Dan Houser: belief

Transcript context

…… in a way that didn’t feel scripted. Yes. And it wasn’t scripted. It was, it was really, really, really low-rent AI. Like, it was a simulation that you could prod and push and see what happened, and I think that was incredibly… It was two things. It was the fact that here was a simulation that you could mess about with and the simulation seemed to have a personality. So you could push and see… And the world would push you back to what… in whatever way that meant. And then the other thing was just this… I think that one of the reasons it was so captivating was also the idea of if I did nothing, the world still existed. Or I could act in quite a passive way. I could just listen to the radio, I could look at billboards, I could talk to pedestrians, and the world… Well, not in GTA III, but by Vice City, you could begin rudimentary talking. And the world was there and existing, and so it was the idea of like almost something that really tried to explore in lots of games the idea of being a digital tourist. You know, you were in, you were in these worlds, and you went there as a visitor, and they existed almost independent of you. It felt like when you turned up, the world was running. It didn’t feel like you’d started it. Of course, you had started it, but that feeling, I think, was one of the things, the illusions that people found very captivating, was I’m in a, I’m in a world that both doesn’t exist and does exist. So there’s these two concepts that I was reading about, just to put names on them. One is systemic video game design, so systemic games, and the other is sandbox video games. And the systemic is from the environment perspective, which means that there are these interlocking game rules and systems that interact with each other and produce emergent behavior. And that emergent behavior is what creates a feeling like there’s a living world. And then the sandbox aspect, which is overlapping but different, is from the user perspective, from the player perspective, the feeling like you can do anything. And when those two things combine, the feeling like you can do anything and the feeling like there’s a world that’s full, that is also doing anything it wants, that creates this incredible feeling of, like, this world is alive.…

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