Any Austin: evaluation

Transcript context

…Through all this looking and thinking, do you feel you’ve learned something about real-world infrastructure that the rest of us don’t think enough about? Yes. It’s just way cool, it’s way more important than you think it is. There’s just so much stuff that we assume is very simple. One of the things that I love to get into and talk about is this idea of, as we look at a thing in a video game, say a piece of electrical infrastructure, we look at it, and we go, how realistic is this? How realistic is it not? Obviously, I’m not trained in any of this stuff, so I’m talking to other people and reading all sorts of papers on this, that, and the other, to try and make sense of it. There’s this funny thing that happens when you do that exercise, when we go in, and we look and we say, how realistic is this river, how realistic is this utility pole, et cetera. We have this way of expecting the ideal form of a thing to be what is used in the video game. If we see something that’s not the ideal form, for example, a utility pole where something is put on wrong or the wire doesn’t go in the right way, we go, “Well, that can’t be right.” But it turns out that if you walk out in the world, there are so many things that are colliding with each other when you’re putting together a city. It’s a lot of the same types of stuff that collides together when you’re putting together a video game, which is to say, you’ve got to talk to a guy who is supposed to be the guy who dug the hole. And the contractor who dug the hole — he’s got a thing, or they’ve got to do this other thing and call this person. The infrastructure you look at in real life is usually wrong. Also, some of the time, if you were to compare it to its ideal form, it wouldn’t look right. The reason for that is there’s such a complexity to doing something like putting up a utility pole. We think of it as really simple, and in some sense, it is, but just getting a paved road with a utility pole on it to your house — it requires so much coordination and so much knowledge and effort, and I think people should appreciate that more. There’s just so much stuff that we take for granted when it comes to infrastructure. I’m really passionate about it, I think, on accident. At a metaphysical level, do you ever, at times, start doubting whether the entirety of the real world is actually fully perfectly knit together the way a game might be imperfect?…

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