Email: Rudyard Kipling

I’m surprised you never mention Rudyard Kipling when talking about interesting people making interesting writers (if you have, your search is broken).  He was the real life version of the Dos Equis “Most Interesting Man in the World.” He was born in India, was raised in London, went back to India, was in South Africa during the Boer War, and failed at banking.

One thing I’ve noticed is that when modern “artists” try to talk about money and business, they always sound like idiots and quickly bore me. But Kipling’s “Gods of the Copybooks Headings” is a timeless classic. Who else could write a compelling poem about maintaining your balance sheet?

Writers should try to be like Kipling. Instead they think moving to New York and working in a coffee shop will do the trick.

Forget about writers for a moment. Just apply it to game developers.

Aside from video games and typical nerdy things like anime and science fiction, what else do typical video game developers like? They tend to have a high interest in ‘tech’ and maybe interest in rocketry and aviation. They also, bizarrely, have interest in ‘high concept’ because it is high concept. It may be my imagination because it seems more and more game developers are not as down to earth as they once were.

Games like Civilization required a strong grasp of history in order to be made. Period. I don’t see the next great hits of gaming coming from the reservoir of ‘anime knowledge’ and ‘inner geek’ cliches.

It is like gaming is entering a type of ‘content rot’. This occurred to other mediums with devastating results. It is currently affecting television. It has crippled American theater. And American poetry is non-existent in commercial form.

What happened to the ambition of gaming? Why aren’t game developers more like Dani Bunton who made the Seven Cities of Gold game have a loading message: “Your computer is building the New World…”