Tesla and SpaceX Elon Musk loves video games. I know, kind of shocking that a big-time billionaire actually does something other than make billions of dollars. His favorite is Blizzard’s Overwatch, but does he enjoy any other games? He sat down with Y Combiner’s Sam Altman recently to discuss the subject. The entire interview can be seen here:
The interview starts with Musk saying that his favorite game in Overwatch, adding that “Generally, Blizzard does great stuff.” This led him to recommend Hearthstone, a free-to-play card game by Blizzard that his kids like to play a lot. He also said that he enjoyed the original Deus Ex, but didn’t like the new Mankind Divided, citing its lack of story.
“I think [story] is really neglected [in modern games],” Musk said. “That’s the criticism of the latest Deus Ex; the storytelling is kind of lame. Some of the oldest games, the graphics and sound were terrible, so they had to rely on storytelling.”
Musk talked about his love for Overwatch last year and made an interesting statement that human existence is actually simulation being controlled by some being of higher intelligence.
“The strongest argument for us being in a simulation is the following: 40 years ago, we had Pong. Two rectangles and a dot. Now, 40 years later, we have photorealistic 3D with millions playing simultaneously. If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, even if that rate of advancement drops by 1000 from what it is now.”
He’s also been on record saying that video game graphics will be indistinguishable from reality.
“It’s a given that we’re clearly on a trajectory that we’re going to have games that are indistinguishable from reality. It would seem to follow that the odds that we’re in base reality [are] one in millions.”