CURE-ALL // Chapter 6
I just need a starting point, Anand thinks. Maybe it’s because I’ve never done a sequel before.
In his six years leading game design at CG Games, Anand has become something of a cult hero within the gaming community. In a world of obsessive eccentrics with pot bellies and unshaved beards, and green-haired wunderkinds with limited social skills, a shirt-and-trou put-together thirty-four-year-old from old Bombay stood out. He looked like someone who could just as easily have been a consultant or an accountant. He attended the workshops with a notepad and pen, sat on panels discussing ‘the future of virtual reality’, even attending industry get-togethers. Whatever the company needed. A hard-working good-boy flew in the face of every cliché those in the industry had bought into. It was refreshing.
Maybe I’m just headset sick.
I wish my brain worked like appa’s. My father has an engineer’s mind — simple, analytical. Even the most complex algorithms are built with a clear purpose in mind — to simplify. In life as in work, simplify. The estimations one makes in the process, the substitutions, the standards one assumes, are all necessary to arrive at a workable solution. In business as in life. I wish it were that simple.
In a way, it convinced everyone within that world that they too could one day be at the top of the pyramid as long as they remained at the top of their game. Eccentricity is hard to practice day in, day out, but putting in the hours and becoming better and better and better until you create the best games out there — that’s something anyone with a certain minimum level of intelligence could achieve.