  Consider Kashiwara's crystal associated to a highest weight representation of
a symmetric Kac-Moody algebra. There is a geometric realization of this object
using Nakajima's quiver varieties, but in many particular cases it can also be
realized by elementary combinatorial methods. Here we propose a framework for
extracting combinatorial realizations from the geometric picture: We construct
certain torus actions on the quiver varieties and use Morse theory to index the
irreducible components by connected components of the subvariety of torus fixed
points. We then discuss the case of affine sl(n). There the fixed point
components are just points, and are naturally indexed by multi-partitions.
There is some choice in our construction, leading to a family of combinatorial
models for each highest weight crystal. Applying this construction to the
crystal of the fundamental representation recovers a family of combinatorial
realizations recently constructed by Fayers. This gives a more conceptual proof
of Fayers' result as well as a generalization to higher level. We also discuss
a relationship with Nakajima's monomial crystal.
