Chatting With Award-Winning Physicist Andrzej Dragan
At CD PROJEKT RED we have many talented employees who all pull inspiration from different places. Whether it’s from playing games, reading books, or exploring the world, we know the creative spark necessary for making revolutionary role-playing games can come from anywhere. That’s why, with our Meet a Star series, we welcome talented professionals from different fields to speak directly with our REDs, in hopes of bringing new ideas and perspectives into their daily work.
Earlier in April we were visited by Andrzej Dragan, an award-winning physicist who leads a research group working on bridging relativity with quantum theory. This may seem a far cry from game development, but Dragan himself pointed to a fundamental philosophy that’s required in both.
“I know the people who work here are extremely creative; they are extremely original,” Dragan told us after he met with our REDs. “This is what you need to be to create worlds that don't exist. Physics also requires a lot of creativity, which people don’t often know. I mean, in order to really discover new ideas, creativity is absolutely necessary — maybe beyond any other activity that I'm aware of.”
But we also welcomed Dragan because he thinks in ways we often might not — and he is well aware of the value of exploring different fields of work. He’s a physicist first and foremost, but also a professor at the University of Warsaw and the National University of Singapore, an author of three books, and an award-winning photographer and filmmaker.
If you can define something like that, that you wish you were involved in, that involves creativity and ingenuity, my suggestion is that you should go and work with those people.
“When you are working in one field, you are engaging a certain part of your brain, your neural activities,” Dragan said. “If you want to have rest from that, if you choose, for example, taking photographs or shooting videos, it involves something else. So when I'm working in physics, I can rest with photography or film or music or whatever. When I'm shooting videos, I can rest with physics. By doing something else, it becomes a kind of complimentary activity.”
We wanted our talk with Dragan to be this for our REDs — a complimentary activity to encourage different ways of thinking. “These meetings challenge our thinking, expose us to different ways of solving problems, and often shift how we approach our own work,” said Magdalena Nowacka-Lange, our Training & Development Specialist. “I see Meet a Star as a way to spark meaningful conversations, inspire new ideas, and bring an outside perspective that we would not get in our day-to-day work. I think our REDs got a mix of intellectual challenge and creative insight from Andrzej’s talk.”
Our teams were certainly eager to attend. Spots in our Warsaw Headquarters cinema, where Dragan gave the talk, quickly reached capacity, and more than 200 REDs tuned in online too. "I really liked Andrzej's enthusiasm for physics; it actually made me want to pick up a good physics book,” said our Engineering Manager of Gameplay, Jan Huňka. “For me, some of the best video games use physical laws to create original gameplay mechanics or sometimes even serve as the foundation of the story itself, so hearing his perspective as a physicist and artist was genuinely inspiring."
We ended our chat with Dragan by asking his advice: what’s the most important thing a creative can do? “I’ll give an example,” he said. “Good films are of two categories for me. One category is just great films that I enjoy watching. And the second category is films I wish I’d made myself. This applies to physics or art or whatever — if you can define something like that, that you wish you were involved in, that involves creativity and ingenuity, my suggestion is that you should go and work with those people, and get involved in what comes next.”
