#484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming

Dan Houser: It was a lot of thinking, a lot like a year sometimes from when we begin talking about a project and dialing it, you know, and I would just get some initial ideas, very like one sentence, they are a Serbian immigrant or they are a retired gunfighter with a wife in, you know, type, very, very simple stuff. And then just start to think through it from every angle and, you know, start to think, well, would it work if they were acted like this? Would it work if you acted like that? If this is the world, how does it contrast with the world? Because I always thought that the games were kind of a mathematical equation. They were the personality of the world, you know, multiplied or divided by the personality of the protagonist. And when that creates interesting friction, that's a really fun experience for the player. You know, it's so almost always at least one or more of the protagonists. Because obviously in GTA 5, we had more than one. We'd have someone who'd moved to the place or was in a new part of the place or moved to a new part of the map. Because it was really, as a player, I think it was really easy, much more easy to identify with your avatar when they, like you, were fish out of water. And even when they weren't, we still made them dissatisfied and feel like a fish out of water in themselves. So I think it was just living with those characters and getting ideas and going, what are their strengths? What are their weaknesses? How are they like me? How are they not like me? and then slowly, what is it like to feel like a human being? and then in most of these games, how much of a psychopath are they? How much of a sociopath are they? And what are their good qualities? What is going to give them humanity? Alongside that, what are they, what are they, what for them apart from money is worth dying for? And then you start to build it out from these kind of fundamental sides and suddenly you go, okay, actually I can start to feel, and then how do they speak? Because fundamentally it doesn't really matter what's going on in their head, they haven't actually got one, but what they say is what's going to make you realize who they are.

Dan Houser: I felt with a lot of portrayals of AI, they tended to be one note and AI was sort of infinitely clever, but didn't really have much purpose apart from to kill everybody and was just this kind of sort of Borg-like fog. And I thought, that's fine, but maybe we can do something, you know, more interesting. AI is being built by humans and humans, and built by computer engineers. And there's a lot of power struggles in any computer engineering team. So I just wanted to explore the idea of it was built by two lead engineers who didn't like each other. So Nigel Dave, who's renamed himself, they wanted to call him something sort of primal Adam. And he renamed himself Nigel Dave because one dad was called Nigel and one dad was called Dave. And just he's riddled with these conflicts and riddled with his... It's going to become clear in the next or clearer in the next volume of the book and in the game. He's riddled with his dad's previous careers. But he is, the idea of he's almost infinitely intelligent or can learn almost everything but has zero wisdom. And so the only thing he knows, and then he's seeing the world through the internet, the most he can do to be in the human world is hack into someone's phone and watch them. But he's stuck, pressed against, he can't actually get into our world. So he can control people's minds, arguably, but he can't control the world. And so he wants to be human. He wants to have these human experiences. He sees all this stuff on, you know, the internet and goes, oh, I want to get married. I want to fall in love. I want to, because that seems fun. I want to have, you know, he's a digital creation. So he wants to have metaphysical experiences. And he's trying to imagine what that will be like. Oh, that's what children are. You know, that's what love is. And he's, so I think he's a... But he might be a sociopath, and he might certainly have sociopathic tendencies. But then he kind of thinks that if he can imagine good and try to do good, that will make him a good AI. So I think there's something sympathetic about him, and I kind of like him as a character, but I don't think he's going to be the protagonist.