2026-09-09 · designer-study
Inside Chris Crawford's Philosophy — Drawing Puzzles Outside the Line, Then Counting His Own Defeats
"Puzzles are challenges with no purposeful opponents." The shortest definition of a puzzle was written by Chris Crawford, the man who almost single-handedly started the field of game design writing. That definition placed puzzles outside of games — and forty years later he wrote, in his own words, that he had failed. Reading across his journal, his laws, his memoirs, his design diary and his talks for his philosophy, obsessions, failures, dilemmas and influences.
