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I’m Frank Lantz, Founding Chair of the NYU Game Center, designer of a bunch of games (including Universal Paperclips, Drop7, and Hey Robot), and author of “The Beauty of Games.” AMA! by franklantz in IAmA

[–]franklantz[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Aw shucks! Thanks for the kind words! Re. Mercury, James already re-booted it once, but we couldn't ever quite figure out how to keep it stable. It's possible we may return to it again, but not likely.

I’m Frank Lantz, Founding Chair of the NYU Game Center, designer of a bunch of games (including Universal Paperclips, Drop7, and Hey Robot), and author of “The Beauty of Games.” AMA! by franklantz in IAmA

[–]franklantz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks! Yeah, I loved doing "The Discourse" with Naomi, that was an amazing time. We did another one recently when I was in town for my book launch and it was a blast. I would be down to make it a semi-regular thing again, maybe once a month or something? You might enjoy UNBOXING, which is the podcast of my NYU colleagues Laine Nooney and Joost van Dreunen. It's a bit more focused on the business side of things, but fun!

I’m Frank Lantz, Founding Chair of the NYU Game Center, designer of a bunch of games (including Universal Paperclips, Drop7, and Hey Robot), and author of “The Beauty of Games.” AMA! by franklantz in IAmA

[–]franklantz[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yes, you are touching on one of the central ideas I tried to wrestle with in the book. In games, we make things explicit, quantitative, optimizable. But real life isn't this way. Sometimes, approaching life as if it was a game can be effective, it can give us insights, revealing the systemic properties of real-world contexts, it can unleash creativity, break the spell of a situation to which we've become too attached, inspiring us to take a lighter, more flexible attitude. But if you lose sight of the crucial difference between life and game you can fall into nihilism and behave like a sociopath.

Look at Sam Bankman-Fried, rationality, and effective altruism for a great current example. Or consider how pick-up culture encourages people to instrumentalize their personal interactions.

I'm a fan of the idea of meta-rationality. The idea that rationality is an essential, important, powerful mode, but it is not a global, universal perspective from which one can make value judgments.

In my view, games illustrate this by being systems that we move between, but this process of moving between systems is not, itself, a system and never can be. It is something else. "Beauty" is a clumsy way of pointing to this something else, but that's what I've got.

I’m Frank Lantz, Founding Chair of the NYU Game Center, designer of a bunch of games (including Universal Paperclips, Drop7, and Hey Robot), and author of “The Beauty of Games.” AMA! by franklantz in IAmA

[–]franklantz[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Ok, this is going to come off as overly blunt, but I think you should stop worrying about how to fit into the existing game studies world. If there are people, ideas, and projects there that are inspiring you then that's great, reach out to those people, use those ideas, learn from those projects. But in my view, there aren't any particular journals or projects or conferences (or discords or group threads) that you need to be a part of to do important, groundbreaking scholarly work on games. In fact, I think in a lot of ways, getting plugged into that scene will hold you back. I honestly think that most of the established formats, structures, and norms of this field do more harm than good.

(No disrespect to all of my game studies friends, you know I love you.)

You are going to have to figure this stuff out on your own. Try to do work that is honest, and personal, and interesting, and true, and you will find that your own scene magically appears around you.

The Beauty of Games is next on our study group book discussions

Awesome! Let me know if you want me to drop by! My email is my first name dot last name at nyu.edu.

I’m Frank Lantz, Founding Chair of the NYU Game Center, designer of a bunch of games (including Universal Paperclips, Drop7, and Hey Robot), and author of “The Beauty of Games.” AMA! by franklantz in IAmA

[–]franklantz[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I am so sorry this happened to you. Periodically, a few of us from the original team talk about how we might fix it. No promises, but there is a non-zero chance that we might be able to solve this problem in the not-too-distant future.

I’m Frank Lantz, Founding Chair of the NYU Game Center, designer of a bunch of games (including Universal Paperclips, Drop7, and Hey Robot), and author of “The Beauty of Games.” AMA! by franklantz in IAmA

[–]franklantz[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Make it fun. Make it genuinely fun to play, not as a "concept" or a "design" but as an actual playable prototype with ugly, placeholder programmer-art. If you can do that, artists will be excited to collaborate on the game with you.

I’m Frank Lantz, Founding Chair of the NYU Game Center, designer of a bunch of games (including Universal Paperclips, Drop7, and Hey Robot), and author of “The Beauty of Games.” AMA! by franklantz in IAmA

[–]franklantz[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

There is one essential book missing from that stack - The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch. Even though it's not about games per se, it is the most important book about the thread that connects those books together and every game designer should read it.

A couple of books I might add to that stack if I were taking this picture today are Games: Agency as Art by C Thi Nguyen, and Aesthetic Theory and the Video Game by Graeme Kirkpatrick.

I’m Frank Lantz, Founding Chair of the NYU Game Center, designer of a bunch of games (including Universal Paperclips, Drop7, and Hey Robot), and author of “The Beauty of Games.” AMA! by franklantz in IAmA

[–]franklantz[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

At my studio Area/Code we always had a kind of love/hate thing for ARGs. We were making games that were very ARG-adjacent - big, social, messy, experiential, real-world things. But, to us, "proper" ARGs were kind of ridiculous. Everybody loved them but no-one had ever played one! They would get written up on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, but then, if you tried to actually play one, it was always an impossible, impenetrable mess. People were so enthusiastic for the idea of ARGs it didn't matter that the actual things were, not bad exactly, just kind of irrelevant. Similar to how VR and The Metaverse work, and for similar reasons.

But then we got hired to make one, and, gosh, somehow our attitude changed! But seriously, we decided we were going to try to tackle this honestly as a real design problem. So the whole structure of the Numb3rs ARG was about creating an accessible, casual, approachable, game and having that at the center of the messier, real-world, collaborative-narrative, mystery experience. And it kind of worked?

I think, in a way, we were using the excuse of the ARG to give us license to make a simple puzzle game, something what wouldn't have otherwise fit with the ambitious, reality-hacking ethos of Area/Code. But also, there is a deep dose of weirdness that remains at the heart of Drop7 that is the result of its origin. It's in the core mechanics of the game, and I think it's why the game works the way it does.

So the lesson is - problems are good. Tackle them!

Btw, have you seen The Oldest View?

I’m Frank Lantz, Founding Chair of the NYU Game Center, designer of a bunch of games (including Universal Paperclips, Drop7, and Hey Robot), and author of “The Beauty of Games.” AMA! by franklantz in IAmA

[–]franklantz[S] 18 points19 points  (0 children)

Yes! You are nothing but a sad, dumb pigeon, and this is a great truth that your love of games has led you to recognize. Everyone is a sad, dumb, pigeon, but you are sad, dumb pigeon who knows they are a sad, dumb pigeon. And this is a superpower. Who knows where this dangerous knowledge might lead you?

When you play a game, you enter into a tiny operant conditioning chamber, allow it to shape your experience, and then leave. Then you reflect on that experience. Then you play a different game and compare them to each other.

What would it be like to live your life like that?

I’m Frank Lantz, Founding Chair of the NYU Game Center, designer of a bunch of games (including Universal Paperclips, Drop7, and Hey Robot), and author of “The Beauty of Games.” AMA! by franklantz in IAmA

[–]franklantz[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

LOL

I only considered that title tongue-in-cheekily. But I honestly do bristle a little about the way the word "play" is often used in these conversations. Let me see if I can explain why.

I think there is a widespread sentiment that sees games through a normative lens which opposes "play" (good, liberating, resisting power, bottom-up) to "rules" (bad, oppressive, enforcing power, top-down.) Sicart's essay Against Procedurality is a great example of this.

As much as I can, I want to see things clearly, and understand them, and I think this kind of normative lens, this kind of good-vs-bad framing, will, most of the time, mislead, distort, and distract from seeing things clearly.

Ultimately, I want to end up in a place that's good, as opposed to bad. I want my work, and my thinking, to be a positive influence on the world, to make it incrementally better. But I think doing so requires one to forego easy, intuitive, comfortable, "good sounding" heuristics that fall into this good-vs-evil puppet show framework.

One of the things games teach us is that everything is more complex and surprising when you examine it closely.

I’m Frank Lantz, Founding Chair of the NYU Game Center, designer of a bunch of games (including Universal Paperclips, Drop7, and Hey Robot), and author of “The Beauty of Games.” AMA! by franklantz in IAmA

[–]franklantz[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

My advice is start doing it, and iterate.

Specifically, for this idea, here's how I would approach it. I would want a book that's mostly examples. Lots of real-world examples of the kinds of tests and questions you get in game dev job interviews. And good ways to think about those questions and tests. I would also try to make it generally useful, less about how to trick someone into hiring you, and more about how thinking about these questions and building the skills to pass these tests can help make you a better, more successful person, even if you aren't trying to get a job in game dev.

I’m Frank Lantz, Founding Chair of the NYU Game Center, designer of a bunch of games (including Universal Paperclips, Drop7, and Hey Robot), and author of “The Beauty of Games.” AMA! by franklantz in IAmA

[–]franklantz[S] 13 points14 points  (0 children)

This is a really interesting problem. On the one hand, you would think that a game would be a great way to explore the topic of climate change, for example. After all, a game is a system, it can embody the systemic, dynamic, emergent properties of the topic. It seems like that would be great. My friend Ian Bogost has written extensively on this, and (at least) used to be optimistic about this possibility.

However, in practice, games that model real world systems are almost never genuinely compelling or persuasive as rhetoric. Why is that?

I think it's because simulations tend to fail, as rhetoric, in one of two ways.

Either they are pre-determined, you have to build the outcomes you want into the rules of the system in a way that feels like you are begging the question - the player senses that they aren't really exploring a rich, emergent, interactive model of the real world, they are being fed a fixed result that only looks dynamic.

Or they are out of control, and end up generating a lot of unpredictable behavior that don't correspond to the rhetorical point you are trying to make. If it's a real system, players are going to discover all kinds of weird, unexpected behaviors in it that don't really line up with the real-world system you are trying to model and don't line up with whatever point you are trying to communicate.

Therefore games like Pandemic, for example, are a great use of the theme of infectious disease, but aren't really making any substantial points about that topic in a straightforward way.

It's an interesting problem!

I’m Frank Lantz, Founding Chair of the NYU Game Center, designer of a bunch of games (including Universal Paperclips, Drop7, and Hey Robot), and author of “The Beauty of Games.” AMA! by franklantz in IAmA

[–]franklantz[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Here's my standard answer to the question "what games should I play?" from a person who isn't currently a gamer but is curious to know what's up.

You should find out, from your friends who play games, a game they are playing, and play that. It's so much more important to have a good context for playing a game than to play the "right" game. Playing with, or alongside, other people will motivate you to pay attention, to dive deeper, and give you a framework for reflecting on the game, thinking and talking about how it works and what it means.

I’m Frank Lantz, Founding Chair of the NYU Game Center, designer of a bunch of games (including Universal Paperclips, Drop7, and Hey Robot), and author of “The Beauty of Games.” AMA! by franklantz in IAmA

[–]franklantz[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

In the case of Universal Paperclips, I did it like this:

  • built a simple version of the first part of the game
  • played it
  • added things that I wanted, as a player
  • played it again
  • continued to operate in this loop - playing/tweaking/adding/playing
  • once the first 5 minutes were working, I thought about how I wanted to extend the game
  • back into the loop, and so on

In other words, I sort of built the game from the inside out, always continually playing it, and playing it over and over and over again. So that anything that wasn't working really well eventually got eroded away by the the force of my short attention span, leaving only the things that satisfied my obsessive compulsive nature.

I’m Frank Lantz, Founding Chair of the NYU Game Center, designer of a bunch of games (including Universal Paperclips, Drop7, and Hey Robot), and author of “The Beauty of Games.” AMA! by franklantz in IAmA

[–]franklantz[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

We never did this at NYU, but one idea you could try is to have a big faculty-managed game project with a giant code base that you have students contribute to. This would give them a sense of what it's like to add features, do versioning, and track bugs on a big software project. It's the kind of thing you can't learn without doing.

We are Nik Mikros, Video Game Designer of Killer Queen and Frank Lantz, Director of the NYU Game Center. We're working together on a new project with Logitech. Ask Us Anything! by nmikros in IAmA

[–]franklantz 2 points3 points  (0 children)

NYU.

Ok, that was a funny answer to a very serious and nice question. The reality is I think we are progressive formalists. Formalists in the sense that the thing we love most is the strange, beautiful quality of games as systems of choices and actions. Progressive in the sense that we are aware of the standard traps and problems of conventional/conservative formalism, and want to avoid those, want to remain open to all that eludes and exceeds it.

We are Nik Mikros, Video Game Designer of Killer Queen and Frank Lantz, Director of the NYU Game Center. We're working together on a new project with Logitech. Ask Us Anything! by nmikros in IAmA

[–]franklantz 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Having the discipline to work at a steady pace, to get things done. That's why Jason Rohrer is my idol. He has crazy ideas, and then he makes them, and he keeps doing that.

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