A three-year-old clip of Valve boss Gabe Newell dissecting the place of realism in games has resurfaced online amidst discussions of GTA 6 gameplay leaks suggesting cars in Rockstar’s universe now use a realistic gasoline system which requires players to refuel them.
The response to this fuel system, even as part of a game build that may be outdated and which we’ve only seen a brief slice of, has been mixed. Some players embrace this added friction and detail, but others seem to worry that this gasoline system, assuming it’s born out by the shipped game, will quickly become annoying upkeep.
In multiple debates on this feature, gamers and GTA fans have pointed to Newell’s examination of realism in 2023’s Half-Life 25th anniversary documentary. Around 15:40, at the start of one of the clips mentioned in GTA 6 leak debates, Newell dismisses the idea that games should pursue realism as a default.
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“You’d have these conversations where you’d be sitting in a design review and somebody’d say, ‘That’s not realistic,'” Newell begins. “And you’re like, ‘OK. What does that have to – explain to me why that’s interesting.’ Because in the real world, I have to write up lists of stuff I have to go to the grocery store to buy. And I have never thought to myself that realism is fun. I go play games to have fun.”
This has to be one of the most-cited Newell quotes around, and it holds up today. We frequently talk about how much more realistic some video games have become, often in discussions of lighting or NPC behavior, but games are still deliberately removed from reality for many reasons. Reality can be tedious and limiting, for one, and it turns out it’s also very difficult to recreate.
The more realistic a game becomes, the more questions it has to answer. And the more questions a game has to answer, the more exceptions it has to make, sometimes to the detriment of gameplay or, ironically, immersion. We’re getting to the core of why games generally aim to construct, and get players to believe, a reality that services their gameplay goals instead of trying to make absolutely everything true-to-life.
But for my money, the most interesting part is what Newell says next: how realism can be fun in games, and what it actually means.
“So we had to come up with some notion of what fun was,” Newell continues. “We knew it was an ad hoc definition, and it was: the degrees to which the game recognizes and responded to the player’s choices and actions. In behavioral science, you would say we’re explicitly talking about what were reinforcers and what the reinforcement schedules were. At that point in time, that was a useful way of making design decisions.”
Positive reinforcers encourage or reward behavior in a way that makes that behavior more likely to be repeated. The Skinner box, an experiment that saw animals trained to receive a reward like food by pressing a button, is one example that often comes up in game design discussions.
Here, a reinforcer would mean that a game acknowledging something you did and giving it observable consequences, big or small, makes it feel meaningful and makes you more likely to do something again. If you shoot a demon in Doom: The Dark Ages, it gets ripped apart in chunks. If you shoot a barrel in Borderlands 4, it explodes. If you shoot a random character in Fallout 4, the whole story may change. But you wouldn’t shoot a random character to change the story of Doom, nor do Borderlands 4’s barrels realistically buckle and leak fuel before exploding. Because now we’ve got realism working for games, rather than games working for realism.
This reward space is where you’ll find immersive sims with seemingly impossible interaction chains that enable alternative solutions. This is where The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom lets you drop 50 metal weapons on the ground to connect an electric circuit instead of engaging with intended puzzle pieces. It’s where crunchy, reactive RPGs like Baldur’s Gate 3 blow players away by accounting for the fringe corner cases they got themselves into. And it’s partly why Half-Life’s convincing and systemic physics were so popular and, even outside the walls of FPS, formative.
The intent behind these and other design decisions isn’t limited to reinforcement, but behavioral psychology is part of a lot of things in games – spaces that provide the agency we crave with the safety of play.
But where does pumping gas in GTA 6 fall – in Newell’s grocery store rant, or in the magic of games carefully deploying realism? Personally, I don’t think some shoddy leak videos are going to tell us.
“The point I would make is: if I go up to a wall and shoot it, to me it feels like the wall is ignoring me,” Newell concludes. “I’m getting a narcissistic injury when the world is ignoring me. So to me, I was trying to convey to the user a sense of, yes, you were making choices, yes, you were progressing. Which meant the game had to acknowledge that back to you. If you shoot at a wall, there have to be [damage] decals. If you kill a bunch of marines, the marines have to run away from you. You have to have this sense of the game acknowledging and responding to the choices and actions and progressions that you’ve made. Otherwise, it loses any sort of impact.”
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