The Dream Architects by David Polfeldt

Author:David Polfeldt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2020-09-07T16:00:00+00:00

23

His Majesty Wants to Play

I looked at the email in slight disbelief. (In my head it came with an appropriately elaborate font.)

Dear Managing Director David Polfeldt, Would you be so kind as to give his Royal Majesty a tour of your company?

The King of Sweden? Really?! When did a video game studio become eligible for an official visit from His Royal Highness?

From about 2010 onward, I started to notice a small change in how people outside the game industry perceived it. We were gradually met with more respect, more interest, more fascination, more envy, and it was eventually impossible for the establishment to ignore the fact that every year, Sweden’s largest cultural export product was a video game. If it wasn’t DICE’s Battlefield, it was Starbreeze’s The Darkness or The Chronicles of Riddick, or Avalanche’s Just Cause. Studios would come and go, briefly hitting the top of the international sales charts, and the heritage of success would eventually give birth to international hit games like Candy Crush, Minecraft, the rebirth of the Wolfenstein and Battleground games, and behind them a rich plethora of almost perfectly crafted interactive entertainment products. The masters of cultural export were no longer the musicians behind the Britney Spears singles, the reissues of ABBA albums, or Avicii. Nor were they the children’s books coming from the deep treasure chest of Astrid Lindgren, or the modern wave of Swedish crime novels.

It took some time for this to sink into the common psyche. It was hard for many to suspend their belief that computer games were made just by nerds, for a tiny nerd audience, and that they were not only violent but sexist, and dangerous for the young. Eventually, a few local politicians asked to visit the studio and get a tour. They immediately realized we were creating a lot of jobs, and decided they liked it. They would pass the message upstairs, and soon national politicians and ministers showed up at our doorstep too. Sometimes they were genuinely interested, but other times they just wanted to take a photo to post on social media to appeal to young potential voters.

I became somewhat of a poster boy for the industry, due to my commitment to a few charities and my opinions about the responsibility that falls on the corporate world. I believe that we build society together, whether we’re private companies, government agencies, or nonprofit organizations. If you have power, you have responsibility; it’s as simple as that, and the responsibility grows with your power. Since I managed to voice this opinion while consciously avoiding partisan politics, I was perceived by a growing group of people as a good choice to represent the Swedish game industry. Also, I do enjoy talking and making presentations, so I came with a nice buzz of entertainment value too—like a modern court jester, I suppose. My poster-boy career peaked when I actually had dinner at the Swedish royal castle with the queen herself, but at the time, all I had was an email from a royal staffer, telling us that the king wanted to check us out.

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