Games play an important, and arguably increasing, role in human life. We play games on our computers and our phones, watch other people compete in games, and occasionally break out the cards or the Monopoly set. What is the origin of this human impulse, and what makes for a great game? Frank Lantz is both a working game designer and an academic who thinks about the nature of games and gaming. We discuss what games are, contrast the challenges of Go and Poker and other games, and investigate both the "dark energy" that games can sometimes induce and the ways they can help us become better people.
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Frank Lantz is a game designer and Director of the Game Center at New York University. He co-founded Area/Code games, and is the designer or co-designer of numerous popular games, including Drop7 and Universal Paperclips. He is also responsible for a number of large-scale real-world games. He has taught at New York University, Parsons School of Design, and the School of Visual Arts.
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0:00:00 Sean Carroll: Hello, everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. And I'm of the opinion that we don't talk about games enough. At least, we don't talk about games enough in an intellectual sense, in a sort of the theory of games. What are games? Why do we do them? Clearly, there's a whole bunch of people playing games. I just looked up the numbers online and we spend over twice as much on video games these days as we do on movies. Despite the fact there's a lot more coverage of movies in TV and magazines. Two-thirds of American households play video games or at least have someone in there playing video games for more than three hours per week. So video games pervade our lives, as do games more generally, right? Chess, Go, card games, etcetera. But what is a game? What's the definition of it and why are we so attracted to them? Why do they fascinate us so?
0:00:50 SC: I think that my cats, Ariel and Caliban, in some sense play games. Ariel at least plays fetch, but we human beings go to great lengths to invent completely arbitrary rules, play by them, and then invest enormous amounts of emotion into whether we win or lose or how we do playing this game. So, today we have on one of the world's leading people who does think about these issues in detail. Frank Lantz is a very active game designer. He's designed a number of video games, Gearheads, Drop7, which is a famous iPhone, mobile phone game, CSI: Crime City, as well as various real-world games, where people are out there in the streets actually playing by certain rules. But he's also the director of the Game Center at NYU, so part of his job is to take the bigger picture, to really ask what games are, where they're going? So this is a very fun conversation.
0:01:43 SC: I do have to admit that it was in an extremely unusual setting that we had the conversation. This was a live recording at the Santa Fe Institute's Interplanetary Festival in Santa Fe, which is a very fun event, but to be honest, the recording was in a big space, in a big tent with lots of other things going on. So the amount of background noise is considerable and what's worse, I wasn't using my own equipment, I was using the local equipment there. And the good news is that Frank's microphone was really good, so you'll hear him well. My microphone, sadly was not as good. And also, I was... Because of that, trying to project, so it sounds like I'm shouting the entire time for the entire podcast. But I've done what I can to save the audio file, make it as listenable as possible. And like I said, Frank, who's the one you're there to listen to is actually very clear in this recording. So I think it's such a good conversation on the substantive level that it's well worth listening to. So, let's go.
[music]
0:02:58 SC: Alright, Frank Lantz, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.
0:03:00 Frank Lantz: Thanks, great to be here.
0:03:01 SC: So, I don't wanna put into words what it is you do, although I've already done that in the intro, but you both design games and have this sort of academic position. So why don't you tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do, what are the games that you've been responsible for?
0:03:16 FL: Well, yeah, I'm a game designer. I've been making games for a long time and also teach game design at NYU. I sort of do both of these simultaneously. The game design department is in the Tisch School of the Arts.
0:03:31 SC: Okay.
0:03:32 FL: Which is the same school that has the film school and acting and things like that. And the idea is that the instructors there are also practitioners. So, we are professional game developers and people who have an ongoing career and a practice. And so, that's what I've been doing for many years now. And as a game designer in New York, I made a lot of weird experimental games. I had a small studio called "Area Code." We specialized in location-aware games and street games, games that took place in physical spaces that incorporated computers, but weren't on computers.
0:04:14 SC: So they weren't video games in the traditional sense?
0:04:15 FL: Yeah. Instead, we were sort of taking advantage of the emerging kind of ubiquitous computing technology to create new kinds of game experiences that brought back social interaction into the mix. So I did a lot of games like that. I taught a class in that style of game at NYU and the students in that class made a game called "Pac Manhattan," which was [chuckle] translating the game of Pac-Man onto the grid, onto the street grid of New York City.
0:04:48 SC: Cool.
0:04:48 FL: So that's the kinda thing that we did. My studio did a bunch of games, we made a bunch of large-scale social games for Facebook. We also did a game called "Drop7," which you maybe familiar with.
0:05:00 SC: An old favorite of mine.
0:05:01 FL: Okay, good.
0:05:02 SC: I spent many hours playing Drop7 on the iPhone.
0:05:05 FL: Nice, nice. And yeah, so, I've made lots and lots of games over the years. And then recently, a couple of years ago, I made a game called "Universal Paperclips."
0:05:16 SC: Right.
0:05:16 FL: Which was the first time that I had sat down to program a game myself from scratch. And so, that was a fun experience and that's the most recent thing I've made.
0:05:29 SC: They take over your life programming something like that?
0:05:31 FL: Yeah, it was deeply satisfying [chuckle] and a learning experience.
0:05:35 SC: I should mention, I'm very new at this in the sense that this is the first ever time that Mindscape has done a live podcast. So for those of you listening over the podcast radio Internet network, we are here live at the Santa Fe Interplanetary Festival. It will also explain why you may hear noises in the background, like what I think was a theremin was just going on. But it may very well have been an alien creature talking its special language, 'cause we're here at the Interplanetary Festival, anything can happen. So, that's okay, we're all about experiences and nuance and seeing how things go. So, one of the wonderful things I like, Frank, about your work is that you have designed games, you've programmed games, you've coded, but you also think carefully about the bigger picture, which is my favorite thing and our favorite thing here on Mindscape. So, let's just be as big as we can. What is a game? What qualifies some activity as being a game rather than being something else?
0:06:32 FL: Well, I think of game as a cultural category. So, it doesn't have a very precise definition that will allow you to distinguish between things that are games and aren't games in some kind of automatic way by looking at their internal characteristics and identifying them. Instead, it is... You know, it represents a kind of a broad category of human action, and I think of it as being a creative form and something like an art form, an aesthetic form. So something like literature or music or film dance that kinda thing. And so, it's gonna have all the same kind of ambiguity to precisely identify what is or isn't a game. But to me it is the art form of interactivity, it is the creative form of designing experiences for people. You're still trying to create something meaningful, beautiful, interesting, popular, expressive, but you're doing it by crafting people's interactions, by crafting their choices and their actions.
0:07:50 SC: So, I like that, the art form of interactivity, so the... I apologize to the audience, like... I... There's an audience in front of me, so I feel I should project my voice to them, but the podcast listeners are gonna be like, "Why is he shouting on the podcast? He doesn't do that." Sorry, take it into consideration. But interactivity then clearly... So that's the thing. Like, it doesn't matter that there's a goal, doesn't matter that you can win or lose, it doesn't matter that there are other people, it doesn't matter that you're not just looking at the work of art, you are interacting with it, that's what makes it a game.
0:08:21 FL: Yeah, and I think things like having a goal win state and loss state, those are the kinds of things that lots of games do have. So, when we're looking to identify whether something's a game or not, having those qualities make it more likely that it's a game. In the same sense that music is about sound, but in some cases, music might be about silence, right? So the absence of sound doesn't mean that it's not a piece of music.
0:08:49 SC: Sure.
0:08:50 FL: This famous John Cage piece, you know? [chuckle] It just is like these are the kinds of things by which we... It's like a family resemblance thing. You know, Wittgenstein famously sort of used game, the word game, as an example of how hard it is define to anything.
0:09:03 SC: Yeah.
0:09:03 FL: Because, you know? But yeah, there's these family resemblances, they do tend to be about goals, but not always. And recently...
0:09:10 SC: Not always.
0:09:11 FL: Game designers have really been exploring the space of games that are explicitly not about goals. So that's interesting.
0:09:16 SC: You know, I went through a phase when I was quasi active in Second Life. I don't know if you ever did Second Life.
0:09:22 FL: I... No, I didn't myself, but I'm familiar with it. Yeah.
0:09:24 SC: Well, I got into it because there was a podcast that was in Second Life, so there was an interviewer, and so forth. Jennifer, my wife hosted, was one of the many hosts of this podcast and I gave public lectures in Second Life. My impression was always for those of the who don't know, it's a massively online game in some sense, but they never... So you had an Avatar, there was a world, you built a virtual world, there weren't goals though, it was an open world in the broadest sense. It was like, "Here it is. Here's your play box, here's your sand box, go play with it." And I think it kind of faltered because of that. There's other virtual worlds like World of Warcraft, other games, that are much more popular 'cause you can still build the world, but there's also a way to win or lose, from moment to moment.
0:10:06 FL: Yeah. I... Actually, I'm fascinated by Second Life. I think it's more interesting now in it's moribund state, as this like abandoned virtual world.
0:10:14 SC: The ghost world. Yeah.
0:10:15 FL: Yeah, you see people like take tours of it, like they're going to Chernobyl. And there's just these big strange decaying ruins of corporate sponsored, like, avant-garde...
0:10:28 SC: Yeah.
0:10:28 FL: Art locations. [chuckle] It's very weird and cool. Yeah.
0:10:31 SC: Well, it was weird to me because it is Second Life. It tried to mimic life. Like, you could have a house, we had a house, we had a cat in our house.
0:10:40 FL: Yeah.
0:10:41 SC: But then, you could apparently just walk into other people's house, and rifle around, and that was weird and you didn't know whether that was okay or not.
0:10:49 FL: Yeah. I mean, I always thought the sort of fascination with virtual worlds was a... It happened in '90s and early 2000s.
0:10:56 SC: Yeah.
0:10:56 FL: It was a little bit misplaced. The idea... For me as a game designer what was interesting about World of Warcraft was not that it was a virtual world that happened to be a game, it was that it was a game that incorporated a virtual world, right? And the fact that it was a game I thought was a really important part of that experience. Because a game... Like a virtual world has the implication that this is just another type of social space, but a game is a kind theatrical, it's kind of like expressive. Like, we know we're entering into a kind of performance.
0:11:33 SC: Performative. Yeah.
0:11:34 FL: And yeah, so it's important in World of Warcraft that it isn't just things like race and politics, it's this strange representation of race and politics. And then I was a hoard, I was a...
0:11:47 SC: Okay.
0:11:47 FL: I was a troll in World of Warcraft and of course it was a hoard versus alliance, and it was this big kind of underlying motivation for your play and I hated the alliance.
0:11:57 SC: Of course.
0:11:58 FL: But it wasn't real hate, right? It's not real hate taking place in a virtual space. It was this strange kind of performative hate. Which is similar to what you get when you are performing a play or looking at a painting or reading a poem. You know what I mean? I think that's the important thing.
0:12:16 SC: But it can also bleed over into the real world. I mean, fans of one sports team can be very not friendly with fans of another sports team.
0:12:24 FL: It's true. And I think when you get violence in sports fandom is, where you see a failure of the kinda ritual transformative aspect. I think, when it's working, sports fandom gives you this kind of strange toy version of the kind of totalitarian identity that we get when we just feel like, "Oh, I'm disappearing into the mob, I become a Mets fan or I become a Yankees fan, and I get to experience the pleasure of what it feels like to get rid of my actual identity, all the nuance and subtlety of being a person and being part of all kinds of different communities. And instead, I get to plunge into this simplistic atavistic," I think... And that's kinda beautiful, because it's not real.
0:13:16 SC: You could be a member of a tribe without all of the terrible baggage that can sometimes go along with that in real world.
0:13:20 FL: Yeah. Yeah. And it works because we know, and as even when we commit fully to it, it is bracketed in a way. And that to me is part of what makes sports and games, in general, feel like they belong alongside the arts.
0:13:37 SC: Well, one of the things I noticed in Second Life with this podcast that Jennifer was a host of, was... So she would interview people, like you interview people in a podcast, she would invite them on, and they generally wouldn't have Second Life characters all ready, so they would design it from scratch. And you saw there were only two types, there were like the people who designed the most sexually attractive version of themselves, right?
0:14:00 FL: Yes.
0:14:00 SC: Like buff, beautiful and glamorous clothes.
0:14:01 FL: Right.
0:14:02 SC: Or people who went completely crazy. They were a unicorn or they were a flock of butterflies, and that freedom to be something completely different was very valuable to them.
0:14:10 FL: Yeah.
0:14:11 SC: But it's still... They're still expressing something that was inside their real selves...
[overlapping conversation]
0:14:14 FL: Yeah, and I think you see that in role playing games as well, when people design avatars for themselves in Morrowind or any kind of RPG. They're kind of playing with identity in that same way.
0:14:30 SC: And it brings us back... I should have asked this even before, what is a game, what is playing? Like, cats and dogs play, right? It's not purely human.
0:14:39 FL: Mm-hmm.
0:14:40 SC: I actually have a cat who plays fetch, she's like a little puppy.
0:14:42 FL: Sure, yeah.
0:14:43 SC: She'll bring it back and her brother won't do that. But... So, somewhere along evolutionary time, our presumably we... Like everything else in evolution, we develop some mental machinery for some reason, and then repurposed it for another reason.
0:14:58 FL: Yeah.
0:14:58 SC: So the hunting and the gathering or whatever, got repurposed as play. Do we know a lot about the evolution of play, and what purposes it serves?
0:15:07 FL: Yeah, I mean, I think there's a deep scholarship about play that comes out of anthropology and also sociology, and psychology, and development science. And I think one of the things that's fascinating about games, is that it taps into this deep and ancient form of behavior, which is not only there at the beginning of human culture, but really pre-dates human culture.
0:15:36 SC: Right.
0:15:38 FL: There's the sociologist Huizinga, who wrote this famous book called Homo Ludens, which is about how play really is the origin point of human culture. Like, human...
0:15:49 SC: Really?
0:15:50 FL: Yeah. Human culture and civilization comes out of play, and the play instant.
0:15:53 SC: This sounds like one of many grandiose claims that you could either believe or disbelieve equally well.
0:15:57 FL: Yeah, it is. [chuckle] But we like Huizinga, so we're gonna give him the nod in this case. But yeah, I mean... So, as for what it is, I think it has something to do with the power of free exploration. A lot of what we do is kinda bound and guided by our goals, and our rules of interaction, and then some things we do are more exploratory, they're more improvisational, they're more unbounded, they involve the things that are maybe random, or trial and error. And, you know, we're... If I pick up this bottle, I know what I'm supposed to do, which is hold it up to my lips and drink it, but if I just pour some out on the table...
[chuckle]
0:16:52 SC: Oh my God, you did it.
[laughter]
0:16:54 FL: That's playful, right?
0:16:56 SC: Right.
0:16:56 FL: Because I'm exploring the range of possible actions I can take with this bottle, and it's not just the ones that we think of immediately, because we're kinda programmed to behave in certain programmed ways. It's all the different ways, like, all the different things that I can do with this bottle, right? So that's play, and I think that's one half of games. I think what's super interesting is that in games, you get this idea of play, wild improvisation, kind of unbounded energetic excess and imaginative kind of exploration, and it's also... It's in conversation with the opposite, with structure, with...
0:17:37 SC: Structure, yeah.
0:17:37 FL: Rules, with goals, with arbitrary goals like, "Oh, I'm going to tie one hand behind my back, and now what can I do with this bottle?" Just like... And so, these two things are kind of in conversation in games, right? Play and rules, kinda freedom and structure.
0:17:57 SC: Rules seem to be one of the things that goes almost inevitably along with the concept of games, right? And like you say, we make them up. And it's always been psychologically fascinating to me that we invent rules and then we stick to them. Like, we invented them, or the goal, like, "Okay, create... Win your golden prize for playing the game a certain number of times on your iPhone this week." But then they become very important to us despite the fact that we know they're entirely arbitrary.
0:18:25 SC: Yeah. And in games, we get to play with rules and we get to submit ourselves to them. We get to experience the pleasure of being bound by a little arbitrary system, and there is a particular kind of pleasure there. But then we also are given a chance to recognize how rules are constructed. Like as a game designer, my job is to make rules, and as as a player, we encounter a game, we voluntarily step into it, submit ourselves to the rules, but then we finish, we stop playing and we step back and we realize, "Oh that's the characteristics of this little set of rules." But it could have been a different way. And even as a player, you get to play with the rules, you say, "What if we do it again? But this time let's tie both hands behind our back?" Or "This time let's not try to do this thing. Let's try to do this other thing." And so it gives you a sense of how rules are pliable.
0:19:21 SC: And if I'm playing solitaire let's say, I'm playing with real cards, not just on a phone. And if I lose, if I can't finish the deck, I feel bad, I'm tempted to cheat, like why is that?
0:19:35 FL: Well, because I think part of what you get from a game is this little sense that you're being tested, and that it's a little puzzle. Solitaire is like a little puzzle, and when you do well at solitaire it's partly a reflection of the fact that you're smart. And so when you do poorly.
0:19:52 SC: Lose your self image.
0:19:54 FL: Yeah. So it's almost wanting to take your temperature again to see if maybe you could get hotter.
0:20:01 SC: You gave this wonderful talk, for the audience out there, you should look online for a talk that Frank gave that involves two games that he compares and contrasts, Go and Poker. And let's take them in order, because they're both fascinating for their own reasons. Go of course, is Japanese originally, is that right?
0:20:18 FL: Chinese originally.
0:20:19 SC: Chinese originally.
0:20:19 FL: Yeah.
0:20:19 SC: Okay, it's the... It's to Asian cultures what chess is to western cultures. And it's very formal and rigid and the rules are very clear and people get into it and you make this wonderful analogy that it becomes like a martial art in some sense, it's a form of discipline to be in a good Go-player.
0:20:37 FL: Yeah. Go is an example of the kind of game that is a very hard deep cognitive problem, like the kind that scientists wrestle with but totally separate from the idea in Science that you're working on a problem for a particular reason. Because it fits into some larger framework. Because by solving this problem, you'll be able to solve this other problem or... 'Cause it might lead downstream to some engineering breakthroughs. In the case of Go, you are just wrestling with that problem, for it's own sake.
0:21:11 SC: You invented it, yeah.
0:21:12 FL: Yeah. And it's a very deep and beautiful game and it's been for thousands of years, and it's another great example of how strange games are as an art form, because we have, they're not that many works of literature or music that people have been interacting with for thousands of years and they're still doing it, in the same way, they're still getting the similar kind of value out of it they're still thinking about it and participating with it in a similar way. Yeah, and it's a remarkable game.
0:21:46 SC: We'd be remiss if we didn't mention the computers are now better than humans.
0:21:48 FL: Yes, it's just a great example of how games are often the ultimate test bed for artificial intelligence and Go is this iconic quintessential AI problem which just recently tumbled. And maybe is the last sort of the last game, the last kind of full-fledged human game that humans are really good at.
0:22:13 SC: Well we'll get to Poker in a second.
0:22:16 FL: Yeah.
0:22:16 SC: But it took longer for computers to win at Go against the best built players than at chess.
0:22:22 FL: It did and people, I think, a little bit over-interpreted that they were like, "Oh well, chess. Of course, of course computer is gonna go to chess because look at it you can see that it's combinatorial and you can just crunch through and look at all the possibilities, but Go, Go requires intuition, and deep insight and all these kind of ineffable." [chuckle]
0:22:43 SC: Really, did they say that?
0:22:43 FL: I think there was a sense of that maybe, especially among game designers for whom one of the beauties of Go is that it does require intuition, and if there is an ineffable quality, like you talk about things like shape and these kind of nebulous concepts. It's not just sitting down and crunching through. If I go there, you go there I go there you go there, you actually do have these hard-to-pin down concepts. And so I think people thought, Oh well this will be our bull work against AI and it'll last for a long time," but of course it didn't. It didn't last long.
0:23:12 SC: So for those who have never seen it, how big is the Go board.
0:23:15 FL: 19 by 19.
0:23:16 SC: So it's 19 by 19 grade and you put either white or black pebble, stones.
0:23:20 FL: Yeah you can alternate black-and-white stones.
0:23:22 SC: So part of me wants to say, I'll be a scientist here for a second. It's a finite game. There's only a finite number of things that can happen.
0:23:29 FL: Sure.
0:23:30 SC: But the other part, says, but that number is really, really big. So of course, when real human beings play, Go just like playing chess. We don't, in our brains try to go through every combinatorial possibility, we use heuristics we use our intuition, we look at the shape of the board, we get a feeling you talk about the energy that comes off of different configurations of the pieces. And of course, then you ask the computer to do it. It was, I heard a talk here at Santa Fe institute fact by former professional Go player who like many professional Go players gave up when the computer won because they can't compete now with the computer. But one of the things we learned was, one of the things that holding the artificial intelligence back from becoming a really good Go player was that they trained it on human games, first. And it actually turned out to be much better if they just let it play against itself without ever poisoning, it with human intuition.
0:24:22 FL: That was the real headline, with AlphaGo was that it got so much better when we stopped trying to seed it with the centuries of knowledge that humans had developed. With all of our insights, all of our heuristic, all of our ways of teaching Go, we just left that out and instead we gave it the rules and then we gave it a technique for playing against itself, and a preference for winning. And it did so much better. It was really kind of an interesting lesson there about humility.
0:24:53 SC: And some of the players used words like, "it was playing against an alien" because the computer used concepts that the humans hadn't thought of before.
0:25:00 FL: But it was still beautiful. The thing is that the Go experts who are watching AlphaGo still found the moves that AlphaGo made that were surprising to be exquisite. And so that was exciting to me.
0:25:15 SC: There's a beauty there. Absolutely, yeah.
0:25:16 FL: Yeah. And it's a beauty that is on one hand non-human or inhuman because it surprised us and it came out of... And on the other hand, deeply human because it is Go itself expressing itself. It is... And a project like AlphaGo is the result of hundreds of people, thousands of people collaborating and working together and building on each other's insights and knowledge to make this piece of engineering. So in some sense it's deeply human. And I think that's a nice thing.
0:25:48 SC: It was humans who had the motivation to invent the game. If the computer never got to play another game, it wouldn't get frustrated. But we, that's what comes from us human beings. And that's why I like this idea of using games like Go almost as a tool of self-discipline, as a way... It's almost like a meditative monk like or martial art like practice. And we're training ourselves to be a slightly better people than we are.
0:26:13 FL: Yes, it's... The way I like to think about it is that it's a way of thinking about thinking. Go itself is a way of thinking about thinking. And artificial intelligence is also a way of thinking about thinking. And when people play Go, I think this is true for as long as people have played Go. They've been doing the kind of Artificial intelligence research [chuckle].
0:26:36 SC: Okay.
0:26:36 FL: You know what I mean? Because they've been...
0:26:37 SC: I don't know what you mean. Explain what you mean.
0:26:39 FL: Well, they've been thinking, what's possible if I take this little isolated problem, and devote all of my thinking, in fact, devote my entire life... Like a serious Go player, like a serious player of any truly deep competitive game gives up the rest of their life to explore this thing.
0:26:54 SC: And if that were World of Warcraft, we would say it's terrible, but if it's Go we think it's beautiful. Or chess.
0:26:58 FL: Yeah, and so in the case of a game like Go, which is about decision making, what they're doing is saying, "I'm going to sacrifice my life in order to explore, in the deepest possible way, what it means to solve problems, what it means to apply every fiber of my cognitive ability to solving a very precise and specific kind of problem, and to go deep and to watch it unfold. And it turns out it fascinating and beautiful. It's not trivial. Even though it's a, it's an extraordinarily simple game with only a handful of rules.
0:27:34 SC: Well, maybe this is a good place to mention the idea that if you just say, games, especially in our modern culture where that has slightly, the connotation of video games, people worry. It has a slightly disreputable connotation. This is something that kids do, it's distracting them for more important things. If you had said chess, or Go, maybe they would get the fact that that's a more elevated sublime thing.
0:27:57 FL: Yeah.
0:27:58 SC: But is it really different, or all games have an aspect of this?
0:28:03 FL: I think people are right to be suspicious of games. I'm a game designer, I've devoted my life to making games and playing games, and I love them very deeply. But games by their very nature have to live outside of ordinary life. And we should be suspicious of them.
[laughter]
0:28:21 FL: I think art is the same way, right? People are also suspicious of art. We spend all your time reading these stupid books. And just, reading comic books, or you're obsessed with music and you're hanging out with your friends, playing that noise instead of doing something practical, and useful.
0:28:43 SC: Yeah.
0:28:44 FL: So, I think in that sense, yeah, games occupy this weird space outside of our kind of ordinary system of values. And they should, that's their job. Is to be out there doing weird stuff and exploring the edges of what we know and think and imagine.
0:29:04 SC: So, it's my... Part of my job as the podcast host is to be slightly contrary, and play the devil's advocate a little bit here.
0:29:09 FL: Okay.
0:29:09 SC: So, some... Go or Chess might be very beautiful, even World of Warcraft can be beautiful in some way. There are some games that are really, really simple and yet it's hard to ascribe the same level of beauty to them, and yet they really get us. They get their hooks into us, and they become addictive.
0:29:27 FL: Yes.
0:29:27 SC: There's a whole... One of the gaming companies is called Addicting games, that's what they shoot for. Maybe Tetris was the first very well known one on the computer.
0:29:35 FL: Yeah.
0:29:35 SC: But this is definitely a goal of certain game designers to make a very simple game, that will prevent people from ever putting their phone down.
0:29:43 FL: And I think we can look at slot machines as a case in point of this, right? Slot machines are games, I would say. And there is a very dark energy to slot machines. Slot machines ruin people's lives, not everyone. There's some people who have a healthy relationship to slot machines, and they actually get some meaning and pleasure and joy and beauty out of slot machines. But...
0:30:11 SC: There's literally no skill by the way, right? You're essentially pushing a button or pulling a...
0:30:16 FL: Yes, yeah, that's, the kind of, yeah, the quintessential version of a slot machine there's no skill. And you can be an advantage gamer who finds slot machines and exploits...
0:30:27 SC: Sure.
0:30:28 FL: Certain payoffs and use your intelligence to actually get a little bit of an edge. But let's just say in the case, in the classic case a slot machines, it's just pure randomness.
0:30:35 SC: I love the fact there are slot machine tournaments.
0:30:37 FL: There are, I mean, yeah, there are people to make a living playing slot machines. You know, it's like... But anyway, the thing is, so slot machines do have a kind of dark energy. And we are right to be anxious about that, and I think good game designers know that, they have a kind of aversion to that type of game. They recognize that they could do that. You can put that into your game. But most good game designers want to make a game that is more than just compelling. That does more than just 'cause the player to wanna keep doing it. They wanna make the kind of game that they themselves love. The kind of game that after you played it you're happy that you did. And you look back and you say, "Oh, that added something of value to my life." Not, "Oh God, I'm sick to my stomach because I've just wasted my time and energy and money." But it's never that simple, right?
0:31:34 SC: Yeah.
0:31:34 FL: Because sometimes great games can have a little bit of dark energy in them. Just like great art can have a little bit of dark energy, a little self-destructive energy, right? And so we don't wanna, we wanna be careful not to be too dogmatic. And to say, "Oh well, we can apply this moral filter to games, and understand what's good and bad about them." Because the role of games, like the role of art, is not just to be good or bad, but to explore what being good or bad means, right? And you can't do that if you start from a starting point where you're like, "Well, I know what bad is. Bad is... " Slot machines are bad. That's what, addiction is bad, right?
0:32:11 SC: Yeah.
0:32:12 FL: No. So part of what a game, like my game Drop 7, I hope, which I think is kind of addictive, has addictive elements. What I hope, I really hope is that it's not just addictive, but it is in a sense about addiction, like, it gives people kind of a toy version of a thing that is a little bit like heroin.
[laughter]
0:32:31 FL: But also a little bit like Sudoku, and a little bit like like Tetris, and a little bit like a painting, or a little bit like a rug, or a little bit like weaving. And it takes all of these things and combines them in a way that I hope gives people some insight and perspective into how their mind works. And why they enjoy it. And not just a kind of like a black box that they disappear into. Does that make sense?
0:32:58 SC: It makes a lot of sense, but I wanna say parenthetically for the cosmology aficionados in the audience, that this is a different sense of the word dark energy than we use in cosmology.
0:33:06 FL: Oh, or is it?
0:33:07 SC: Or is it.
[laughter]
0:33:08 SC: Yes, it is. It definitely is.
0:33:10 FL: Okay, it is.
0:33:11 SC: But do we know anything about the neuroscience of what makes it addicting? Is there... Are there some games that just poke your dopamine receptors?
0:33:19 FL: We do. The psychologist know a lot about sort of reward schedules. And in the case of slot machines, for example, what makes them so powerfully compulsive is that the rewards are intermittent. That we... Yeah, we're not able to predict them. And it's of these famous experiments where rats, if they push a button, and they always get a pellet. They'll do that until they've had their fill, but if they push a button and occasionally get a pellet, they'll do that until they die.
0:33:47 SC: It's unpredictable.
0:33:48 FL: Yeah, they'll do that.
0:33:48 SC: Yeah.
0:33:49 FL: And so this kind of intermittent reward schedule, is a big part of what makes something truly compulsive. But I tend to be a little bit skeptical of that. Sometimes, I will get calls from journalists, and they'll be like, "Tell me how these evil corporations making these addictive mobile games are using these psychological principles." And I have no doubt that these big companies do employ psychologists, but I actually don't think it's that easy. And because I think if it were, everyone would do it.
0:34:19 SC: Yeah.
0:34:19 FL: Right? They're... I think even in the case of slot machines, if you talk to people who design slot machines, they don't always know what is going to be popular. They'll try a bunch of different kinds of slot machines and it turns out, "Oh, this Golden Girls machine is doing amazingly well. This Batman machine is a turd.
0:34:36 SC: You have to be an empiricist. It's not all PR, yeah.
0:34:38 FL: Yeah, exactly. So there's still this sense of trial and error, and in some sense, it's still a kind of a creative process. And I think, for me, in terms of games, the important thing to remember is games are culture. Games are not primarily technology, games are a form of culture that has this deep relationship to technology. But they are not simply technology, they're not simply devices, they're not things that you plug in and then you get a hedonic pulse, and that they're like a coffee machine, instead, they are more like hats. You know what I mean? Why did everyone wear hats for a while? Why did every single man in every social space wear this same hat? For a while, that was all people did, right? Is that addiction? It's weird. So I think games, even addictive games, have that weird element in them, which makes them hard to just... You can't just plug in a formula and guarantee that you'll have something popular, or compulsive or successful.
0:35:37 SC: It's never happened to me, but has it maybe happened to you that you've been playing a game so much, that you fell asleep and while you were dreaming, you kept playing the game?
0:35:44 FL: Yes. In fact, I'll tell you the game that did that to me in the most powerful way was a game by David O'Reilly called Everything.
0:35:52 SC: Okay.
0:35:52 FL: It's a beautiful game. If you've never played it, I really recommend it. You can play it on the Playstation, and it's an exploration of the thinking of Alan Watts, the great Zen philosopher. And David, who's this brilliant genius, made the game in such a way that if you stop controlling it for a while, it sort of automatically starts playing itself.
[chuckle]
0:36:18 FL: And so, if you just put it, the controller down, after a while, it'll slowly start to just kind of randomly do actions and move through the space and explore it. And I was playing it very late one night, and I was very tired and I was already kind of in this loopy kind of state of mind, and I'm listening to the voice of Alan Watts talk about transcendence and mindfulness, and I was drifting out of consciousness. And then, occasionally, I would wake up, and the game would be playing, and I wasn't even sure whether it was me or not.
0:36:49 SC: Was it you or the game, yes.
0:36:50 FL: Yeah, it was a really beautiful experience.
0:36:52 SC: Wow. Yeah, I think that there's a lot to learn that we don't yet know about the psychology of this. My personal theory about Tetris and even Drop7 and these other games where that there's some threshold where every time you lost, you felt, "Well, if I'd done one little thing better, I would have won, so therefore, I should play again."
0:37:09 FL: I think that's the mark of a good game in many cases.
0:37:11 SC: Yeah.
0:37:11 FL: In many cases, what we're trying to do as designers, is create just that experience where, "I lost, but there was meaning to my loss. I understand now what I should have done differently." And so what the player is doing is building up a little model of the system that you designed and they're doing... They have hypotheses, and then they do little experiments, and I think there's a lot of kind of like toy science in a lot of games.
0:37:36 SC: Oh, absolutely. Experimenting, yeah.
0:37:37 FL: And so, yeah, this feeling of the player kind of wanting to understand what you've made and going deeper and deeper. So that feeling of like, "Oh, I know what I wanna try differently this time. Ooh, I love it." I also love it in a game where I get this feeling that, "Oh, something here is broken I bet I can exploit. I bet there's a thing here that the designer has not thought of, and so I'm going to use an axe, and I'm not gonna wear any armor, and I bet I'm gonna get this weird... " And so, that feeling of something being almost broken or the potential of it being broken, to me, that's catnip.
0:38:11 SC: Well, it goes back to your self-image, right?
0:38:14 FL: Yes.
0:38:14 SC: You're playing game to get reaffirmation that, "I, actually I'm pretty clever here."
0:38:18 FL: I am pretty clever.
[laughter]
0:38:19 SC: Speaking of being pretty clever, let's switch from Go. We got off Go a little bit, but this idea of a sublime martial art that we use to train ourselves to Poker, which is actually one of my favorite games, and you wonderfully contrast this idea of sitting in the tranquil zen garden and playing very slowly and deliberately and engaging your most rational mind to the degenerate gamblers that we get in the poker community in Vegas.
0:38:47 FL: Yeah, it's a... These are...
0:38:49 SC: Or on a Mississippi Riverboat.
0:38:50 FL: The two games that I've played most deeply in my life, in some ways, are very similar. But yeah, they have this very... 'Cause Go is sort of like the beloved of game design snobs, and it has this... It's this ancient game, and it's kind of like a sacred ritual, and there's a lot of respect and a kind of deep culture. And then poker, of course, is the game you play when you're crouched down next to the slot machines and you know they've set up a little table and, yeah, you're listening to the chime of the slot machines, and they're bringing you free drinks, and you're not even sure whether you're good or not, because you think you're cleverly exploiting some edge that you have, but maybe you're not. Maybe you just suck, and you don't even know, right? So it puts you in this totally opposite frame of mind.
0:39:35 SC: One of those fascinating things about poker for me is that it is clearly advantageous for you if your fellow players think you're an idiot, 'cause you can exploit that. But there's such an enormous psychological desire for your fellow players to think you're brilliant that you resist taking advantage of that.
0:39:53 FL: Yeah, and it's such a beautiful game, because it involves all of the kind of problem solving, that cognitive problem solving that goes into Go. There's still lots of math in poker and lots of ways to apply yourself and develop a kind of serious, scholarly discipline to really plumbing the depths of how this thing works as a system, and at the same time, it's deeply social. It's so much about tapping into your ego and the ego of other people, also how we predict each other. The models that we have for each other's behavior that's kind of...
0:40:31 SC: It's the most social thing, having a model of what your opponents are going to do, and then manipulating that model by talking to them, by not talking, by hiding.
0:40:38 FL: Right. But it involves a kind of empathy, like you can't be good at poker unless you can put yourself into the shoes of your opponent and think, "Oh, what are they thinking?" And then they're doing the same thing to you, so you get this strange [chuckle] reciprocal quality, "What are they thinking I'm thinking?" And it's just, it's mindblowing. It's one of the things that led John von Neumann to invent game theory. But he looked at poker and he...
0:41:00 SC: One of the smartest people in the 20th century.
0:41:01 FL: Yeah. And he was like, oh, he compared Poker to Go, I'm sorry, Go to chess. And he was like, "Well, chess is not really a game, chess is obviously just a math problem."
0:41:10 SC: Yeah, we just haven't solved it yet.
0:41:11 FL: "Now poker, now, that's a game, because it involves this conflict between people where it's all about what I think you think I think. It's this deeply, convoluted back and forth of modeling each other." And that's what he wanted to understand.
0:41:30 SC: And yet, Jim McManus who is a writer who wrote a wonderful book about poker, pointed out that at least for a long time, every poker book had six shooters on the cover of the book. Even though they have nothing to do with playing poker, there's this image of outlaw, of degeneracy, of living on the edge that is the opposite of the image that we have in Chess or Go.
0:41:52 FL: But I do love the mythic figure of the gambler. And it's, to me, it's always been a romantic...
0:41:58 SC: It's an archetypical thing, yeah.
0:41:58 FL: It really is a romantic ideal, because I think what the gambler represents...
0:42:02 SC: The aliens are landing here somewhere nearby, but we're gonna press on.
[chuckle]
0:42:06 FL: What the mythic archetype of the gambler represents is the person who has trained themself or by their very personality has a taste for variance, a taste for risk. If you're willing to eat risk, you can profit from it. And so there's something powerful and strange about that, because I think randomness, risk, probability, these are things that as humans, we're still trying to wrap our heads around. We still don't quite understand how to think about them...
0:42:36 SC: We're terrible at it, yeah.
0:42:37 FL: Even in physics, there's this deep debate about how to interpret randomness, like whether it exists.
0:42:42 SC: Or philosophy, we don't know the definition of probability.
0:42:44 FL: Yeah, exactly. And here we have, in Poker, an art form devoted to it, which in its own way is about getting at some of the same questions of: How does the world work? Is everything deterministic or not?
0:43:00 SC: Yeah, but the idea of expectation, and the idea of not being results-oriented is one that I love. In Go or in Chess, there's a right or wrong move in every circumstance, even if you don't know what it is. But in Poker, you might make the best possible move and still lose.
0:43:17 FL: Yes, and which is what makes it so incredibly maddening. You can work so hard and you can be sitting at a table of people who are only there to party. And they've never once thought about how to play or what the right move is. And you can be playing at such a high level and they can just be making the donkiest moves ever, and they can take all of your money. And they can do it over and over and over again. And it's just soul-crushing. But that's what makes it, to my mind beautiful, because you have to overcome that kind of soul-crushing quality. And then that's the sense in which Poker can be a spiritual discipline, just like Go was.
0:43:54 SC: We should give some practical advice to the audience, if you want to make money playing poker, Vegas, 2:00 AM when you've not been drinking is the best time to play, 'cause they'll be plenty of people who are there just to have a good time.
0:44:08 FL: Yes.
[chuckle]
0:44:08 FL: If you wanna make money at poker, come play me tonight. John and I are gonna have a game and we're just terrible, so...
[laughter]
0:44:16 SC: But it is, it's a different kind of game, because it's in some sense more realistic than Go. It hasn't been abstracted down to this pristine set of situations. It's a game of incomplete information. We don't know what's going to happen, and that some of the fun.
0:44:32 FL: And I also think it's a harder AI problem for that reason too.
0:44:35 SC: Empirically it is, yeah.
0:44:36 FL: Because it does involve this kind of reciprocal modeling and guessing. And it's the same kind of AI problem if all you're trying to do is develop a cast iron strategy that is not exploitable. In other words, if all you wanna do is develop a strategy that no one else can have a strategy that will get money from it.
0:44:57 SC: On average you can tie at worst.
0:44:58 FL: Yeah, yeah. A perfect strategy in that sense, that's just a trivial... It's a hard problem, but in some sense, it's a knowable problem, that we understand how to solve that kind of problem and it's... But if the problem you're trying to solve is: How can I make a strategy that is flexible enough to adapt to the poor play of my opponents in a way to maximize the edge I have against other players who are not playing perfectly, then you have a higher level problem, 'cause then you have all of the psychology of interpreting people, understanding what their strategy is from their actions, and they might be doing it to you at the same time.
0:45:36 SC: If Go is human then Poker is even more so for exactly these reasons.
0:45:39 FL: Yeah, yeah, Poker is superhuman.
0:45:42 SC: And you have this wonderful quote from Phil Ivey who is arguably the best poker player in the world right now. I just saw it last night, so I don't know if you remember the quote or I should give it.
0:45:50 FL: You give it and I'll tell you if it's right.
0:45:52 SC: Roughly speaking, Phil Ivey just chitchatting with other poker players in the middle of the game said, "You know when you lose so much money that you can't breathe, I love that."
[laughter]
0:46:02 FL: Yeah. He said, "That's what I'm addicted to."
0:46:04 SC: That's what I'm addicted to, right. Yeah.
0:46:04 FL: And it was beautiful, because this was I think in Poker After Dark or one of these other great TV shows. And so he wasn't even aware that necessarily it was kind of like in the background in the chatter, and it was very honest. And as soon as I heard that, I got chills. This idea that that's, that weird feeling of being sick to your stomach, that pain, that is the thing that he was addicted to? I was like, "I recognize that." And again there was a darkness there, that there was a kind of destructive energy. That's not a good thing. I'm not here to tell you, "Oh, this is all sweetness and light, and poker is wonderful, and you should... " No, this is, it's... It's horrifying, and it is destructive, but it also can be deeply meaningful and deeply beautiful. So that that's what I'm addicted to.
[chuckle]
0:46:50 SC: But it's also a central part of gaming. It's not just poker where you lose a lot of money, but even if you're a spectator, we just finished the NHL and NBA playoffs, right? Most teams end their season on a losing note. Most fans are disappointed at the end of the season, 'cause they didn't win the championship. There's that sense of loss being maybe not ineffable, but at least likely is a big part of what brings us to these games.
0:47:14 FL: Yes, unless like me, you are the north, in which case, I was very happy.
0:47:20 SC: Oh, okay. Well, there you go. But you didn't know that ahead of time.
0:47:23 FL: No, I didn't.
0:47:24 SC: As a Philadelphian, I would say that you kind of got lucky that Joel Embiid was sick during the playoffs.
0:47:29 FL: Perhaps. Perhaps, yeah.
0:47:30 SC: Alright. Despite all of this masochism and love for variants, and losing, and so forth, games are art. How should we societally change our view?
0:47:43 FL: The word art is so overloaded that I...
0:47:46 SC: No, lets go there. Lets just lean into it.
0:47:48 FL: It's something similar to an art form in the same sense that pop music is an art, is an art form. It's a creative form, it's an expressive aesthetic form in that sense. I don't think you can dictate to culture how culture should interpret things. I think culture is so complicated and nebulous, this process. I try to contribute, in my work as a teacher, or as a designer, as someone who is out giving talks and stuff, I do try to get people to be aware of what it is that people who love games, what it is that they love, because I think it can be confusing. If you're outside of the world of games looking in, it can look like nonsense. It looks like an explosion in a cartoon factory. It's like what is happening this weird violent junk that my kid is obsessed with? And I do hope that I can help people who look at that understand, no, part of what your kid is doing is deep problem solving. Part of what your kid is doing is exploring a complex system and forming hypotheses and trying to get better at it. Part of what your kid is doing is developing discipline. Part of what they're doing is social and collaborative.
0:49:04 SC: A big part these days, yeah.
0:49:04 FL: Yeah. And so that doesn't ex... And in some cases, people's... Yeah, some, most kids play too many video games. [laughter] They probably do and...
0:49:15 SC: Sure. There's always a balance.
0:49:17 FL: Yeah, but understanding what is happening under the hood. And what is valuable about that I think is the first step toward developing kind of collectively evolving into a more sophisticated audience that demands better games, that has a more subtle and refined sense of taste for what makes a good game and pushes the art form in the right direction.
0:49:43 SC: I was at a conference, maybe 15 years ago, so just to put it in social context. But it was about science, and drama, and narrative. So it was mostly about scientists talking to writers and English professors. And some conversation was happening and I came up with the idea, I raised my hand and said, "Are we gonna think a few decades from now that the newest most exciting form of story telling is games?" And everyone said, "Oh no, [chuckle] that's not stories, 'cause stories, there's only one thing that happens. You can't have a story where you're not sure what's gonna happen next." I think maybe we know better now.
0:50:19 FL: Yeah, I think some of the most interesting stuff that's happening in games is these new forms of storytelling. And both in a traditional sense where you just have great characters and rich world building woven into game experiences, and also in the kind of avant-garde sense of exploring what a story is, what a story can be, and new forms of narrative and new forms of storytelling. Yeah, there's a lot happening in that world that's really interesting.
0:50:53 SC: And for the audience, 'cause maybe not everyone is calibrated here, compare the size of the video game industry to the size of the movie industry right now.
0:51:00 FL: It's bigger, I don't know.
[chuckle]
0:51:02 FL: This is contentious.
0:51:03 SC: People spend a lot more money on videogames than on movies.
0:51:04 FL: It's contentious, but I think by most measures, it is basically the sort of biggest pop cultural industry right now. So when a game like Red Dead Redemption 2 comes out, it's not just the biggest game launch in history, it's the biggest entertainment launch in history. So yeah, in terms of overall scale as a commercial industry, it's immense, which is great for me, because as someone who is excited about the creative possibilities, I get to kind of tag-along. I get to hijack this rising tide, this commercial tide, which is not my primary interest. I wanna make games that make money, I want people to buy my game, but I'm mostly interested in the creative potential. And so it's good, it's a good healthy, I think mix honestly.
0:51:55 SC: But there's a difference with other forms of mass market entertainment in that there's some barrier to entry. It's siloed a little bit. When a really big movie comes out, everyone knows about it, whether or not they go to see it. Whereas there's huge numbers of people who have no idea what you're talking about when you talk about Red Dead Redemption.
0:52:14 FL: Yeah, but maybe less and less so over time. Maybe that's just a generational thing. And maybe those aren't...
0:52:22 SC: Does every 20-year-old know about Red Dead Redemption?
0:52:27 FL: I think it's a pretty well-understood touchstone of culture as much as... What's an equiv... I guess maybe The Avengers. Yeah, maybe it's not as well known as that, but it's partly because The Avengers lives or dies as spectacle. Whereas Red Dead Redemption has... Because it is an activity and a hobby almost, lives and dies by a slightly different cultural logic. It's not just about imprinting itself as an image.
0:53:01 SC: A little bit less ephemeral as well.
0:53:03 FL: Yeah, it is about creating a place and a space that draws people in and so maybe that's part of the difference, right?
0:53:10 SC: And you've highlighted the interplay of emotion and logic, I think is how you put it.
0:53:15 FL: Yeah.
0:53:16 SC: And there's certainly a way that a video game can be where it's purely pristinely logical, right? You're adding up numbers or getting the shortest path and there's also a way a game can be... I shouldn't have said video, any game.
0:53:28 FL: Right.
0:53:29 SC: Where it's more experiential, more emotional, more about how you're feeling in the moment. And is it slightly over-generalizing or is it okay to say there's a sweet spot where they're both engaging?
0:53:39 FL: You know I don't think of it in terms of a sweet spot where you have these two things and they're in conflict. Instead, I think you have these two different mindsets. The kind of logical, rational mindset of, there's maybe reductionist and kind of conscious problem solving and then you have the mindset of this kind of emotional, intuitive, imaginative, improvisational mindset that is more fluid and less kind of logical and analytical. I don't think of those things as being opposed necessarily. I think they're kind of woven together in a game. And so, for an example, you take the game chess, which in one sense is this kind of purely logical exercise of problem solving, analytical problem solving and yet the chess itself is something like an art form. You're doing this analytical problem solving because you find it beautiful, because there is an emotional connection to it because you find it expressive and meaningful and beautiful in ways that you can't precisely articulate.
0:54:46 FL: And so in a sense, this logical problem solving is embedded in something that is entirely illogical. It's not logical to devote your life to playing chess, it's highly illogical.
[laughter]
0:55:00 SC: Depends on what your motivations are, right?
0:55:01 FL: Yeah.
0:55:01 SC: Yeah. But...
0:55:02 FL: But we do it because we find it beautiful, and we find it meaningful and so, these things I think are wrapped around each other it's more of a fractal structure than it is a kind of a dialectical structure.
0:55:14 SC: Certainly something, even with chess or go, there are styles of play, right? If you thought of it as a purely logical expression of trying to win, you might not think there should be styles.
0:55:22 FL: What makes Magnuson thorny in his play? I forget how they describe his play, but he's like he's known as someone who is stubborn and all he's doing is solving a math problem.
0:55:33 SC: Yeah.
0:55:33 FL: But it shows you that even in the realm of solving math problems, there is nuance. There are deep kind of heuristics that we will never get to the bottom of right, even when problems are well-defined, the path that you take through solution space can be totally irreducible.
0:55:55 SC: And individualistic.
0:55:56 FL: Yeah, and an expression of who you are as a person.
0:56:00 SC: I remember I was on a panel once with Garry Kasparov who I like to introduce him as the last human being who is the best chess player in the world.
0:56:06 FL: Right, yeah.
0:56:07 SC: Now it's computers who are the best. But he said something I thought that was very interesting 'cause his personal style was very aggressive, very fast and there was a conventional wisdom that that was not the right way to play.
0:56:20 FL: Yeah.
0:56:21 SC: And he said when the computers came along, they played that way. He felt very... He felt redeemed.
0:56:25 FL: Yeah.
0:56:25 SC: He felt vindicated that way.
0:56:26 FL: You know it's funny when professional chess players talk about play they often use concepts from poker. This is another thing I love about games is that when you go deep on any one system you find these resonances right? And so they talk about there's a lot in professional chess, tournament level chess play, there's a lot of predicting what your opponent is gonna do, what openings are they gonna bring, what things are going to work well against them.
0:56:51 SC: 'Cause you wanna spend your time thinking about the right pathways, right?
0:56:53 FL: Yeah. And you can also have bluffing in chess, right? You can make a move, and hope that your opponent thinks it's a good move when in fact you don't know for sure whether it was or not, but you're trying to kind of like rattle them which I just love. I love this mix between these... We think we have these categories, we think we know the difference between logic and emotion but I think games highlight the ways in which these things bleed into each other.
0:57:17 SC: And I like the idea having styles in these different kinda games, it's a different aspect of this fact that games help with self-discovery, right? Not just self-discipline but self-expression sort of figuring out who we are.
0:57:29 FL: Yeah. I totally agree. And I think any game that you play is an opportunity to learn something about yourself, an opportunity to be on this path of self-improvement, self-overcoming you know what I mean? Like this path that I personally wanna be on as a human where I'm... Where I'm not just good at what I'm doing, but I'm kind of improving my idea of what good means. Like what type of person am I trying to be and I think games give you an opportunity to do that. And you don't have to do... And most games are not like that. Most people who play games aren't doing that and many people who play games they're just wasting their time, and they're just disappearing into a pleasant experience, and that's great. But I think along the way, there's always this potential and it's that what gets me excited.
0:58:22 SC: If we think about the history of game design are we getting better at connecting with the sublime in our games? Is that something that is valued in the community?
0:58:32 FL: I think we are. I think we are getting better and better, which is not to say that it's like a simple straight forward path that over time we just get better at.
0:58:42 SC: Yeah.
0:58:43 FL: Instead it's this weird circuitous thing like all forms of culture. Are we getting better at music? Sort of. And yet, there are ancient pieces of music that I find deeply moving. And so I think games are similar. As a design discipline, I do think we are developing new methods and better kinds of best practices and a sense of how to do this really difficult, challenging task slightly better. But it is irreducible, yeah.
0:59:20 SC: Yeah. One aspect of the self-discovery is given that there are definitely... There's an aspect of being addicted or being in a zone and losing yourself, there's another aspect of games that let you become more conscious of processes that were unconscious, right? You had that wonderful example of a game where you tried to just walk with four keys on the keyboard, and realize that walking is really hard if you have to tell your legs what to do.
0:59:43 FL: Yeah, this wonderful game by a close friend of mine, Bennett Foddy, who also teaches at NYU. Yeah, QWOP, which is just a game where you're walking.
[chuckle]
0:59:54 SC: Harder than it sounds.
0:59:54 FL: And it's hilarious because what he did was create this incredibly convoluted control scheme where you control different limbs, and so it turns this trivial thing into this deeply, complicated thing. But you can get good at it.
1:00:11 SC: I did not get good at it in the 10 minutes that I spent.
1:00:14 FL: Give yourself time.
1:00:14 SC: Okay, maybe I won't do it. [chuckle] So what do you think, we should wrap up in a little bit, two things. You can answer which one first you want. One is, speculate crazily about the future of gaming. Will it become a bigger and bigger entertainment behemoth or will it sort of blur into the cultural milieu so that games are everywhere in some sense? And the other is, I'm sure we have a heterogeneous audience in terms of some people are avid gamers, some people have never done it. For those who have never done it, how should they approach games? Are there certain games they should think about playing? Is there a gateway drug?
1:00:50 FL: I wanna answer the second.
1:00:51 SC: Okay.
1:00:52 FL: Okay, 'cause the first question, it's too hard to predict culture.
1:00:54 SC: Well, you have to answer both. You could just choose which one... Ordering is all you can choose.
1:00:55 FL: I'll do the first one first and I'll just knock it out of the park and then move on. The job of a game designer is to answer that question, right? Every game designer is trying to figure out what the future of games is and is going to be and what it should be. And so, in the process of making games, we are actively fulfilling that kind of role of predicting what the future games is gonna be. So that's my short answer to that.
1:01:23 SC: Fine.
1:01:25 FL: The second question of what... Yeah, a lot of times people come up to me and... "What kind of game should I play? How do I get into this world?" What I like to tell them is find a game that your friends are playing and play that. It's so much more important that you play a game as part of a living community than that you play the right game. Play a game that other people are playing that you can then talk to them about it, you can learn from them. You can say, "Well, what did you like? What did I... "
1:01:55 SC: Yeah.
1:01:55 FL: "I didn't get very far, I'm stuck here." Or that you can play with them and think about the game as being part of a social practice where people communicate with each other through the game. I think that's... I think that's more important than playing just the right kind of little masterpiece that's going to... This whole idea of masterpieces, you now what I mean? We have a running joke in game design about Citizen Kane.
[chuckle]
1:02:27 FL: There's this Citizen Kane of games and... But I think games by their nature are so squirrely, right? They are so evanescent and they're so weird that they don't fit into that little tidy box of what a masterpiece is, right? They don't fit into this thing where, "Oh yes, I can take an object and put it on a pedestal and look at it and see its characteristics, and thereby get some aesthetic experience because they're participatory." And so it's less important that you play Cinco Paus, the greatest game that you could play right now. It's a game I love, my game designer named, Michael Brough. It's more important that you play something that you have a context, a social context for, and that you can talk to people about and learn and be motivated to participate in.
1:03:21 SC: So there's an introvert part of me inside that says, "But I just wanna ignore other people when I'm playing games." But then I remember a really good poker table really matters, the other people you're playing with is a huge part of the experience.
1:03:33 FL: Yeah. It's really true. I often think if I were in a place and I was given an option... I was with a bunch of people and I was giving an option, you can go into room A and play this game that you know is a great game, but play with these people who are maybe a bunch of jerks, or you go in this other room and play a game that maybe is not so good on its own, but with these wonderful people that you love and you think are really interesting and clever, it's always better to do the second thing.
1:03:57 SC: There's a lot to think about about the future of this. I think that we're just starting really with where games can go. So Frank Lantz, thanks so much for being on the podcast.
1:04:04 FL: Thank you, love being here.
[applause]
1:04:06 SC: And Santa Fe and the Interplanetary Festival, thanks so much for having us. And thank you very much to the audience for helping us with this experience, it's been a lot of fun, thanks.
[music]
If you look at the website for the upcoming Game Music, Sound Design and Virtual Reality Audio Conference scheduled for Oct. 29-30 this year in Los Angeles, the game industry itself seems to debunk the idea that the gaming industry is bigger (2X) than the movie industry. There are several reasons listed, one of which, the usual comparisons deflate movie industry revenues by only including box office receipts while including every revenue source for games, headsets, Playstations and other hardware sales, on top of specific game costs. Just something to consider.
65% of all adults have either a DSM V Mental health diagnosis, an addiction, or both, sometime in their lives, according to robust studies of large populations 500k+, over 10 yrs or more. . People look 165 x at their cell phones everyday. Alcohol is way up in the younger demographic after a 10 year advertising blitz of hard liquor. Its’ not new. In the 80’s, the average US adult watched 23 hrs of TV per week. As 43% of the US meets the criteria for poverty, according to ‘the poor people’s campaign’, and 40% of us make $15/hr or less.
None of the above is a critique of the joy of games. We are more isolated now than in recent memory.
IRL games with kids at your local school could be a boone to humankind. Teaching a high schooler GO- marvelous. Take your chess board to a nursing home.
RPG’s of shooter games, played alone or on line- surely- less good? I think so.
Don’t dive into your own bellybutton, navel gazing, without meeting someone IRL- take them along, and make a closer friend. Most time on line, one person is staring at a screen, alone.
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Why is AI not being applied (or maybe it is, unsuccessfully) to
—call centers (the agony is so far unrelieved)
—TV remote controllers (ditto, worse even)
These are obviously not games in the
sense described above. They “should be”
a piece of cake…in my illiterate opinion.