Austin Grossman has spent much of his career working in video games as a writer and designer starting at Looking Glass Studios in the early 1990s. He worked on last years hit game Dishonored and at various studios over the years, contributing to games including Ultima Underworld II, System Shock, Deus Ex and Clive Barkers Undying. Grossmans first novel Soon I Will Be Invincible was a story of supervillains and superheroes, a colorful and thoughtful take on the genre. Grossmans new book is You. The story of game developers and game development, its a novel with autobiographical elements following a group of game developers in the nineteen-nineties and when they were younger in the eighties. Its also an incredible book about the nature of games and how we need fantasy in our lives.
ALEX DUEBEN: I really loved Youwhich sounds creepy as I say it out loud.
AUSTIN GROSSMAN: Welcome to my world. Theres just no easy way to have a conversation about the book. You was the working title and I offered to change it early on, but thats where we are. [laughs] Im kind of happy with it but at the same time, yes, its a little awkward.
AD: Where did the book begin?
AG: There are probably two places it began. One, it started from an autobiographical moment. I graduated college in 92 and my first job was at Looking Glass Studios making video games. Im the kind of person where nothing I did in college was relevant to what I did later. I was sucked into this world and it was super interesting and exciting. It was a really interesting moment to start in games. It was a moment I stored up and have wanted to write about ever since. Thats the thing that drove me, but I also really had all these other interests from the literary standpoint. The second person voicewhich is obviously where the title comes fromI wanted to play with that.
AD: I was going to ask about the autobiographical aspects of the book because its tied to the video game industry in the nineties and then earlier when the characters were at summer camp.
AG: I never went to computer camp. I fantasized about going to computer camp, so that was the computer camp that I wanted to go to. I got sent to regular swimming summer camp, which sucked. [laughs] I talked to people about computer camp a lot. To insiders there are a lot of cues and inside reference in the characters in the book and scenes in the book. Theres a lot of autobiographical references which I hope will not be apparent to everyone. There are a lot of scenes I could have written down but didnt write down because I didnt know if people would recognize it and the gaming industry is a small place.
I dont know how game literate you are by the way. I dont know how game literate the general public is. Thats one of the general experiments of this book.
AD: I wonder that because people may recognize many references, Doom or whatever, but Im not sure if theres much beyond that which the average person would know.
AG: When we talked about blurbs we said, lets get a famous game designer blurb the book and then we thought, oh, there are no famous game designers. [laughs] Its a huge industry but in terms of name recognition, maybe Will Wright, maybe Shigeru Miyamoto, but thats really where it ends. Theres no one the general public is going to recognize, which is kind of bizarre for how big the industry is.
AD: It is and I keep wondering about movies back in the day where they were product and people watched them but there wasnt a sense of the creators the way there is today.
AG: Right, like back in the studio system. Thats a good point and people try to promote the idea of the game auteurlike we have Ken Levine right nowbut I dont know how that reads to a general audience. I dont know if it does. I dont know if you could stop a random person and ask for the name of a person who makes games and get someone. Maybe Im wrong about that.
AD: The New York Times Arts Section had a lengthy, laudatory article about Ken Levine recently, but I wonder if that makes a difference?
AG: Yeah, I saw the article. I cant tell either. But maybe thats a good thing. Maybe it speaks to the fact that its a player-centered medium. Its not a medium where youre going to put the main creator on it. Maybe thats just a part of the experience. Im not sure.
AD: I wonder if its hard to make a designer so well known because its closer to building a theme park or a city almost rather than crafting a narrative which is how were used to thinking and analyzing art.
AG: I agree and that may be what were seeing. Its unclear. It feel like the craft of making games is like there are goals to it. When you see that profile of Ken Levine as the auteur and Bioshock Infinite, is a story with a point of view. It gives you a character and its an immersive experience. On the other there something like The Sims, a game Ive never in the least enjoyed but I admire it. It does seem like games are a divergent art form. There are amusement park rides and lego games. I dont know. Maybe the medium is big enough to support two types of experience.
AD: I did think that the most interesting character in the book was Lisa. Is she based on someone or multiple people because her comments at the end about why she does this were stirring and fascinating.
AG: Its not a radical statement to say that the studio game industry is male-centric and its tricky for a woman to negotiate their way in the industry. That character distills a lot of conversations that Ive had with different people in game development. My older sister was something of a math prodigy so I got an early sense of the frustration a woman gets in math and science, particularly growing up in the seventies. Honestly, I just talked to a lot of people. It was very tricky to write a female character in the book. There are so many easy traps to fall into when talking about women and game development. I could have made her the art director and demographically that probably would have been more accurate.
AD: She makes it clear that shes really there for something different than the other characters are, and she ends up leaving the industry.
AG: Which is sadly true to life. I know a lot of women for whom geek culture and game culture just end up being more trouble than its worth and so they drop it. The trajectory for her made intuitive sense.
AD: Youve worked on many games. Which ones are you a big fan of?
AG: System Shock, which came out in 95 and is kind of the distant ancestor of Bioshock Infinite. Im also very proud of Dishonored which came out last year and is probably the most successful game Ive ever worked on. Those are the two.
AD: Talk a little about what you did on Dishonored and how a game is assembled. Im not sure people know what that means or how its assembled.
AG: Yes, particularly if youre doing story and writing. People are still figuring out to organize the creative process in making a game. When I was in Hollywood and on a movie set I realized that they had this thing down to science, but games are still inventing the creative process for games. I was brought in after the big story was set. The setting and the characters were more or less decided. I was brought in to work on the story structure and then it got down to writing the dialogue. That was just intensely collaborative because I was writing the dialogue, but the dialogue is only a small part of telling the story. I mean Im talking to the level designers who are deciding when and where to meet these characters and what theyre haggling over. When you meet a character in a video game one of the early questions is, can you kill this character instead of talking to them? If the character has vital information to the plot, what happens if you kill that character? Theres a lot of haggling. I would say sixty precent of the spoken dialogue in Dishonored is mine, but its hard to point to a particular level thats all mine. Part of the reason Dishonored works is because the intense collaboration worked.
Theres a character named Granny Rags and shes important but here you are and youre walking around tooled up with your sword and your crossbow so what if you just shoot her in the face? Well the answer is shes a witch but she disintegrates into a cloud of rats who consume you. Which is an elegant answer to keeping her alive in the game. I feel like Im talking like a maniac, but games involve really weird choices. Obviously in Jane Austen you never have to worry whether the reader can kill Mr. Darcy, but its the kind of question you have to answer. Its the kind of question that has to go before the team. If you cant kill her, then why cant you kill her. Is she standing behind unbreakable glass? Is he immortal? Etc., etc. You have to collaborate with game designers to come up with the most elegant solution to keep the story running. How do you do that elegantly? Not everyone can turn into a cloud of rats. You have to finesse that choice every time.
The answer is that I wrote the dialogue and then I got involved in a long quasi-philosophical conversation about agency and choice and the weird craft of limiting a players choices without them feeling limited. Without really tipping them off to the fact that youre limiting their choices, on a certain level. When youre telling stories in games, theres really awkward moments seem to be when youre blatantly preventing a player from doing something theyd like to do. It gets back to that point, whos the author of the story. When you the designer or writer really jumps in and says, no, you cant do that. Thats when the medium fails, when it feel like its not living up to its promise.
AD: Going back to the chess analogy, and im not good at chess, but you often find yourself at a point where theres no good or elegant move and you just make a move and hope for the best.
AG: Thats true. Theres something about the choices in chess like you cant ever give the player total absolute choice but you can make the rules and the system that theyre playing within feel organic. Its hard to complain that the rules of chess are somehow artificialunless youre talking about the En Passant rule which always catches me off. I was using chess as an example the other night on a panel because what I like about chess is that it seems to contain these miniature characters whose characters are substantiated within their rules. Like the bishops feel sort of devious and the pawns have their characters arc where theyre these disposable things unless they reach the far end. Its frustrating to lose at chess, but I dont feel like the rules of chess are cutting me off from something. If that makes any sense.
AD: It does. The rules are a consistent limitation on what you can do.
AG: To put it another way, the annoying thing in games is often when they feel inconsistent. If youre playing Grand Theft Auto and you want to stop the car and get out to make a call on a pay phone, well, you cant because it would involve adding a whole other set of options to the game which nobody wants to do. You have this moment where you realize that the world is mostly made of plastic and it starts to feel false. Its an artificial constraint. Or a place in which the simulation of the reality feels inconsistent. When you play a game like Portal, its a closed world, and the rules internally make a lot of sense. You can lose yourself in the simulation without feeling so aware of the fact that youre playing in a fake world. It feels self-complete. Even in a lot of way it simulates a lot less of a world than Grand Theft Auto does.
Most of my examples are probably not even relevant to a mass audience. Again, Im completely obsessed with that question of whether the book has an audience or whether its within the gamer community and not within the larger community or what.
AD: Well, thats always a question when writing about a subculture or group.
AG: Also, are video gamers a discrete category anymore or how far is it mainstream?
AD: Its like whenever theres a mass shooting, someone always brings up how the guy played video games and I think, yes, like 99% of other men under 40. He also drove a car. Its not a surprise.
AG: Youre quite right. Its telling that that conversation still happens every time.
AD: We talked about collaboration and this is your second novel. Does working on a novel feel different from working on a game for you?
AG: Honestly its super-liberating. When youre a writer on a game, the language and even the story of the game are often a small part of that. You only have to watch once while someone starts your game and then clicks through the two paragraphs of exposition without reading them. You only have to see that happen once to realize what your place is as the writer is in the game. You learn to swallow that, you learn to use language liberally. You realize its not the main show. The main show is movement and all the dynamics that happens in games. And thats how in my twenties I wrote in games. I didnt start my first novel until I was thirty-two so I learned to restrain myself. Then I went into games and I could switch from, okay, this is my show where Im building the entire experience out of language for myself and I can make massive changes to the plot and characterization without calling a meeting. Its a quite different experience writing a novel versus writing a game.
AD: Having written a novel, is it hard to write a game?
AG: In some ways it turns out not to be because I know I have a place to put my need to control everything. Its better knowing that I can write novels and have a place to put all of that and to do it my own way and to play with language as much as I want to. It feels more balanced now than when I didnt do novels. It is also a relief to be able to collaborate and not have to carry the ball entirely by myself. Its brought some balance to my work habits. Its a nice thing. I had this experience, I was in a classroom talking about the Soon I Will Be Invincible characters and we got into an argument about whether one of the characters was black. I realized that I hadnt actually specified that in the book and I realized that for some readers, the character was black, and I realized that I did not have as much control over the player experience of my novel as I thought I did. That was a good realization to have that even when youre a novelist, you cant control everything. Your readers compose scenes in their heads by themselves far away from you where you cannot control it.
AD: I know that you signed a two book deal and that You is the first. Did you want to talk about the next one?
AG: Im probably about halfway through writing it. Its a book about Richard Nixon from his point of view. I think that book, which is called Crooked, is going to look more like Soon I Will Be Invincible than You does. I have to say it was the centennial of Nixons birth and for a while there was a lot of talk about LincolnSpielbergs Lincoln, vampire slayer Lincolnand I thought to myself, Lincoln is not the most interesting President we could be writing about. [laughs]
AD: I was asked to ask you if well ever see a sequel to Soon I Will Be Invincible?
AG: The answer used to be no, but then I wrote a short story for an anthology about mad scientists and now the answer is starting to be more of a yes. So the answers not no anymore. There may be a Soon I Will Be Invincible movie. I dont know if anybody wants to publish a sequel, but I realized that there was something more to do there so its certainly writeable.
AD: If you did, though, it would a few years down the road at least.
AG: Yes. It could be the one after Crooked or later on. I dont know.
AD: Can you talk about any games youre working on?
AG: Dishonored. We have downloadable story arcs that are coming out and unofficially there will probably be a sequel to Dishonored. I dont know. Im looking at a bunch of stuff. I dont have a full time position in games so I jump around and try to do interesting things.
AD: I havent said much about the plot of You, and thats intentional, but to bring it back to books opening, whats your ultimate game?
AG: [laughs] The truth is that Im a quite obsessive old school player of a game called NetHack, which probably you dont know about and thats probably fine. You may have had a normal personal life or something. [laughs] Its an old school dungeon game which started in the early eighties but it hung around as people added more and more features to it and things you could do and in-jokes. Obviously it was the basis for the first Realms of Gold in the book, but creating more features and cultural in-jokes, it kept expandinglike some creature that builds its own shell out of ambient garbage and keeps expanding. That was one of the big touchstones for me. Most people would probably say the holodeck or something, but I think about a game that keeps changing and expanding. Obviously the real ultimate game is some kind of singularity or rapture that cannot logically occur, but my touchstone was very primitive but very powerful and flexible.
The real real answer is that I dont have a short answer, which is why I wrote a book about it. For me this is why I dont plot or outline books because these are the annoying questions I run into. In the first book it was, why would you possibly become a super villain as a profession. It began as a short story and ended up as a novel because I kept worrying and gnawing away at that question. That is the question that made this a book length project because I could not give a coherent answer to it. [laughs]
AD: So for you, all the games described in the book, the evolution of it and the thinking behind it is and how the characters think about it, is in a sense you answering that question.
AG: That is true. Thats what the game industry does. The first game I did was Ultima Underworld II. Ultima Underworld was just not real enough and heres how we can make it feel more real and more immersive. We did System Shock and then Deus Ex. The game industry is changing, every year it becomes more interesting. It seems like the same questions that drive the technology breakneck pace of the game industry, what is the ultimate game? Whose ultimate game can we do this year and next years games will be even more. They make the older games look primitive and make us wonder why we ever got excited about them. Everybody is driving towards that question and its weird its not talked about more in fact. What goal are we going to arrive at? This year its interesting because its only getting weirder. Things are getting stranger. Theyre not normalizing.
ALEX DUEBEN: I really loved Youwhich sounds creepy as I say it out loud.
AUSTIN GROSSMAN: Welcome to my world. Theres just no easy way to have a conversation about the book. You was the working title and I offered to change it early on, but thats where we are. [laughs] Im kind of happy with it but at the same time, yes, its a little awkward.
AD: Where did the book begin?
AG: There are probably two places it began. One, it started from an autobiographical moment. I graduated college in 92 and my first job was at Looking Glass Studios making video games. Im the kind of person where nothing I did in college was relevant to what I did later. I was sucked into this world and it was super interesting and exciting. It was a really interesting moment to start in games. It was a moment I stored up and have wanted to write about ever since. Thats the thing that drove me, but I also really had all these other interests from the literary standpoint. The second person voicewhich is obviously where the title comes fromI wanted to play with that.
AD: I was going to ask about the autobiographical aspects of the book because its tied to the video game industry in the nineties and then earlier when the characters were at summer camp.
AG: I never went to computer camp. I fantasized about going to computer camp, so that was the computer camp that I wanted to go to. I got sent to regular swimming summer camp, which sucked. [laughs] I talked to people about computer camp a lot. To insiders there are a lot of cues and inside reference in the characters in the book and scenes in the book. Theres a lot of autobiographical references which I hope will not be apparent to everyone. There are a lot of scenes I could have written down but didnt write down because I didnt know if people would recognize it and the gaming industry is a small place.
I dont know how game literate you are by the way. I dont know how game literate the general public is. Thats one of the general experiments of this book.
AD: I wonder that because people may recognize many references, Doom or whatever, but Im not sure if theres much beyond that which the average person would know.
AG: When we talked about blurbs we said, lets get a famous game designer blurb the book and then we thought, oh, there are no famous game designers. [laughs] Its a huge industry but in terms of name recognition, maybe Will Wright, maybe Shigeru Miyamoto, but thats really where it ends. Theres no one the general public is going to recognize, which is kind of bizarre for how big the industry is.
AD: It is and I keep wondering about movies back in the day where they were product and people watched them but there wasnt a sense of the creators the way there is today.
AG: Right, like back in the studio system. Thats a good point and people try to promote the idea of the game auteurlike we have Ken Levine right nowbut I dont know how that reads to a general audience. I dont know if it does. I dont know if you could stop a random person and ask for the name of a person who makes games and get someone. Maybe Im wrong about that.
AD: The New York Times Arts Section had a lengthy, laudatory article about Ken Levine recently, but I wonder if that makes a difference?
AG: Yeah, I saw the article. I cant tell either. But maybe thats a good thing. Maybe it speaks to the fact that its a player-centered medium. Its not a medium where youre going to put the main creator on it. Maybe thats just a part of the experience. Im not sure.
AD: I wonder if its hard to make a designer so well known because its closer to building a theme park or a city almost rather than crafting a narrative which is how were used to thinking and analyzing art.
AG: I agree and that may be what were seeing. Its unclear. It feel like the craft of making games is like there are goals to it. When you see that profile of Ken Levine as the auteur and Bioshock Infinite, is a story with a point of view. It gives you a character and its an immersive experience. On the other there something like The Sims, a game Ive never in the least enjoyed but I admire it. It does seem like games are a divergent art form. There are amusement park rides and lego games. I dont know. Maybe the medium is big enough to support two types of experience.
AD: I did think that the most interesting character in the book was Lisa. Is she based on someone or multiple people because her comments at the end about why she does this were stirring and fascinating.
AG: Its not a radical statement to say that the studio game industry is male-centric and its tricky for a woman to negotiate their way in the industry. That character distills a lot of conversations that Ive had with different people in game development. My older sister was something of a math prodigy so I got an early sense of the frustration a woman gets in math and science, particularly growing up in the seventies. Honestly, I just talked to a lot of people. It was very tricky to write a female character in the book. There are so many easy traps to fall into when talking about women and game development. I could have made her the art director and demographically that probably would have been more accurate.
AD: She makes it clear that shes really there for something different than the other characters are, and she ends up leaving the industry.
AG: Which is sadly true to life. I know a lot of women for whom geek culture and game culture just end up being more trouble than its worth and so they drop it. The trajectory for her made intuitive sense.
AD: Youve worked on many games. Which ones are you a big fan of?
AG: System Shock, which came out in 95 and is kind of the distant ancestor of Bioshock Infinite. Im also very proud of Dishonored which came out last year and is probably the most successful game Ive ever worked on. Those are the two.
AD: Talk a little about what you did on Dishonored and how a game is assembled. Im not sure people know what that means or how its assembled.
AG: Yes, particularly if youre doing story and writing. People are still figuring out to organize the creative process in making a game. When I was in Hollywood and on a movie set I realized that they had this thing down to science, but games are still inventing the creative process for games. I was brought in after the big story was set. The setting and the characters were more or less decided. I was brought in to work on the story structure and then it got down to writing the dialogue. That was just intensely collaborative because I was writing the dialogue, but the dialogue is only a small part of telling the story. I mean Im talking to the level designers who are deciding when and where to meet these characters and what theyre haggling over. When you meet a character in a video game one of the early questions is, can you kill this character instead of talking to them? If the character has vital information to the plot, what happens if you kill that character? Theres a lot of haggling. I would say sixty precent of the spoken dialogue in Dishonored is mine, but its hard to point to a particular level thats all mine. Part of the reason Dishonored works is because the intense collaboration worked.
Theres a character named Granny Rags and shes important but here you are and youre walking around tooled up with your sword and your crossbow so what if you just shoot her in the face? Well the answer is shes a witch but she disintegrates into a cloud of rats who consume you. Which is an elegant answer to keeping her alive in the game. I feel like Im talking like a maniac, but games involve really weird choices. Obviously in Jane Austen you never have to worry whether the reader can kill Mr. Darcy, but its the kind of question you have to answer. Its the kind of question that has to go before the team. If you cant kill her, then why cant you kill her. Is she standing behind unbreakable glass? Is he immortal? Etc., etc. You have to collaborate with game designers to come up with the most elegant solution to keep the story running. How do you do that elegantly? Not everyone can turn into a cloud of rats. You have to finesse that choice every time.
The answer is that I wrote the dialogue and then I got involved in a long quasi-philosophical conversation about agency and choice and the weird craft of limiting a players choices without them feeling limited. Without really tipping them off to the fact that youre limiting their choices, on a certain level. When youre telling stories in games, theres really awkward moments seem to be when youre blatantly preventing a player from doing something theyd like to do. It gets back to that point, whos the author of the story. When you the designer or writer really jumps in and says, no, you cant do that. Thats when the medium fails, when it feel like its not living up to its promise.
AD: Going back to the chess analogy, and im not good at chess, but you often find yourself at a point where theres no good or elegant move and you just make a move and hope for the best.
AG: Thats true. Theres something about the choices in chess like you cant ever give the player total absolute choice but you can make the rules and the system that theyre playing within feel organic. Its hard to complain that the rules of chess are somehow artificialunless youre talking about the En Passant rule which always catches me off. I was using chess as an example the other night on a panel because what I like about chess is that it seems to contain these miniature characters whose characters are substantiated within their rules. Like the bishops feel sort of devious and the pawns have their characters arc where theyre these disposable things unless they reach the far end. Its frustrating to lose at chess, but I dont feel like the rules of chess are cutting me off from something. If that makes any sense.
AD: It does. The rules are a consistent limitation on what you can do.
AG: To put it another way, the annoying thing in games is often when they feel inconsistent. If youre playing Grand Theft Auto and you want to stop the car and get out to make a call on a pay phone, well, you cant because it would involve adding a whole other set of options to the game which nobody wants to do. You have this moment where you realize that the world is mostly made of plastic and it starts to feel false. Its an artificial constraint. Or a place in which the simulation of the reality feels inconsistent. When you play a game like Portal, its a closed world, and the rules internally make a lot of sense. You can lose yourself in the simulation without feeling so aware of the fact that youre playing in a fake world. It feels self-complete. Even in a lot of way it simulates a lot less of a world than Grand Theft Auto does.
Most of my examples are probably not even relevant to a mass audience. Again, Im completely obsessed with that question of whether the book has an audience or whether its within the gamer community and not within the larger community or what.
AD: Well, thats always a question when writing about a subculture or group.
AG: Also, are video gamers a discrete category anymore or how far is it mainstream?
AD: Its like whenever theres a mass shooting, someone always brings up how the guy played video games and I think, yes, like 99% of other men under 40. He also drove a car. Its not a surprise.
AG: Youre quite right. Its telling that that conversation still happens every time.
AD: We talked about collaboration and this is your second novel. Does working on a novel feel different from working on a game for you?
AG: Honestly its super-liberating. When youre a writer on a game, the language and even the story of the game are often a small part of that. You only have to watch once while someone starts your game and then clicks through the two paragraphs of exposition without reading them. You only have to see that happen once to realize what your place is as the writer is in the game. You learn to swallow that, you learn to use language liberally. You realize its not the main show. The main show is movement and all the dynamics that happens in games. And thats how in my twenties I wrote in games. I didnt start my first novel until I was thirty-two so I learned to restrain myself. Then I went into games and I could switch from, okay, this is my show where Im building the entire experience out of language for myself and I can make massive changes to the plot and characterization without calling a meeting. Its a quite different experience writing a novel versus writing a game.
AD: Having written a novel, is it hard to write a game?
AG: In some ways it turns out not to be because I know I have a place to put my need to control everything. Its better knowing that I can write novels and have a place to put all of that and to do it my own way and to play with language as much as I want to. It feels more balanced now than when I didnt do novels. It is also a relief to be able to collaborate and not have to carry the ball entirely by myself. Its brought some balance to my work habits. Its a nice thing. I had this experience, I was in a classroom talking about the Soon I Will Be Invincible characters and we got into an argument about whether one of the characters was black. I realized that I hadnt actually specified that in the book and I realized that for some readers, the character was black, and I realized that I did not have as much control over the player experience of my novel as I thought I did. That was a good realization to have that even when youre a novelist, you cant control everything. Your readers compose scenes in their heads by themselves far away from you where you cannot control it.
AD: I know that you signed a two book deal and that You is the first. Did you want to talk about the next one?
AG: Im probably about halfway through writing it. Its a book about Richard Nixon from his point of view. I think that book, which is called Crooked, is going to look more like Soon I Will Be Invincible than You does. I have to say it was the centennial of Nixons birth and for a while there was a lot of talk about LincolnSpielbergs Lincoln, vampire slayer Lincolnand I thought to myself, Lincoln is not the most interesting President we could be writing about. [laughs]
AD: I was asked to ask you if well ever see a sequel to Soon I Will Be Invincible?
AG: The answer used to be no, but then I wrote a short story for an anthology about mad scientists and now the answer is starting to be more of a yes. So the answers not no anymore. There may be a Soon I Will Be Invincible movie. I dont know if anybody wants to publish a sequel, but I realized that there was something more to do there so its certainly writeable.
AD: If you did, though, it would a few years down the road at least.
AG: Yes. It could be the one after Crooked or later on. I dont know.
AD: Can you talk about any games youre working on?
AG: Dishonored. We have downloadable story arcs that are coming out and unofficially there will probably be a sequel to Dishonored. I dont know. Im looking at a bunch of stuff. I dont have a full time position in games so I jump around and try to do interesting things.
AD: I havent said much about the plot of You, and thats intentional, but to bring it back to books opening, whats your ultimate game?
AG: [laughs] The truth is that Im a quite obsessive old school player of a game called NetHack, which probably you dont know about and thats probably fine. You may have had a normal personal life or something. [laughs] Its an old school dungeon game which started in the early eighties but it hung around as people added more and more features to it and things you could do and in-jokes. Obviously it was the basis for the first Realms of Gold in the book, but creating more features and cultural in-jokes, it kept expandinglike some creature that builds its own shell out of ambient garbage and keeps expanding. That was one of the big touchstones for me. Most people would probably say the holodeck or something, but I think about a game that keeps changing and expanding. Obviously the real ultimate game is some kind of singularity or rapture that cannot logically occur, but my touchstone was very primitive but very powerful and flexible.
The real real answer is that I dont have a short answer, which is why I wrote a book about it. For me this is why I dont plot or outline books because these are the annoying questions I run into. In the first book it was, why would you possibly become a super villain as a profession. It began as a short story and ended up as a novel because I kept worrying and gnawing away at that question. That is the question that made this a book length project because I could not give a coherent answer to it. [laughs]
AD: So for you, all the games described in the book, the evolution of it and the thinking behind it is and how the characters think about it, is in a sense you answering that question.
AG: That is true. Thats what the game industry does. The first game I did was Ultima Underworld II. Ultima Underworld was just not real enough and heres how we can make it feel more real and more immersive. We did System Shock and then Deus Ex. The game industry is changing, every year it becomes more interesting. It seems like the same questions that drive the technology breakneck pace of the game industry, what is the ultimate game? Whose ultimate game can we do this year and next years games will be even more. They make the older games look primitive and make us wonder why we ever got excited about them. Everybody is driving towards that question and its weird its not talked about more in fact. What goal are we going to arrive at? This year its interesting because its only getting weirder. Things are getting stranger. Theyre not normalizing.