"He told me that, 15 years ago, he was doing press interviews for the Grand Theft Auto IV expansion packs when he had something of a revelation about the series. I was talking to a journalist from Paris Match, a very cultured French guy and he said, Well, the Grand Theft Auto games are just like Dickens'. And I was like, God bless you for saying that!"
"But I thought about it afterwards and, well, they're not as good as Dickens, but they are similar in that he's world-building. If you look at Dickens, Zola, Tolstoy or any of those authors, there's that feeling of all the world is here that's what you're trying to get in open world games. It's a twisted prism, looking at a society that's interesting in one way or another."
Open-world video games merge narrative, social connectivity and player freedom to create immersive, potentially endless entertainment experiences. Recent projects include a novel and podcast series about a vast online game that goes tragically wrong, and a comedy-adventure set in an online world called Absurdaverse. Open-world design shares similarities with Victorian world-building, using exhaustive descriptive detail to conjure virtual realities and produce complete immersion. Victorian novels aimed to render exact mental images before cinema; modern games pursue the same 'all the world is here' ambition and examine society through a twisted prism.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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