This morning I asked Curt Schilling—winner of three World Series, two-time co-Sportsman of the Year, the Man with the Bloody Sock—how much time he spent playing video games when he was a professional baseball player:
“Twenty hours a week?”
“Way more than that.”
“Thirty?”
“More.”
“Forty?”
“Something like that.”
Schilling was at Bloomberg Television, having just stepped off set. He was wearing makeup, and looking far less intimidating than he once did on NESN. Schilling seemed to take pleasure in reflecting on his previous life of leisure. After games, he would just retreat to his hotel: too wired to sleep, just wired enough to play until dawn. He didn’t have much to do on the day after a pitching start, either, so he’d play some more. “Think about it,” he said, “No one had more time than me. You finish a game on Monday night and you don’t have to pitch again until Saturday.” The other options weren’t appealing. You can either “go to social events where you’re going to be put in situations that could put your marriage at risk or stay at home and game.” On the road, he would get online in the hotel and play EverQuest and World of Warcraft with his kids.
It seems to have been a doubly smart move. Schilling is still married, and he’s built a video-game company, 38 Studios, that now has four hundred employees. He’s hired designers, engineers, and storytellers, and they have just released “Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning” to great acclaim. It’s a role-playing game that starts when your character comes back from the dead. You cast spells, slay dragons, and talk to wolves.
Video-game reviewers were skeptical at first: Was Schilling a dilettante? And does the world need another massive, intricate fantasy game? But they seem to like it. The New York Times says, “It sings with infectious, engaging excellence.” IGN declared that “Amalur demands your attention.” Schilling told me that the distinguishing feature is that the fighting is, well, awesome. Oddly, Schilling’s lifetime financial prospects might have been better if he’d taken a line-drive off the leg in about 2002, skipped all those World Series, and started building games earlier—in the era of blockbuster epics and before people were captured by Farmville and Angry Birds. Still, designing and marketing “Amalur” sure beats trying to catch on as an assistant first-base coach for the PawSox.
Schilling invested thirty-five million dollars in the company, and he can be grandiose in talking about it. He says that people have told him that 38 Studios resembles Google when it first got going. And if the trailer for “Amalur” looks a little like “The Two Towers,” it’s not an accident. Schilling says he wants his game to be “Middle Earth” for teen-agers today. While the game isn’t exactly a derivative of Tolkien, Schilling says, it comes out of the same ten thousand years of storytelling history.
Schilling’s actual role in the company seems relatively small. He says he’s there from 6:30 A.M. to 8 A.M.—perhaps catching coders as they down their last Red Bulls, pop Skittles, and wrap up their shifts. He hires, fires, and inspires. He knows that his fame is a draw for employees, but he worries that it’s a hindrance, too, because “What the hell would I know about shipping software?” He says that he learned management through his old coaches. Asked for an example, he cites an aphorism: “This is not a place to work, it’s a place to belong.”
Gaming, Schilling says, helped him understand baseball, by training him to analyze data. He was one of the first baseball players to carry around a laptop with statistics about what pitches, exactly, batters hit in what directions, exactly. And, a la Steven Johnson, he thinks gaming helps young people develop useful life skills: cooperation and planning, for example. What about the violence?, I asked, knowing that he is a born-again Christian and a family man. Well, the games aren’t real, he said. And we can tell the difference: “If your son knows that going down the street and clubbing your neighbor with a mallet is a bad thing, then playing this is O.K.”
