Chris Crawford on Game Design

The Novella

The final design was weird enough that it required some explanation. I did so with a novella, just as I had done with Excalibur. It presented the history of the world in which the player found himself, doing so in a series of short vignettes. I'm proud of that novella. A professional writer I am not, but I dare to say that as a work of fiction, it was passable. Even then, a more conventional manual was still required to explain the mundane aspects of the game, such as how to save and load games.