In recognition of Chris Crawford’s upcoming lecture at GDC 2011, his first speaking appearance at the conference since he claimed “games are dead” in 2006, Gamasutra contributor Patrick Dugan explores why the game designer and CGDC designer may be famously misunderstood.]In 2006 Chris Crawford stood up at the GDC rant-session and candidly informed a room full of people dedicating their professional lives to game creation that they were wasting their time, servicing a dead patient, and by implication a bunch of idiots. He didn’t say the last part so explicitly, but gauging from the crowd’s reaction, he might as well have. This event made him infamous with a generation of game developers now in their thirties or older, who came of age in the industry when the Playstation series of consoles lead a boom in what is now referred to as traditional AAA game development. Here’s a guy some of them had heard of with good tidings, a guy who worked at Atari back in the day, wrote the first book on game design ever published, made a number of firsts with his games about King Arthur’s struggles, managing nuclear plants, cold war diplomacy, environmental policy and alien courtship rituals,…