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Dan Houser on Absurd Ventures

2:54:01 recording · EN · 2 speakers

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Brief overview

Dan Houser explains how living open worlds and 360-degree characters are built, and why AI cannot replace them.

  1. A world must live without the playerThe captivating illusion in GTA III was that if you did nothing, the world still existed and pushed back.
  2. Characters need all 360 degreesA year of thinking through strengths, flaws, psychopathy and speech precedes the first line of dialogue.
  3. LLMs do the cheap 90%, not the magicHouser expects fantastic cheap, decent work from them, but not original ideas or the final five percent.
Executive Summary AI
  • Lex Friedman introduces Dan Houser, co-founder of Rockstar Games and the writer behind Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption, who has since founded Absurd Ventures and is building three worlds — A Better Paradise, American Caper and Absurdiverse — across books, comic books, audio series and video games.0:33
  • Houser says GTA III's power was not scripting but a crude simulation you could prod, with a personality that pushed back, and a world that kept running whether or not the player acted, making people feel like digital tourists in a city that existed without them.26:41
  • Building a protagonist took roughly a year of thinking before any dialogue: starting from a one-sentence idea such as a Serbian immigrant or a retired gunfighter, then asking what gives them humanity, what besides money is worth dying for, and finally how they speak.33:45
  • On language models he is less scared than most — he thinks they cannot come up with genuinely new ideas, that they have done the first 90% of the work of sounding human, and that the last five percent will end up being 95% of the work.46:09
  • He recalls a meeting with designer Christian Cantamesa around late 2008 or early 2009 where he proposed that John should die at the end of Red Dead Redemption, an idea he thought clever narratively but doubted would work technically.1:29:44
Key Quote
“really really really low rent ai like it was a simulation that you could prod and push and see what happened”
— Dan Houser27:07
Key Quote
“i like humans apart from the bad bits”
— Dan Houser41:29
Key Quote
“they're not gonna replace good ideas they can't really come up with good new ideas.”
— Dan Houser47:00