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- Yeah, I think GTA III

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is probably one of the most influential
games of all time. It created a

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feeling of an open world.
What do you think it takes to create that

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feeling? There were like these looming

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skyscrapers. There were the changing
traffic lights. There's the feeling

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like, first of all, you had
a feeling you could do anything,

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and then the world was reacting to it.

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- Yes - in a way that
didn't feel scripted.

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- Yes, and it wasn't scripted.
It was really, really, really

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low-rent AI.
It was a simulation that you could

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prod and push and see what
happened, and I think that was

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incredibly... It was two things.
It was the fact that

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here was a simulation that you could mess
about with and the simulation seemed to

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have a personality. So you could
push and see... And the world would

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push you back in whatever way that meant.
And then the other thing

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was just this... I think one
of the reasons it was so captivating was

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also the idea of if I did nothing,
the world still existed.

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Or I could act in quite a passive way. I
could just listen to the radio, I could...

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Look at billboards, I could talk
to pedestrians, and not in GTA III, but by

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Vice City, you could begin
rudimentary talking. And the world

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was there and existing, and so it was
the idea of almost something that really

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tried to explore in lots of games,
the idea of being a digital

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tourist. You know,
you were in, you were in

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these worlds, and you went there
as a visitor, and they existed

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almost independent of you. It felt like
when you turned up, the world was running.

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It didn't feel like you'd started it.
Of course, you had started it,

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but that feeling,

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I think, was one of the things,
the illusions that people found very

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captivating, was, "I'm in a world
that both doesn't exist and does exist."

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- So there are these two concepts that I
was reading about, just to put names on

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them: one is systemic video
game design, so systemic

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games, and the other
is sandbox video games. And

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the systemic is from the
environment perspective,

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which means that there are these

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interlocking game rules and systems
that interact with each other and produce

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emergent behavior.

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And that emergent behavior is what creates
a feeling like there's a living world.

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And then the sandbox aspect, which
is overlapping but different, is from

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the user perspective,
from the player perspective, the feeling

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like you can do anything. And when
those two things combine, the feeling

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like you can do anything,
and the feeling like there's a world

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that's full,
that is also doing anything it

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wants, that creates this incredible
feeling of, like, "This world is alive.

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- And I'm in it." - And I'm in it.

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- And it's the combination of those two
things, I think, that is very powerful.

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And I think with GTA III,

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you know, for me, it came at a
really interesting time in my life

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personally, and I was very
able to engage in it,

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probably for the first
time professionally,

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actually away to do something.
And we were really sort

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of scratching, began to scratch
the surface on how do we fill these worlds

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with

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content, and how do we make that content
interesting and make the content all

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interwoven? So, as you start
to mess with these systems, they also

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feel alive and interesting.