy of study, as is the causation for why
| he experienced external failure. It embodies the "simulationist"
| aesthetic of game design: given enough modelled parameters,
| something emergent and interesting will happen. This was a trend
| of the 20th century: computers were new and interesting, and
| simulations did work when you asked them to solve physics
| problems and plan logistics. Why wouldn't it work for narrative?
|
| But then you play the games, and they're all so opaque. You have
| no idea what's going on, and the responses to your actions are so
| hard to grasp. But if you do figure it out, the model usually
| collapses into a linear, repeatable strategy and the illusion of
| depth disappears. You can see this happening from the start, with
| _Gossip_. Instead of noticing that his game didn 't communicate
| and looking for points of accessibility, he plunged further
| forward into computer modelling. The failure is one of
| verisimilitude: The model is similar to a grounded truth on
| paper, but it's uninteresting to behold because it doesn't lead
| to a coherent whole. It just reflects the designer's thoughts on
| "this is how the world should work", which is something that can
| be found in any comments section.
|
| Often, when Crawford lectured, he would go into evo-psych
| theories to build his claims: that is, he was confident that the
| answers he already accepted about the world and society were the
| correct ones, and the games were a matter of illustration. He was
| likewise confident that a shooting game would be less thoughtful
| than a turn-based strategy game because the moment-to-moment
| decisions were less complex, and the goal should be to portray
| completeness in the details.
|
| I think he's aware of some of this, but he's a stubborn guy.
| cossatot wrote:
| This is evident in his description of programming in his later
| years:
|
| _Time and time again I would send my friend Dave Walker an
| email declaring that Javascript (or something else) was utterly
| broken, incapable of executing the simplest program without
| errors. Dave would ask to see the source code and I would
| present it to him with detailed notes proving that my code was
| perfect and Javascript was broken. He'd call me, we'd discuss
| it, and eventually he'd say something like, "Where did you
| terminate the loop beginning at line 563?" There would be a
| long silence, followed by the tiniest "Oh" from me. I'd thank
| him for his help and hang up. A week later, I'd be fuming again
| about another fundamental flaw in Javascript._
|
| Many of us are stubborn and will work hard and long, without
| much positive external feedback, under the assumption that our
| vision is correct and the audience, if one even exists, is
| wrong. Much fundamental progress has been made this way:
| Faraday, Einstein, Jobs, etc. But of course many times one
| simply _is_ wrong and refusing to see it means throwing years
| away, and whatever else with it (money, relationships, etc.).
| It 's a hard balance, especially for the monomaniacal without
| much interest in balance. Finding out how to make solid
| (public, peer-reviewed, evidence-based, whatever) incremental
| progress towards the paradigm shift seems to be the way if one
| can manage.
| anyfoo wrote:
| That quote about JavaScript is... huh. I do not understand
| how you can even begin coming to the conclusion of
| "JavaScript [is] utterly broken, incapable of executing the
| simplest programs without errors" when obviously, JavaScript
| (which I do not like, by the way) is productively used on a
| large scale (even back then), and constantly under scrutiny
| from programmers, computer scientists, language designers...
| it's just baffling.
|
| It reminds me of when I was around 10 years old or so, maybe
| slightly older, and playing around with Turbo C (or maybe
| Turbo C++) on DOS. I must have gotten something very basic
| about pointers (which were new to me at the time) wrong,
| probably having declared a char* pointer but not actually
| allocated any memory, leaving it entirely uninitialized, and
| my string manipulation failed in weird and interesting ways
| (since this was on DOS without memory protection, you
| wouldn't get a program crash like a segmentation fault very
| easily, instead you'd often see "more interesting"
| corruption).
|
| Hilariously, at the time I concluded that the string
| functions of Turbo C(++) must be broken and moved away
| "string.h" so I wouldn't use it. But even then I shortly
| after realized how insane I was: Borland could never sell
| Turbo C(++) if the functions behind the string.h API were
| actually broken, and it became clear that my code must be
| buggy instead. And remember, I was 10 years old or so,
| otherwise I don't think I would have come to that weird
| conclusion in the first place.
|
| Nowadays, I _do_ live in this very tiny niche where I
| actually encounter not only compiler bugs, but actual
| hardware /CPU bugs, but even then I need a lot of experiments
| and evidence for myself that that's what I'm actually
| hitting...
| tangus wrote:
| >I do not understand how you can even begin coming to the
| conclusion of ...
|
| Obviously he's not serious, he's playing the part of the
| out of touch old man.
| anyfoo wrote:
| Ah, okay. Maybe it's more obvious in context, or maybe my
| hyperbole detector is broken.
| yuchi wrote:
| Just as a small note I did not get that too.
| smaudet wrote:
| I can imagine grumpy an old man frustrated by a different
| paradigm shouting at his computer.
|
| We all become that eventually, hopefully we can all be as
| poetic and humble (and honest) about it.
| anyfoo wrote:
| Sure, but "JavaScript [is] utterly broken, incapable of
| executing the simplest programs without errors" is a bit
| much. I find it hard to believe that even when I'm
| completely out of touch, I'd say that about a language
| that people are obviously productive in (as much as I
| hate JS myself).
|
| But apparently I didn't get the hyperbole.
| Tarsul wrote:
| Sometimes when I play a point n click adventure and I am
| stuck for hours on a puzzle I tend to think: I've tried
| _everything_... surely there must be some kind of bug for
| why I am not proceeding.
|
| Only to then realize (after reading the walkthrough) that
| there was indeed a way.
|
| I think it's human nature to find (rather search) blame
| not only in yourself but everywhere else... anyhow, since
| the author _is_ reflective we should be forgiving as
| well.
| nkrisc wrote:
| It is a rather common mindset among beginner programmers
| though, particularly younger ones.
| smaudet wrote:
| Other languages have problems, but before some basic
| libraries (jQuery/Underscore) and language enhancements
| (Typescript/Coffeescript), it was arguably quite
| simplistic, and parts of the language were straight up
| anachronistic.
|
| If you've ever been unfortunate enough to have to wrangle a
| VB script routine, it was (less bad) like that. If not, I
| would go find some assembly code and teach it yourself, and
| then imagine that instead of side effects in registers
| there were random effects on your code/visual state.
|
| And like assembly code, you could now imagine that the same
| code might behave wildly different on different machines in
| different browsers.
|
| So a bit of "old man"isms, but also I imagine his
| JavaScript was tainted by the early days. It's better in
| some ways now, worse in different ways, I don't mean to say
| that is the worst or the best, just to offer perspective on
| where it came from.
| anyfoo wrote:
| I'm well aware of all of those things (I program modern
| assembly for a living, and witnessed the evolution of
| JS), but the quote was "JavaScript [is] utterly broken,
| incapable of executing the simplest programs without
| errors", which is a bit more extreme than what you're
| describing.
| lproven wrote:
| > I do not understand how you can even begin coming to the
| conclusion
|
| Tell us again when you're 74.
|
| I'm still nearly 2 decades from it, but I am a profoundly
| different human to the one I was 20 years ago, or 20 years
| before that.
| bitwize wrote:
| "Am I so out of touch? No, it's the _audience_ who 's wrong!"
| dripdry45 wrote:
| It's a quality I've run into with a couple people: young or
| old, once they've ossified into thinking they are Better and
| Smarter than everyone else, they stop being curious and
| simply start mandating their wild "truths"
|
| I'm sure we've all done it at one time or another, but
| repeated as habit without learning seems to speak of a
| certain kind of personality.
| whoisyc wrote:
| > He was likewise confident that a shooting game would be less
| thoughtful than a turn-based strategy game because the moment-
| to-moment decisions were less complex
|
| Sounds like a classic example of Moravec's paradox:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
|
| It's not that a shooting (or action, or heck talk to
| competitive fighting game players) game has less decisions for
| the player to make, it's that the decisions being made are all
| subconscious decisions about movements and difficult to put
| into words.
| gyomu wrote:
| I was not familiar with Chris Crawford other than vaguely being
| aware of the name. Reading this post and others on the website
| (like
| https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035048/http://www.erasma...),
| it's hard to not get the overall picture of "person says everyone
| else is doing it wrong, without having done it right themselves".
|
| What I mean by that is that there are game designers like
| Jonathan Blow who have their own theories on what is a great game
| and are extremely critical of the industry not following those
| theories, and then have released games that succeed at
| demonstrating those theories. In Jonathan Blow's case, you can
| disagree with the man, but you can't disagree with the fact that
| The Witness is a wildly original, successful game (1M+ copies
| sold) that has a cult following.
|
| That does not seem to be the case for Crawford's work. Lots of
| theories, lots of indictment for the industry doing it wrong, but
| no actual demonstration of what "doing it right" would mean.
|
| Saying that no one gets it and civilization won't be ready for
| many centuries (as the article I linked above does) feels like
| kind of a cheap rhetorical cop out.
|
| For what it's worth, I disagree with his indictment of the video
| game landscape as being narratively poor. Lots of video games
| with great interactive narratives out there, and there are many
| players who have been deeply moved by such games (of course,
| which games that might be varies from person to person).
|
| I think a good antidote when one finds themselves in those
| thinking patterns is to listen to what others have to say, and
| not dismiss them as not getting it because they don't follow your
| particular (unproven) theories.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| > I disagree with his indictment of the video game landscape as
| being narratively poor.
|
| I think he would say they are narratively poor by his defintion
| that the narrative must be generated by the game/player combo
| and not just pre-programmed. People love "The Last of Us" for
| it's narrative but that narritive is something that can
| arguably be conveyed via book or movie. Crawford wanted
| something where the narrative itself was generated.
|
| And no, he wouldn't count the choices players make in the
| average game. Whether to get go west or east. Whether to get
| the a sword first or the arrow. He wanted the story and
| character dialog to change. Few if any games do that. Of course
| today with LLMs it's likely some games will soon / have already
| done it to some degree and will do better in the future.
|
| Going back to his older work, you'd need to feed a context to
| the LLM about each characters motivations and then update that
| context based on player actions so that as the game progresses
| the way each NPC interacts with the player, and other NPCs,
| changes in a way that's consistent with each character's
| intrisict motivations and their interactions with others.
| gyomu wrote:
| People come up with complex shared narratives in multiplayer
| sandbox games like Minecraft/Roblox/Kenshi/etc. all the time.
|
| In the single player realm, there are games like Dwarf
| Fortress, Caves of Qud, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, etc.
|
| Point is, the landscape of what "narrative" means in video
| games today is broad and deep. If none of those are even
| remotely like what Crawford thinks is "right" - and he's not
| able to design a game that meets his standards himself - I'd
| argue his definition of "right" might just not be workable in
| the first place.
|
| There's a kind of people who want video games to have all of
| the possibility, depth, and meaning of real life. A game
| where you could do anything, be anyone, but still have
| consequences matter and be far reaching (like "Roy: A Life
| Well Lived" in Rick & Morty). Well, that exists, it's called
| real life, but you're not going to recreate it on a computer
| screen.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| > People come up with complex shared narratives in
| multiplayer sandbox games like Minecraft/Roblox/Kenshi/etc.
| all the time.
|
| That sounds no different from comming up with narratives on
| a playground. That's not a designed narrative, that's
| people making up a narrative where none exists. Hey, the
| jungle gym in our secret base! The swings are space ship!
| The ground is lava!
|
| I think we can all imagine what he wanted to build even if
| he failed to come close to building it. He wanted to make a
| story machine where you could play the game and converse
| with the characters in a free flowing way yet still have
| the game provide a setting and conflict. Imagine talking to
| characters in the holodeck on Star Trek. Ideally where,
| over the course of the game, the dialog and interactions
| are designed in real time within the constraints of the
| setting. And, the way you treat characters influences how
| they react. Be a dick to the bartender, all his connections
| are harder to get consessions from. Be nice to one romantic
| partner, get snubbed by another, etc... And not just by
| canned responses. Tell one character a piece of info and it
| gets leaked to their closest contacts who then change their
| behavior/dialog based on this new knowledge.
| tompark wrote:
| I'm glad you're trying to explain the difference.
|
| I've been in too many conversations where this topic
| comes up, and it's very disheartening to me. Gamers
| insist there are plenty of great narrative games, and
| every example they give is basically a branching story
| with bunch of flags that gate which branches can be
| taken. If I give the Holodeck as a counter-example, well
| that's just too pie-in-the-sky.
|
| These conversations remind me a lot of Paul Graham's Blub
| Paradox: "Blub is good enough for him, because he thinks
| in Blub." Current SotA narrative games are good enough
| for most gamers, because all they've played are branching
| story games.
| gyomu wrote:
| The complex emergent narratives people love in Dwarf
| Fortress or Caves of Qud aren't branching stories though?
|
| If the argument is "let's build games that tell character
| stories as complex as Last of Us with the world building
| techniques of Dwarf Fortress", it might be worth
| considering why 1) it wouldn't be feasible and/or 2) it
| wouldn't lead to a game that's as fun/compelling as a
| more narratively linear counterpart.
|
| The narrative in Last of Us is compelling because it's
| tight and focused and authored by the authors to be told
| in a very specific way.
|
| The "emergent narrative out of raw world simulation"
| argument sounds like filming thousands of hours of
| security camera footage and expecting Citizen Kane to
| come out of it.
|
| I mean again, I would be pretty receptive to a "this game
| had the right idea, we should push it further" argument,
| but the "I'm a visionary game designer who hasn't shipped
| a game that embodies my vision AND the thousands of other
| game designers are clueless, but everyone will see how
| clever I was in 3 centuries" argument rings pretty
| hollow.
|
| For what it's worth, Chris Crawford's tool
| (http://storytron.com/) is a branching story editor, and
| one that seems much less powerful than what is used in
| the industry (eg articy).
| blizdiddy wrote:
| You haven't played dwarf fortress or caves of qud and it
| shows. Great example of armchair designers insisting they
| know better than all the gamers and game creators
| immersed in the art.
| marcinzm wrote:
| That describes Dwarf Fortress. I guess you don't have an
| text interface to talk to people but that feels like a no
| true Scotsman requirement.
|
| The difference is that Dwarf Fortress is not fully opaque
| to the player. You see a large part of the world so can
| see the consequences of your actions. And that is what
| makes it fun.
|
| An opaque world simulator is frustrating and tedious.
| Eventually someone just min-maxes a way to break it which
| makes it just a tedious cookie clicker. That's why D&D
| has a game master that modifies the world's design to
| align with the players so that everyone has a good time.
| That is the key difference. An illusion of rigid
| structure, which requires some actual structure, with
| opaque flexibility. A simulator is not a fun game. A
| world where god cheats to make you have more fun time is
| a fun game. A pre-defined narrative or narrative tress is
| one such cheat, but not the only one.
| jbattle wrote:
| Crawford's work that I'm most familiar with is a game called
| Balance of Power
| -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_Power_(video_game)
|
| I played it as a cold war kid and was fascinated by it. Mid 80's,
| post War-Games, this game blew my mind. It simulated the _world_.
|
| The lesson I remember was that conflict in the Cold War was _not_
| zero-sum. One side would win and one side would lose. There were
| (in this game) no win-win outcomes. But - and this is the key
| point - the value of each win or loss was unequally felt. For the
| US to back down in Indonesia was disappointing. To back down in
| West Germany was fatal.
|
| Oh - and also the notion of graduated escalation & de-escalation.
| Playing the game well requried using escalation wisely. Sometimes
| you escalate (a bit) to see how they respond & judge the value of
| a conflict to your opponent. Sometimes you escalate (a lot) to
| signal to your opponent that a given conflict is very serious to
| you.
|
| I don't know if I ever had _fun_ playing the game - but of the
| hundreds of games I played as a kid this one stuck with me.
|
| All this with something like 64k of memory - brilliant!
| saghm wrote:
| > The lesson I remember was that conflict in the Cold War was
| not zero-sum. One side would win and one side would lose. There
| were (in this game) no win-win outcomes. But -and this is the
| key point - the value of each win or loss was unequally felt.
| For the US to back down in Indonesia was disappointing. To back
| down in West Germany was fatal.
|
| Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but it's not clear to me how this
| describes something obviously non-zero sum. Independent losses
| can have different values in a zero-sum hand game; what matters
| is whether each win is proportional to the corresponding loss.
| If the USSR winning in West Germany was only a small win, that
| would demonstrate it was non-zero sum due to the size of the
| loss there for the US, but I don't think the magnitude of the
| outcome in Indonesia would relate to that at all.
| ludicity wrote:
| I've been reading Crawford for quite a few years now, and got
| into DS9 at his recommendation. I had to skip the last paragraph
| because I haven't finished his latest game, but I've quietly
| admired his weirdness and dedication to the craft. Some of his
| criticisms of storytelling in games have also been frequently
| opaque to me, but I still believe there's something behind even
| the statements I didn't understand.
|
| Some of his reflections on growing old, remembering his first
| crush, and even just noodling about home improvement are
| incredibly beautiful too.
|
| Those are all asides, but what I mean to say is that his other
| posts are worth reading.
| joaogui1 wrote:
| DS9 the Star Trek series?
| jccalhoun wrote:
| He's always seemed very frustrated with the gaming industry and I
| hope he's happy in his day to day life. I remember running across
| Crawford's works and storytron back around 2000. I thought he was
| wrong then but I hoped he would find success. After all this time
| it is hard not to think that he's spent years tilting at
| windmills.
| ezekiel68 wrote:
| I can so relate to this guy.
|
| I'm "only" in my 50s now, but I am in my 50s now. For a couple of
| decades I've had this grand vision about how to build the perfect
| algorithmic trading system. The practical expression of this has
| come in fits and starts.
|
| During the Pandemic, I finally devoted some time to building a
| bespoke server and hosting it co-located facility near a high-
| quality market data provider. I chose to do this before the
| software was ready in order to "light a fire under my a$$" and
| help motivate me to move things along. By the end of 2021 I had
| written, tested, and deployed a set of specialized clients
| written in rust to consume the market data and perform basic
| parsing of the real-time information. I stored the transformed
| output of these processes in log files as a temporary data sink
| that could represent the data "someday" moving downstream in a
| custom stream processing platform that would perform trades via
| an online broker.
|
| And then, it stalled. There always seemed to be good reasons why
| I couldn't commit to one implementation strategy or another.
| Would I pass the data downstreeam via pipes? With Kafka? Via
| shared memory? Would the parsed input be represented via protobuf
| records? A custom binary format? Apache Arrow/Parquet format?
| Would the algorithms be expressed in custom rust code? Using
| Pandas(numpy)/Polars? Would I focus on my imagined "insights"
| into how prices move or make the transition to Machine Learning
| by trying to produce "special sauce" custom features that could
| be fed into models of various types? In the meantime, I have only
| collected a high volume of daily log files.
|
| There has been some progress, of course. Last year, with LLMs as
| my pair programmer, I added vector processing to the ingest
| components, which made them run even more efficiently. I
| certainly enjoy the sporadic work I dedicate to working on the
| system. But there always seems to be a fog of possibilities ahead
| of me obscuring my view towards a broker API getting called.
|
| My family and closest friends look upon this as the "hot rod in
| his garage" which I sometimes work on and which will probably
| never get finished.
| woah wrote:
| Did you ever try to make it trade with a few thousand dollars?
| ezekiel68 wrote:
| I should. Yet what I'm trying to express in my comment is
| that the part of the system that would analyze the data and
| then make trades is not only unfinished, is still unstarted.
| So I have continually polished the ingest portion but felt
| "stuck" when contemplating how to get the system as-a-whole
| into a testable state.
|
| The broker API I plan to use features the ability to "paper
| trade" in a simulated account. So I'm not so worried about
| switching the thing on one day and immediately blowing my
| account.
|
| I do trade manually in a broker account but as fun and
| instructive as that is, it doesn't represent the kinds of
| high-speed analysis and execution my system would make once
| it was completed.
| tompark wrote:
| Chris Crawford's tools for interactive storytelling may have
| failed, but he was a huge inspiration for me in my game dev
| career, and I still harbor aspirations in "interactive
| storytelling" due to his influence.
|
| I first attended CGDC in 1994. It was two years after his Dragon
| Speech (which I knew nothing about), but the highlight of the
| conference was his talk about the challenges of story-based
| games. The part I remember is how he modeled stories as branching
| trees with fan-out, foldback, tree-of-death, etc (he covers this
| in the "Architecture" chapter of this book "The Art of
| Interactive Design"). I didn't really follow Crawford's work on
| Erasmatron or later, but by the late 90's it sounded like his
| story model had changed from a tree to a graph network structure,
| like a finite state machine. While it was an improvement, I was a
| bit skeptical that this model was enough. Nevertheless, I spent a
| lot of time thinking about the problem. You see, he'd already
| infected me with his dream of interactive storytelling.
|
| By the time I moved to California and took a job at EA/Maxis on
| The Sims 2.0 team, I had decided that true _interactive_
| storytelling (as I saw it) was not possible until game AI was
| sophisticated enough to enable autonomous NPC chatbots. So I put
| that dream aside while I pursued a career in software
| development.
|
| Here we are, over a quarter of a century later, and that AI
| technology is here now. For those of us who have been waiting for
| this moment, it is almost miraculous. It might be the end of an
| era for Chris Crawford, but it is just the beginning of the AI-
| based interactive storytelling era.
| lordfrito wrote:
| In many ways Chris is ending things just as his dream is about
| to come to fruition. His vision was just 40 years ahead of the
| technology. If only he could stay engaged another 10 years. The
| best times are ahead of us
| cubefox wrote:
| A few months ago someone here reported on making text
| adventures with language models. If I remember correctly, a
| problem is that it is not trivial to control the AI in a way
| that players can't cheat on puzzles.
| jackdoe wrote:
| Reminds me that Don Quixote is a different book every 10 years
| you read it.
|
| I have watched the dragon speech multiple times, and it makes me
| feel like you should put everything in what you are doing, as
| everything is your magnum opus. I have huge respect for artists
| and artisans that work like that. It is really difficult, and
| often not economically viable, but there are people that just
| `see` something and they want it to exist.
|
| I often think about the dragon speech, when I am doing the same
| 'pick up 10 things' quest in World of Warcraft that I have been
| doing since 2005. Thousands of times.. I have picked up hundreds
| of thousands of things :) and I wonder, what game would WoW be
| had he succeeded.
| Sweepi wrote:
| OT: what a nice website! No ads, no bloat, no useless white
| space, no annoying formatting, but instead: - browse-able sub
| directories!!! - readable links - intuitive navigation - and,
| well, interesting content
|
| https://www.erasmatazz.com/index.html
| spacecadet wrote:
| I empathize with him. I always wanted to make indy games, going
| back to modding and being part of modding teams for doom, qwake,
| and half-life... In 2007 when the first iPhone came out, I
| immediately snagged one and dove into the jailbreaking and app
| building, eventually releasing 2 games into the app store, One
| did better financially, one was objectively a better game. Either
| way, I quit a stable job to focus on that and after 14 months I
| was unemployed again.
|
| I explored tabletop games after that, modding, expanding, and
| even building prototypes using 3DP.
|
| When AI exploded 2 years ago I was curious how much of a game it
| could build and I had recently learned about the existence of
| Pygame. Ended up building a zero-player 2D space sim. It's
| stupid, but I appreciate it and there is some art in it.
|
| https://github.com/derekburgess/simcraft
|
| Then recently, a coworker asked if I had tried Codex yet. I
| hadn't, and while riding in a car had the idea of using Codex on
| my phone to make a game that I could then deploy on my phone and
| play. Wanted to explore something meta, so I made an AI dungeon
| master in the style of Zork. It got out of hand and you cant
| deploy it on a phone- but I did deploy it remotely on my home
| workstation and then played over ssh from my phone ;P
|
| https://github.com/derekburgess/dungen
|
| I appreciate games for their randomness and have always leaned
| into games that incorporate generative sandbox experiences.
| conartist6 wrote:
| Thank you, Chris
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