Igrorama in English

CT: I'm 41 years old (surely some mistake - I feel 16), I'm six foot six inches tall, live in Scotland, and have grand plans for changing the world! I've always had big ideas, and always believed that whatever you want to do, if you set your mind to it, anything is possible. My real passion is economics: I spent the first thirty years of my life looking for answers to why the world is like it is, and what ideas could change it. Then somebody introduced me to Henry George's idea, in his book "Progress and Poverty," to abolishing all taxation and replace it with land rent. It was such a simple idea, it fit perfectly with ideas I'd been developing for the philosophical basis of property and morality. And it has so many economic and social benefits that I decided I wanted to spend the rest of my life studying land rent.

But there was one problem: having spent all my life studying this, I had paid no attention to my career, so I had to work long hours just to pay the bills. There was no time to study economics! So I decided to find a new career. One where I could be my own boss, and one that I really enjoyed so I wouldn't mind working long hours at it.

As a child I always wanted to be a comic artist, but comics are practically dead - they've been replaced by computer games. The only computer games I ever enjoyed were story based adventure games, and they're a lot like comics - all words and pictures where anything is possible. Well, I've had a few jobs working with multimedia (including running my own business for a year) so this seemed like an idea.

I looked round at what kind of games were selling, and I was amazed that there is this huge gap in the market! Think about books: what sells the most? Stories! Think about movies: what sells the most? Stories! Think about TV: what sells the most? Stories! Think about the first computer games - what were the most popular games when computers came into every house? Stories! Adventure games! The reason for their falling from fashion is structural, and I believe the pendulum will swing back again for various reasons that I won't go into here.

I also looked around and saw that movies and TV and books were all based on classic formulas. They all go back to the classics like Shakespeare or Jules Verne or Dracula or the Bible for inspiration. So where are the classic games? Nobody is doing them! Or rather, a few people are, but they never get big enough to be noticed.

That made me think about economics again. Adventure games don't need expensive technology - flat pictures and simple characters are enough. And with the Internet there's no limit to how many you can sell if you get them right. I figured that a person could easily make a living by turning classic books into games. So why shouldn't that person be me?

Another thing about economics. The people who get rich, and do the most good in the world (at least as far as money is concerned) are the ones who find something everyone wants, and sell a lot of it very cheaply. I decided that I would sell all my games together for the same low price for everything. That way I would get noticed. There are so many talented game developers who never sell many games because most people have never heard of them. I wanted to be noticed! And I figure that if I sell a game that includes, say, a hundred full length stories, including the complete works of Shakespeare, people will notice!

Of course, it will take a few years before I have a lot of stories, and before I get really good at this. I'm still learning from my mistakes. But I have three stories now and a fourth on the way, so it's a start.

CT: Yes! I was six years old and my mother brought me my first comic: Monster Fun comic, issue 4 (I think). it came with a mini-comic inside, called a "bad time bed time book" - a parody of a classic novel, in eight tiny pages. I loved those things! I was young, and al these "famous" stories were new to me! I saw those eight page mini-comics as a gateway to the world of ideas, of discovery, or history, possibilities, anarchy! That to me is the perfect comic - so much packed into so little space. A doorway to another world.

I soon read other comics, and books. By the age of eight I would typically have seven books at various stages of being read at any time. By the age of ten I had read the Lord of the Rings. By the age of fourteen I had read the whole Bible. I soon discovered classics comics - 48 page adaptations of great literature. So much packed into so little space! The greatest comics ever, in my opinion. I also like the full length classics of course - I loved War and Peace - but those comic versions packed in so much in so little space. they really affected me deeply. It really felt like a gateway to a universe of wonder.

CT: That's a hard one. My favorite series of books are actually the Solar Pons books by August Derleth. They're like Sherlock Holmes but I actually like them better (I could write an essay on that!). My favorite work of fiction is Journey to the Center of The Earth. I love how it's completely believable. I love the idea of amazing worlds to explore, just under our feet. I'm also a huge fan of the Early Fantastic Four - again, because they're so believable (they don't have secret identities) and also so packed full of ideas. And like I said, my all time favorite reading is comic versions of classic novels.

This probably sounds surprising - they're all considered very lightweight books. But it depends on how you approach them. I approach them for the mind expanding ideas (I love to read encyclopedias of science fiction for the same reason). I tend to think deeply about serious topics, so I am highly critical of what I read. A lot of more serious work just seems pretentious to me. Also, my priorities and interests are different from most people (economics and religion, for example) so books that are praised as "realistic" and "moving" usually don't interest me at all. Other books I've enjoyed recently include a history of the Templars, a collection of ancient British legends, The Strangest man (the Dirac biography) and a rather good guide to Einstein's ideas (I forget the title). I thought Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes was pretty good too.

CT: I'm not financially successful yet, but that's because I don't spend much time promoting my games. I'm more concerned with getting them right - I'm always thinking of the long term. And surprisingly enough, I wasn't much of a gamer! Most games didn't interest me (and still don't) but games are just such an obvious and natural way to tell a story.

But the game that really changed my life was Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders. I love the upbeat philosophy of David Fox, the man who made it. it's packed with ideas, it's optimistic, non-violent, it explores the world - and other worlds - it has great, realistic female characters, it's about an ordinary guy in the real world, I just adore it. Nobody ever made another game like it. I haven't played the big German sequel yet - I'm sure it's an excellent game, but I'm not sure they've focused on the things that particularly interest me: the ideas, the inspiring message. I'm just a hippy at heart. Loom was my second favorite game ever. Zak beat it because it had more ideas and more realism, but Loom was a thing of beauty.

I can trace my desire to make a game back to a day in 1993 when I first saw the opening screen of Zak. it was like a real world, in a box, on the screen in front of me. I eagerly awaited other games like this. I never found any. So by 1997 I decided that I would make my own. That's a story in itself!

Incidentally, my games right now look nothing like Zak McKracken, but that's because the most important thing to me is the story. Without the story working, my games will fail. Story must come first. When I'm more experienced at adding stories then I'll start to experiment with more comedies and different kinds of characters. But the story must come first. If I can get a reputation for good solid stories then the rest will follow.

CT: What inspires me is the vision of making games in the same way that people make comics: I dream of releasing a new story every month. That probably won't happen, but I think every two months is realistic by the end of this year. I love the idea of finding a great new story, and thinking "this would be great to add to the game" and just doing it! It's very frustrating when unimportant maters like coding and testing take a long time. I just want to grab more and more stories and put them in at a greater and greater rate. I've just added a bookshelf front end to the game, and I want to fill those shelves with books! I want this game to be the first place people go when they just want to jump into the world of literature and ideas and have fun along the way!

As for music, I find I'm really easily distracted, so tend to code in silence. If I'm doing art then I don't need to concentrate quite as much and I'll have BBC radio 4 on (a station with news, reports and drama). If I listened to good music I'd be thinking about it too much. I used to sing in choirs and I find music either takes up all my attention or irritates m so much I have to turn it off :)

Every couple of hours I go online to check my emails, and I have a very small comic collection (I used to have many thousands but got rid of them years ago). Other than that I take my kids swimming on Wednesdays, and that's pretty much my week!

CT: I've not worked out al the details yet, but the basic idea is very simple: location, location, location! Most of the value of a house is because of its location. People will spend huge amounts of money to get a house in a good location. in other worlds, the local community has made your house valuable. You didn't do it, the community did. The community created that value, so the community owns it. However, if you work hard and make something al on your own, that is your property and nobody else's. The idea of land rent is simply to let governments keep what they create, and let people keep what they create.

What difference would this make?

1. Nobody could get rich by simply having land and doing nothing: you only get rich by doing things. This increases the amount of work that is done, which increases the wealth of the nation.

2. With no taxation, the work of government and business becomes much simpler. Land rent is easy to collect, and nobody can avoid it since land cannot be hidden. All those people now employed as accountants can do useful work instead. All the time wasted by businessmen in tax avoidance and form filling can be spent doing useful work.

3. With no taxation, it is much cheaper to employ additional people or manufacture additional goods.

4. Some people will sell their land rather than pay land rent on it, so the price of land goes right down (the law of supply and demand).

5. Nobody can rich simply by owning land, so investors put more money into useful things instead.

6. No more catastrophic recessions. Since nobody speculates on land there can be no land-based bubbles, For example, the global credit crunch could never happen. Remember that it all started because sub-prime lenders lent too much money to people who could not pay their mortgages. Lenders did this because they assumed that land values would always go up. They assumed this because everyone wants land! But with land rent nobody wants land unless they have a genuine money making business or they have enough money to pay the land rent. So there is no land speculation bubble, and hence no global recession.

7. No more big recessions means that businesses can afford to plan longer term.

8. There are numerous other advantages like this. Each might only change the national wealth by one percent, but added together they make a huge difference. And this difference is cumulative - if. for example this only makes a two percent difference to national wealth each year, that is two percent on top of two percent every year, and pretty soon a land rent nation is far wealthier than its neighbors.

To put some figures on this, ten years ago it was estimated that land rent would increase the national wealth annually by fifteen thousand pounds (about twenty five thousand dollars) for every man, woman and child in the nation.

But that's just the start. By measuring the value that a government adds to the land, we can measure the value of the government itself. The actual real value of every government is now plain to see and cannot be hidden. This allows people to compare different forms of government, different local government ideas, and so on. Good government makes a huge difference to how much wealth a society can create. So the wealth creation just accelerates.

Just as important, life becomes more enjoyable, because land rent measures how attractive a location is: it measures how much people want to live there. So every government and every business becomes kinder, fairer, and more attractive.

I could go on and on. This has implications for international relations, for migration, for welfare, for war, for everything. It is fairly easy to show that land rent, once established, would quickly spread, and global poverty would be ended within one generation. Which of course increases our wealth still further, as poor countries in Africa become just as productive as America or Japan, driving down global costs and creating innovation accordingly.

Perhaps the most amazing result is that, as the value of each government can now be measured, there is a strong incentive to allow people to experiment with their own ideal government. This is a shortcut to everyone having their own ideal society.

I could go on and on! I hope you're going to edit this. :)

CT: I look on it from an economic point of view: people like stories. The classics are the classics for a good reason - people like them! People have liked them for hundreds of years. The first game developer to successfully capture that quality in a game will naturally sell more games. Good stories always outsell bad stories. Look on the best seller lists: we might scoff at Harry Potter and Dan Brown, but those are good quality stories: they entertain, and any sex or violence is minimal and only seen in context. If the good exists it always drives out the bad.

So I'm not really bothered about sex and violence in games, as long as better stuff is available. The real problem is if better stuff is not available, that is where we should be concerned. And I don't mean well-meaning "educational" or "wholesome" games. I mean good games. Games that attract huge numbers of normal people.

If there is a problem with games, I think it's only that the industry is still new. Developers are still making games largely for teenagers. They are still producing the easy to make games - games where you race cars or shoot people. Games with stories are harder to make, but when somebody gets it right (hopefully me!) then good games will naturally sell. And they won't just sell to teenagers and teenagers-at-heart, they will sell to everyone.

Games now are like the early days of cinema. The first hit movie was film of a train running towards the audience. people were so excited" But once they learned how to make movies like Casablanca and Gone With The Wind, nobody watched the train-coming-at-you movie any more.

CT: From what I've heard, Tamashii no Mon blows them both away!

CT: Thanks! Sorry I couldn't answer in Serbian, and my apologies to any translator.

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