Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…And it’s the combination of those two things, I think, is very powerful. And I think with GTA III, you know, for me, it came at a really interesting time in my life personally, and I was very able to engage in it, probably for the first time professionally, actually, how we can do something. And we were really sort of scratching, began to scratch the surface on how do we fill these worlds with content, and how do we make that content interesting and make the content all interwoven? So as you start to mess with these systems, they also feel alive and interesting. There’s often been a tension through your work between an open world, that freedom, and the narrative- …driven storytelling. And I think you’ve often, maybe always, gotten the balance right. So what is it? What is the value of each, and how do you get the balance right? Well, I think the open world is intrinsically pretty fun. It’s just fun to be in a world and have complete freedom. And certainly, I think at various points, we debated or, you know, I’d have theoretical discussions in my own head with myself, or other people in the team would really push for less story, less story. You know, let the whole thing evolve organically. You know, have it all be procedural. Have it all just evolve from what you do. I think for me, I would always come back to going, “Story can be, if done well, incredibly compelling, and it gives you some structure, and something to do, and it helps you from a game design perspective unlock the features.” It means we know the big features because, essentially, when you put someone in a world and give them a whole new way of interacting with that world through the control panel, it can be a little overwhelming. You know, playing a game is a lot more of an engaging experience even than reading a book or watching a movie. You’ve got to engage in it properly. So how you unlock the features and how you unlock the world, there’s an art and a skill to that. And I think we felt that a structured story was the best way to do that and to have control over that process. And also just, you know, people are looking in their lives for story. I think story’s very important and very powerful, and when you combine the two successfully, you get the best of both worlds. But there is a tension always there. I think in a game like GTA IV, which I worked on and loved and I thought the story was great, but we got criticized because people felt there was almost too much story, and that meant you cared too much about Nico, and he wasn’t as effective an avatar in the open world. I think we probably got closest to reconciling them as perfectly as they can be done in Red Dead II, or when playing as Trevor in GTA V if you wanted to be crazy. I think those were when it really worked, the character, absolute freedom, because also you didn’t want… In any game, you don’t really want to compel the player. If you’re giving them freedom, you don’t want to say, “Well, I’m giving you freedom, but then I’m taking it away because you’ve got to be this kind of person when you’re free.” So I liked it when it could be… He could… You know, he or she could veer to be nice, veer to be nasty. I think that’s when it was at the strongest. So you kind of want a character that was rounded and you felt had good sides and bad sides.…

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