Aaron Kardell: [00:00:00] It was really interesting to me that you mentioned, Monty Python and Mad Magazine there early on. And I recently realized just how much of a comedy nerd I am myself. And I'm curious to learn more. Like, how do you see like influence of comedy on your trajectory with games? How has that played out?
Frank Lantz: You know, I don't know.
Frank Lantz: I mean, there's, it's very hard to do comedy in games, but some of the greatest games of all time have done it really well, I would say.
Nate Kadlac: Welcome to the Hey, Good Game podcast, where we chat with the creators of your favorite games that you secretly play in the cracks of your day.
Aaron Kardell: All right. Well, we just got done interviewing Frank Lantz, who is the founding chair of the NYU game center. Also award winning game designer. Fantastic background, really great conversation.
Aaron Kardell: Joseph, what were some of your takeaways?
Joseph Rueter: Well, I thought the, he puts some of that [00:01:00] profundity in the title. Of his most recent book that games are beautiful, similar to music. And I think when you're dealing with beauty, in some cases, it's okay that it just exists for beauty. The painting exists for enjoyment.
Joseph Rueter: It's for its own sake that it's there. And I think it's really fascinating to tie that to what he talked about towards the end of the conversation, where he's looking for games to be commentary. on culture. And it led me to the thinking about commentary on food and commentary on poetry, sort of, but more about Broadway and almost nothing like that existing for games.
Joseph Rueter: How about yourself?
Aaron Kardell: Well, I really liked the talk, the part where he talked about universal paperclips and sort of having this satisfying off ramp at the end of the game, which I thought was just, you know, Really thoughtful thing [00:02:00] and I'm, I'm going to save it for you to hear it directly, but with that onto the pod.
Joseph Rueter: Hi, I'm Joseph Reuter and we're here with my co host Aaron Cardell. Today, we're excited to speak with Frank Lantz. The director of New York university's game center, the author of the beauty of games and an award winning game designer. Frank is known for his expertise in learning about and using emerging technologies to freshen and improve gameplay experiences.
Joseph Rueter: Aside from being its director, he's also the founding chair of the NYU game center. He has co founded prominent game development companies, such as area code games and everybody's house games. Additionally, he's created the game Universal Paperclips, which I played for far too long. And his book, The Beauty of Games, which was published by [00:03:00] MIT Press in October of 23.
Joseph Rueter: For more than two decades, Frank has been passionate about game design, education, teaching. And not only at NYU, but also Parsons School of Design and the School of Visual Arts. An academic, an author, a game designer and more, and he lives and breathes, I think, fair game design. Frank, we're thrilled you're here.
Joseph Rueter: Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. Fantastic. We have this tradition that anybody kind of coming together and doing the same thing over and over will generate a tradition. On this pod, we look to this question right away. What's your favorite game to play these days?
Frank Lantz: Oh, well, these days, I think it would be a lie to say anything other than Bellatro.
Frank Lantz: Over the past month or so, I've been playing a lot of Bellatro. And having a lot of fun [00:04:00] with it, not just because it's really great game and a really fun game, but also there's a lot to think about in Bellantro because it is, it's a type of game that I find really appealing, which is, it's a game with very high variance.
Frank Lantz: It's like a gambling game with lots of randomness and, but also very high strategy. So there's lots of opportunities. For calculation and problem solving and figuring out the ways that game works, the different elements of the games, extrapolating the rules of how they fit together. And so at any given point.
Frank Lantz: there's an opportunity to actually do a lot of cognitive work to figure out what is the best move. And so, which is like what happens in chess, but at the same time, you're often in a position where you're kind of at the mercy of these big, very wide swings of [00:05:00] variance. And you have to both accommodate that in, in your calculations and also.
Frank Lantz: Respond to those things. They create little different kinds of problems every time you play that you're always figuring out different kinds of problems. So really interesting game. I like games like that. I think they're especially fun to think about and kind of careful with them because part of what makes Bellatro fun is this kind of slot machine energy of, you know, an intermittent reward, which, you know, we're familiar with from casino games and mobile games and other kinds of exploitative.
Frank Lantz: And you have to be careful with that. It's as an ingredient, it's like alcohol or drugs or caffeine or something like that.
Joseph Rueter: These are the fears of all parents of children.
Frank Lantz: Yeah. I mean, I think that one of the things we don't teach in our society, and maybe this makes sense, is how to. Manage addiction, as opposed to having taboos about addictive things, which may be the right thing to do.
Frank Lantz: [00:06:00] Maybe it's just better to have these kinds of bright lines and say, Oh, gambling is bad and alcohol is bad, but we still do them. But we know they're bad. We kind of bracket them off. But I think if you talk to people like Austin, I'll talk to people who are very literate in games. But I'll ask them about World of Warcraft, for example.
Frank Lantz: I played World of Warcraft for a year or two. It was a profound experience. I think it was like a deeply fun and rich experience. One that I look back on, I really value it highly. It was really intense and really good. But often people will say, Oh no, I can't, I couldn't play World of Warcraft. It's just too, it's too addictive.
Frank Lantz: I know my own personality. I know I would never be able to survive. You know, I'd never be able to get out of it if I started it. So I'm kind of bracketing it off. And, and that just seems weird to me. Like, if you're a game designer, you should have the discipline and the skill Like, it is a skill. Like, it's true that you have to figure that, like, there's no off ramp in World of Warcraft.
Frank Lantz: You know, there's no quit button. You have to [00:07:00] engineer that for yourself. It is, it can be very dangerous, and I think some people's lives are destroyed by it. Just like some people's lives are destroyed by alcohol, or by, you know, sports betting, or by cars, or by romance novels, or there's lots of things that can ruin your life.
Frank Lantz: But I do think it is a valuable skill, especially for game designers, to be able to, like, imbibe of those intensely addictive things, understand them, deconstruct them, figure out how they work, figure out what it's like to be inside of a game like that, and have it, like, really operating on you, really taking over.
Frank Lantz: I mean, Universal Paperclips is a little bit like this, I think. Oh, for sure. You know what I mean? Universal Paperclips tries to do this on purpose in a way. Gets in your head, takes you over, and then lets you go. Like in the case that was very explicit in that game, I wanted it to end in a way that let people then.
Frank Lantz: Pull back from it because I think that's an important type of experience to have. [00:08:00]
Aaron Kardell: Since we're on the topic, I just got to say, I got sucked into that hole yesterday and it was so fun and also such a satisfying end. I may go back and see if I can get a faster run at some point, but I think just that, Oh, I'm done.
Aaron Kardell: I thought it was really well done and really, really
Frank Lantz: clever. Thank you. I appreciate that. And yeah, that was very intentional because In the games that inspired me when I was making Universal Paperclips, there's a lot of great incremental games, and most of them kind of don't want to let go once they get you.
Frank Lantz: Cookie Clicker just has this endless prestige system, and the Kittens game, which was a big influence on me, also just keeps going. Once it opens up, it just keeps going and going and going. And I was like, I don't want to make a hobby. You know what I mean? I don't need to like make a game that people are then going to play for years.
Frank Lantz: I mean, I [00:09:00] do like games like that and I do want to make games like that, but I didn't feel like that was a good fit with, you know, Universal Paperclips was meant to be a small game by intentionally, like it's, it's minimalist and it's presentation. It's like a little thought experiment. It's like a little fable.
Frank Lantz: It's not meant to be this big, sprawling epic of, the Lord of the Rings or something with hundreds and hundreds of hours of content. It's meant to be this really intense thing that you do. And in some ways that's the scope of what the game is describing in contrast with how small it is as part of the fun.
Frank Lantz: So I really wanted to kind of. put the hooks in and then let people off the hook. But also because I really specifically wanted them to have this moment of reflection. And if you never get out of the game, you never have an opportunity to reflect on it. And honestly, I think that's one of the problems that games struggle with sometimes is that books have this, you know, why is it that games [00:10:00] People still don't really think of them alongside things like books and movies as useful lenses with which to talk about the world and things that we care about.
Frank Lantz: And it's partly, I think, because in a way games are often these enormous universes, they are these hobbies that you go into, and then you're just kind of in them, and you kind of never, you never get a chance to kind of pull back and say, Oh, well, how did that make me feel? How does that relate to other things?
Frank Lantz: What are some meanings I can extract from it? Or how can I see these larger patterns? And so I specifically want to do that. So I'm happy. I think that's one of my favorite things about the game. Honestly, one of the things I'm most proud of is that the ending's good also, by the way, no spoilers, but I was really happy when I thought of that ending.
Frank Lantz: And I was like, Oh, this is so good. And then I did it and it worked. And I was like, Oh, this is great. There's that, even that moment where. I give you a choice at the end and I'm sure you made the right choice because you can kind of keep [00:11:00] going, but instead it's like, no, no, I want to stop. And that's the right choice.
Frank Lantz: And really makes that really highlights that moment. So, so I'm glad.
Aaron Kardell: I did have a question as I was clicking the button, like this is either going to. Well, we'll see what happens when I do this. But, so it was cool.
Frank Lantz: Yeah. You never know because I pulled a rug out from under you so many times in that game that you can't, you sort of stopped.
Frank Lantz: She stopped trusting you at a certain point.
Joseph Rueter: Well, at some point you've got a sunk cost and you don't want to make that wrong. You know, you don't want to make the wrong in just time. Well, it's interesting. You're as you're chatting about like system and design. And vices, I think you could swap in social media for systems and design and vices.
Joseph Rueter: Like how does the human learn to interact with addictive substances or systems or you name it? And I think what was right on the line there, you can correct me if I'm wrong or kind of conversations you've had with other interdisciplinary [00:12:00] experts, but it was this notion of being able to think about your thinking.
Joseph Rueter: Like you can step out of the system, right? And either the designer gives you that option. Or maybe the business need never wants to give you that option. And I think it's so fascinating.
Frank Lantz: Yeah, it's true. I think it's a big topic. When you think about social media, it is, I mean, there's no off ramp to that stuff either.
Frank Lantz: And, but why would there be, I mean, you know, cause like, It makes sense. Like, why isn't Facebook just like the telephone? Like now we have the telephone and now we just integrate the telephone. But it does seem like we've done a poor job integrating the, the internet into our larger civilizational projects of raising our kids and, and having, you know, a healthy democracy and, and getting, you know, and having innovation and the things, venting more things that we like and cooperating and collaborating with each other.
Frank Lantz: I think we [00:13:00] haven't. really grappled with what are the skills that we need to develop to use the internet and software in the best ways. I think it's, it's hard. We're just in the process of doing that. Like, I don't know what they are exactly. But I often think about, it seems like the internet goes through phases and some, you know, I remember the early days of the internet, there were certain, there were kind of norms, I remember back in the days of like message boards and form communities and things like that.
Frank Lantz: It seemed like. There were a different set of norms. And then, and then we have this big explosion of things like Facebook and Twitter and the kind of modern era of social media. And it seemed like there, there was no longer these, these norms, some of which had to do with, I don't know, restraint or courtesy or respect or tolerance, or, you [00:14:00] know, some of these other things, skepticism.
Frank Lantz: I remember being in the early days of the internet. There being a strong sense of, like, Look, it's very easy to fool yourself on the internet, right? It's very easy to just say, Oh, look, I read this article. And then it's, there's some amazing thing. And people are like, huh, did you know, like, is that real? And we used to like, kind of like have this ongoing thing of like checking each other for that kind of BS and not really tolerating it and being embarrassed if you were caught perpetuating something like that.
Frank Lantz: It was almost like. We had the intuition that this stuff was dangerous, that we were handling dynamite. This idea of memes in the early day of memes, it's like, oh, I see. It's very easy for something to kind of snowball in networks for the network effects to take things and snowball them. And therefore you should approach everything a little bit cautiously.
Frank Lantz: It's like, Don't just blindly participate in every snowball [00:15:00] that goes by you. Don't just roll it up and push it forward. And it's like, no, no, no. And like, and now, and then at a certain point, and I think you're right to point out that, you know, business models that then kind of guide how these things evolve.
Frank Lantz: And for better or worse. Super
Joseph Rueter: fascinating. Like the user gets to decide what they want to do with it, right? I mean, if you're not deciding, then someone else is. I think that's really.
Frank Lantz: Yeah,
Joseph Rueter: pretty fascinating. Like what is right might be what is right for your goals. And if you don't have them, somebody else will decide your goals for you.
Joseph Rueter: It seems really fascinating.
Frank Lantz: And so you guys have kids now, right? I mean, you guys, you guys are dads and you have kids. And so, yeah, so you know what it's like to kind of like wrestle with that. What does it mean to teach? A young person, what computers are good at and what they're for and what networks are and how to think about information and searching and interpreting and, and that whole thing.
Frank Lantz: But we kind of have to do it. Or we have to figure that out ourselves. I mean, there is no really good, solid, [00:16:00] strong kind of ethos about how to approach these questions, certainly not in school or certainly not coherently in a way that, that makes sense. And to bring it back to games. I mean, I think. What's one of the things that's interesting about games is that all of these things that we just mentioned about networks and computers and social media are kind of present in games because games are the art form of systems, right?
Frank Lantz: So when you play Tic Tac Toe or you play Hungry Hungry Hippos, like you are looking at it, you're being entertained by. Participating in the dynamics of a little system and a little system that is harnessing your desire and kind of channeling it and putting constraints around it and giving you a specific goal and then you're figuring out how the system works and how it operates and it's and so Ideally, those things should go together, like becoming literate [00:17:00] in games and understanding games and how they work and learning to appreciate games should give you insights into things like computer networks and the social media and how incentives.
Frank Lantz: You know, like influence behavior and that surprising emergent effects that aren't expected or that are not intended. And so, yeah, it's my hope, sort of what the book touches on a lot, is that, that games can do more of that. Games can do a better job at that. Like, if we're struggling as a civilization, and I think we are, We always are.
Frank Lantz: I mean, that's what civilization is. It's a particular kind of struggle to do things well. And I would love for, you know, I mean, look, mostly I just love games cause I love them and they're fun and they're cool and they're interesting in and of themselves to think about, you know, I'm not saying that, you know, the only criteria for a game is, you know, is it contributing to society and some making it better off in some explicit way, but I do think [00:18:00] that there are, there's an opportunity here that is kind of being missed.
Joseph Rueter: Yeah, well, in the book you're referring to, I think you're right. Yeah. Well, it's being missed so far. I think there's some along the way that are leveraging it, but the book title is The Beauty of Games, and when you head down this path, I think it's, it's Like an art, right? I thought it was very interesting to play with the notion of music being the expression of what hearing does and sight being painting, right?
Joseph Rueter: It's this art form for the senses. And to bring that across to cognition, what's the art form for cognition? And it's not like, oh, no, okay, here we
Frank Lantz: go. I'm glad that worked for you, because that was a big insight for me to realize that like, oh yeah, games are, you know, every art form kind of has its, has its core thing.
Frank Lantz: That it's taking [00:19:00] and, and blowing out like, okay, what does it mean to like, just look at something and look at a landscape or look at a person and just get lost in looking? And that's what painting is exploring and games are exploring that for really for thinking and doing for like, what does it mean to solve a problem?
Frank Lantz: What does it mean to make something? What does it mean to collaborate with people? And you know what I mean? To like, what does it mean to compete and succeed or just to explore and learn like that? Yeah. Is really what games are blowing out. And so that's for me, that was the key.
Joseph Rueter: We're not supposed to doom scroll unendingly.
Joseph Rueter: Oh man. I couldn't even doom scroll when I was growing up. My influencers were duck hunt and an Italian plumber. What were your influences growing up? What, what brought you down this path of well, arts, art, you've taken arts and games and shoved them together. Now what's what were your influences along the way?
Frank Lantz: A big [00:20:00] influences for me growing up were, I would say, Number one, MAD magazine. When I was a kid, I discovered MAD magazine and I used to read them in, there were like little paperback reprints. So I wasn't reading the comic book format of MAD. I was reading these little paperback size things you could buy in the drugstore.
Frank Lantz: And they would like take a bunch of MAD magazines from. 10, 20 years ago and bundle them up into a little paperback. So I was reading like mad magazine from the fifties, you know? So I was in the, I was like growing up in the seventies in some ways is like the height of mad magazine. Like it was like more Drucker and all these geniuses, amazing art, but it was like parodies of stuff that I'd never heard of, parodies of like old black and white TV shows that I'd never heard of and like trends that didn't exist anymore.
Frank Lantz: And. But there was something, I loved it. I wanted to be a cartoonist. I just thought this was. So complicated and interesting and [00:21:00] cool. And then, you know, getting older, eventually things like discovering Monty Python, that was a big influence on me reading eventually. I, I started reading science fiction.
Frank Lantz: I'm a big science fiction guy. And so getting into science fiction first, you know, the big like Arthur C. Clark and Isaac Asimov, but then eventually kind of more of the new wave stuff, J. G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick. folks like that. And then I just read voraciously. And so, and then video games were actually not like, cause I was a bit Young for like, I played arcade games.
Frank Lantz: I would go down to the arcade and we had like a home console, but it was like pong, you know, it's like a, like those early Atari, like Sears home consoles. And then, but then eventually, I guess when I was in, when I was just starting college, maybe was when. I started to get into computers, I guess maybe.
Frank Lantz: Yeah, like [00:22:00] right around there. And I got an Omega and that was my, 'cause I'm such a contrarian, you know, it's like, you know, you could get a, a Mac. It was the early days of Mac and PCs of course. I mean I wanted to do like graphics and, and things like that. So I really got into Omega and that was like kinda my first experience with really getting into computer games.
Frank Lantz: And then I read. Douglas Hofstetter, Godel, Escher, Bach, and that book made a huge impact on me and was a big influence. So those were all the things that were kind of rattling around in my head when I read it. First started making stuff and doing stuff. Although originally I just wanted to be a painter.
Frank Lantz: That was my goal. Kind of went to college and started like figuring stuff out. I was like, Oh, these guys know what's up. I mean, painters just seemed like the smartest and most interesting and weirdest and coolest domain to be in. So originally I just wanted to be a painter, but then I was like trying to combine that with computer stuff.
Frank Lantz: And I was like writing software to make images. And then I realized, Oh no, what I really like. is [00:23:00] the connection between software and, and images. It's not like the images themselves. I just like the kind of logic and patterns and ideas that computers can create and play with. And so for, for their own sake.
Frank Lantz: And so that's what eventually made me want to make computer games.
Aaron Kardell: It was really interesting to me that you mentioned, Monty Python and Mad Magazine there early on, and I recently realized just how much of a comedy nerd I am myself, and I'm curious to learn more, like, how do you see, like, influence of comedy on your trajectory with games?
Aaron Kardell: How's that played out?
Frank Lantz: You know, I don't know. I mean, there's, it's very hard to do comedy in games, but some of the greatest games of all time have done it really well. I would say Portal is definitely a strong candidate for greatest video game of all time, right? It's up there. Sure, we could argue about, about whether it's, it's the GOAT, but I think it's [00:24:00] certainly up there.
Frank Lantz: And also maybe In arguably the funniest game of all time, very, extremely well written, Eric Wolpaw is a genius. And actually the story of Portal is really interesting because Eric Wolpaw and his partner Chet had a early, early game criticism blog called Old Man Murray. And it was the funniest thing. When I first encountered Old Man Murray, that was, like, life changing.
Frank Lantz: I thought, oh my god, these guys, for the first time, it was like someone writing in a way that was both incredibly smart about video games and incredibly funny. It just seemed like, oh yeah. Because there is something absurd about games in a way. It's like, you kind of have to be funny. If you take them too seriously, you're kind of weirdly missing the point.
Frank Lantz: And so it seemed like these, these guys really were, yeah, some of the best writing that's ever been done about video games. And it was just this [00:25:00] hilarious, off the wall, comic, satirical, tongue in cheek reviews of games. And Gabe Newell loved Old Man Murray and he, he said, you know, at Valve, part of our design process, as we're making a game, we think, what are the guys at Old Man Murray going to say about this?
Frank Lantz: And so eventually he just hired them. And so they came on board and started working at Valve. Chad is still there. I don't know what Eric is doing, but, and so then when they started working on Portal. Eric kind of, along with other people, I don't want to give him too much credit, but I think you can see his voice in that game, and yeah, I don't know, there's just a, there's so much bad writing in video games.
Frank Lantz: It's a very hard problem. There's, first of all, there's just too much writing in general. I'm sorry, I don't want to get anyone mad at me. It's like, I think that people overemphasize writing partly because Let's see, how can I put this? It [00:26:00] comes from a good place. I think the people who overemphasize writing and narrative and games are doing it for good reasons.
Frank Lantz: They're doing it because they recognize that all these things that we're saying about games, they want them to have more impact, you know, they want them to be in conversation with the world and be participating in this process of civilization, all the stuff that we pretentiously want, you know, games to do more of, they want that too.
Frank Lantz: And they, and I think that's what drives this motivation to like focus on story and narrative in a game is one way of trying to kind of amplify. It's meaningfulness instead of being just a black hole that you can pour attention and energy into. No, it should give you something in return. It should contribute something to your life.
Frank Lantz: It should be a way of reflecting on the world and make you understand the world and yourself and other people. And the way that a great poem does, or the way a great novel does, or the way a great movie does, and therefore. [00:27:00] Maybe we should just put more story in there because story does that, you know, so why don't we, let's make, there is a sense in which games, that's one of the angles by which they resonate with the world is through language.
Frank Lantz: And so I understand that impulse and sometimes it works. I would call out for example, Disco Elysium as another example of amazing writing and games and a brilliant work of kind of interactive literature in the form of a game. And I mean, people love Kentucky Route Zero. I love, I love plenty of like, really narrative focused games.
Frank Lantz: Things like, The Stanley Parable, The Beginner's Guide, I think is a, these are masterpieces. that really focus on stories and storytelling. But for the most part, let's be honest, for the most part, it's, they're, they're terrible. Like if you play through, if you love Assassin's Creed, then you are, you are suffering through a lot of boring, plotting cut scenes that are not well written that would [00:28:00] not make the cut in a mediocre TV show.
Frank Lantz: In a mediocre TV show, people would look at that and say, that's corny. Let's go back to the writer's room. Let's do it again. Let's re re But in a game, because you have to make 12 million lines of dialogue, but it's part of the problem, and also because you're mostly focused on the things that Assassin's Creed does well, which is this giant world and this clockwork city.
Frank Lantz: And you're diving off of a tower into a haystack and stuff is hard. That's not easy to do. You're going to tell me I'm going to supposed to do all of that. And then also be Shakespeare. Like that's really, really hard. So anyway, it's a complicated issue, but this is part of why it's art. I mean, yeah, the challenge, the difficulty of integrating these things and figuring out which way to go.
Frank Lantz: Yeah, so that's a topic that I think is, it's controversial too, because people will get mad at you. I mean, many of the students who come to the Game Center, you know, [00:29:00] that's their passion. They want to be a narrative designer, they want to be a writer, and we want to accommodate that. We want them to do that, we want them to do it well and meet their goals, but we also want them To like have a broader sense of, of how games make meaning and that it isn't not to focus too much on the things that wear a t shirt that says I'm meaningful, right?
Frank Lantz: That's what text does. That's what language and storytelling does. It's a, look, I'm talking about the world. Cause look, I'm, it's a story about a little kid and they're lost and they're looking for their mother and they're sad and they're crying and that's emotions. And you know what I mean? It's like, yes, but also.
Frank Lantz: There are also emotions in tic tac toe, right? Tic tac toe is also about the world. chess is also about the world, right? Chess isn't about the world because some of the pieces look like kings and queens, right? It's about the world because, because the world is, can be seen as a [00:30:00] system of rules, overlapping rules of the world and many situations in the world can be, can be understood through the lens of an interactive system constructed out of rules and, and a logic and kind of logic and the way these things fit together.
Frank Lantz: And even moreover, as a kind of Competitive situation in which different forces are trying to accomplish different things and they are arranged in a way that makes them push at each other and drive each other into different directions and it is a problem to solve. And that is another way that different related way in which in which games are meaningful.
Joseph Rueter: Well, we know from our games, when we add share score and let people just stick it wherever, right? That they use it to create a touchpoint, a social connection, an engagement, right? And now you have that layer of relationship, either [00:31:00] tangentially or a top of the game that drives a whole new thing.
Frank Lantz: And this is the thing that I think is maybe underappreciated in the history of computer games and video games is the degree to which they are a continuation of a tradition of games have been part of human a big important part of human life since before the dawn of civilization we've always had games and up until recently they were always social they were always primarily social games were ritualized social interactions.
Frank Lantz: I mean, we get together and we compete or collaborate or problem solve in complicated ways together. It's a little kind of stylized, ritualized interaction between people.
Joseph Rueter: Yeah. Culture.
Frank Lantz: Deeply social. It's deeply psychological and [00:32:00] emotional and it involves bodies and faces and emotions and you're interacting with people and stuff.
Frank Lantz: And, and then we make computer games. And a lot of that gets stripped away in a single player game. Now it's you're doing, you're interacting with a complex system, but it used to be that that complex system, a lot of it was driven by the complexity of other people. Like that's what you were. And now it's funny because if you think about the, the meaning of a game like checkers, so much of the meaning of a game like checkers, so much of what makes it rich and complex and beautiful in people's lives is who you're playing with the context of playing.
Frank Lantz: Like your grandfather teaches you the game and then you play it every Sunday. Sitting on the porch of your grandfather's house, and there's a big pitcher of of lemonade there, and you're getting better. Your grandfather beats you every weekend, every Sunday you go. And then eventually you, you win the first time.
Frank Lantz: And then all of a [00:33:00] sudden, this moment between you and your granddad about like, you're growing up and you're, and all of a sudden now you're jockeying. Now, sometimes he wins, sometimes you win. And now you're going back and forth. It's like, think of how complicated and rich that is. And then if you just think of checkers as a computer problem, that it's just you kind of figuring out what the optimal move is.
Frank Lantz: That's like weird. It's so dry. So what we're going to do is we're going to paint one of those on the computer screen. We're going to paint one of those to look like a princess, and we're going to paint one of those to look like a big angry monkey. And now a little bit of that social juice comes back in this new way as a story because it's missing.
Frank Lantz: You know what I mean? So much of that, that juice got drained out of it when it became just a piece of software and you went in by yourself in a room with the software, you know?
Joseph Rueter: If what is the art of taste? Well, it's cooking and cooking drives these social connections, right? It's a custom you get social institutions out of [00:34:00] it.
Joseph Rueter: You get levels of achievement, right? Like recognitions in a culture that you would be great analogy, like, yeah, a status in a group.
Frank Lantz: Think of the way cooking is embedded in your home and your relationships and your family and your friends and visitors and guests and your culture and your traditions and your history and all of that, and then think about games.
Frank Lantz: Which are also embedded in a way, but in a different way. And then now think about how, think about the difference between growing up in a town where everyone plays football and versus being on steam and looking for a game, what game am I going to play next? Now I'm growing up in a town where everybody plays the latest game.
Frank Lantz: And so that's a different kind of context, right? Is, okay, can I find a new thing and learn it and get good at it? Or League of Legends, which is more like the first one. Like League of Legends is basically. The kind of, this pervasive, ubiquitous game that everyone grows up playing [00:35:00] if you're, you know, it's weird, right?
Frank Lantz: It's all of these things are at play and they all contribute in different ways to when you play a game. How is it meaningful? You know what I mean? How does it, what does it do to your, to your life?
Joseph Rueter: And when you choose not to play, right? My kids growing up in, kids are growing up in a town that is very driven by hockey and neither of them play.
Joseph Rueter: That's a whole thing. Or we're in Minnesota. There's some hockey here. I know Massachusetts and the East coast has some of these clusters as well. But the game center at NYU is about this culture. It says your mission is to graduate the next generation of game designers, developers, and engineers.
Joseph Rueter: Entrepreneurs, critics to advance the field of games by creating context for advanced scholarship and groundbreaking work. I was wondering if across 20 years, you have an observation of the story arc of [00:36:00] how a student thought about joining. The game center 20 years ago, 10 years ago, and those that join now, given the role games are transitioning and driving culture for us,
Frank Lantz: there's a lot of story arcs.
Frank Lantz: I'm not sure if there's one single master narrative there, but so first of all, I should say that I'm. Officially retired now. So I've stepped down. I am chair emeritus and I've passed the torch to my colleague, Naomi Clark, who is the new chair and then is now leading the game center and doing a great job.
Frank Lantz: But I was there at the beginning along with, with many other colleagues, Eric Zerman and Jesper Juul at Charles Pratt, we were teaching games. Eric and I were teaching games at NYU before the Game Center existed. Yeah, Eric Zerman was kind of like one of the key people in terms of that. We were collaborating as game designers in New York City, and Eric comes from [00:37:00] A, an academic household, his parents are teachers.
Frank Lantz: And he was like, Oh, we should be teaching game design. And at the time, you know, 20 years ago, whatever. I said, we're just figuring this stuff out. How would you even teach it? We don't know the first thing about what we're doing. We're just making it up as we go and figuring out what game design is. And he said, yeah, teaching it will be a great way to do that and do it more consciously and do it better.
Frank Lantz: And so I was like, okay, let's, let's give it a try. And so, yeah, we were teaching classes in game design very early, maybe among the first people to at the college level, really try to think about what would it mean to teach game design as a creative discipline, the way that you teach writing or, or art or theater.
Frank Lantz: So we weren't primarily teaching it. As a subset of computer science, like many schools have game development, but it's kind of a subset of computer engineering, software engineering, computer science, right? Whereas we thought, no, no, no, we're going to teach this as a cultural form. You know, what does it mean to invent a new kind of game, design a new kind [00:38:00] of game and think about it creatively as a game?
Frank Lantz: as a work of culture. And that was our primary focus. And I think that has continued to be, you know, the main thread that, because there are different ways of approaching games as a, as an academic subject, but that was always ours. It was sort of like, yeah, the way a film program approaches film or the way an art program approaches art, we're going to approach games as a creative discipline and something that involves Craft and expressive meaning.
Frank Lantz: And, but there's also, an industry, right? It's also culture, pop culture, something that you can have a career in something that you can, you know, that there's a market for. And so that's always been. Our approach, having said that, we think it's important to acknowledge that there is a lot of programming.
Frank Lantz: There is something important about the relationship between games as a creative form and [00:39:00] computer science. Even though we're saying, no, we're not going to consider ourselves a subset of computer science. We think we're, we're, we're like an art form. We're like, well, we're, we're the art form of computers in a way, right?
Frank Lantz: That's one way to think about it. Even before computers existed. Games were kind of the art form of computers in a way, right? Because if you look at chess. If you look at Go, what are these things? They look like calculation machines. They look like an abacus sort of, like they're little rules for like moving logical units around.
Frank Lantz: Then seeing how they can explode exponentially and all of this stuff. And they're also like, little exercises in problem solving and, and calculation and, but even sports weirdly are, have a little bit of that in them. Even sports are about isolating. physical activity and abstracting it and making it quantitative in a way that allows us to kind of calculate what is the optimal [00:40:00] strategy or what is the measuring people's skill, you know, quantitatively and coming up with an explicit outcome.
Frank Lantz: You know, you put these 12 guys together on the, on the ice. I don't know how many people go into hockey, you know, and then, and then you get at out, they, they do a kind of physical calculation and the output is the score of the game. You know what I mean? Like in a weird way. It is the score
Joseph Rueter: of the game. I know on Wednesdays.
Joseph Rueter: And Aaron, both of us have found tennis later in life. Oh, nice. But on Wednesdays and Saturdays for sure. And if I'm lucky a couple other times in the week, I will go empty the cash in my brain and become fully immersed in a game of tennis.
Frank Lantz: And I think that's a great way to describe it. And I think. It, when you play tennis, part of what's going on there is you are kind of trying to turn into a robot.
Frank Lantz: You're like, okay, can I treat my body as if it were a tool that's goal is to like hit a ball over a net and like, I'm treating my eyes and my [00:41:00] hands and my legs and my heart and lungs as if they were an instrumental device. Whose goal is to like do this thing. And it's like, like becoming a robot in a way.
Joseph Rueter: It's so fascinating playing with like venture capitalists and, you know, high end insurance brokers and former judges and like, you name it. And the number of times that these highly intelligent humans will hit a ball. And then go like, ah, question their intelligence. You're like, no, no, no, it's not about intelligence.
Joseph Rueter: It's, it's about muscle memory and practice and time on target. But it is a fascinating and warm. Social exchange. It's a source of comfort. I know those guys are going to be out goofing off. I can escape and, and life is just better if I play some tennis. I don't know how to get my son. I don't know how to make the same connection with Fortnite for my son, but I suspect he feels similarly, right?
Frank Lantz: I [00:42:00] think so too. And this is one of the things that I've always had as part, one of my missions at the game center is to kind of be the parent whisperer, the one who can sort of like help, so I get this wave after wave of kids who are so passionate about this thing and parents who are so confused, like what is happening?
Frank Lantz: Like, what is this? Cause if you look at computer games, if you look at video games, They just look like nonsense. I mean, they don't look like, and so to understand that, that they're look, maybe they are nonsense, you know, and sometimes they just are. And sometimes you're right. Your kid just is wasting their time, right?
Frank Lantz: Sometimes your instincts are correct. And your kid is spending way too much time playing this game and it's just avoiding, you know, doing their homework or doing the dishes. And it's just way, you know, But there is, at least they should recognize that if. They have in their own life something like tennis or golf or skiing.
Frank Lantz: That is a point of connection, that they can [00:43:00] see, okay, what your kid is doing is something like that. You know what I mean? It's not identical, but it has this idea of submerging yourself in a very simple kind of stylized activity that is nonetheless infinitely deep. Like, if you look at skiing, you can just put as much time and energy as you want into that and you will always find ways to improve.
Frank Lantz: You will always find new depths. of ways to incrementally increase your skill, your ability to understand and appreciate what skiing is or what tennis is. And there's at least in every game an opportunity for that kind of experience above and beyond the thing that it looks just like this cartoon weird wizards are going around casting spells or people are shooting each other with squirt guns or whatever.
Frank Lantz: It's like, yeah, there's that. There's that, that surface. But under the hood, there is [00:44:00] also something that is endlessly, almost infinitely deep in terms of how much attention it can absorb and give back. Cause it's not just a slot machine that's stealing your attention and hypnotizing you, although it can be that, and there's an element of that in many games, there's also an element of continuous ongoing incremental self improvement.
Frank Lantz: Going deeper and deeper into a discipline that is constantly revealing new levels, new layers of problems to solve, new things to learn, new ways to understand and improve and get better. At least that's, there's an opportunity for that and a potential for that. And understanding that a little bit better is also a good way to help your kid make better choices.
Frank Lantz: about the kind of games they should play and how they should play them and how they should think about them.
Aaron Kardell: It's a bit of a hard left turn, but just as we were talking about tennis there, I certainly have experienced what Joseph was saying there, but [00:45:00] I've also experienced it watching my son play tennis.
Aaron Kardell: And I had this realization recently that. Most of my life, I'm multitasking, doing three things at a time, and it's just not great use of my time. But watching my son play tennis yesterday, fully undistracted, was just such a joyful experience. And I'm curious, like, to relate this back to, Something I've, I've heard about you.
Aaron Kardell: It sounds like you've recently gotten into watching, GeoGuessr tournaments. And I'm curious, you know, there are so many like e sport games and different things that can be watched, but are these experiences also experienced in, in watching others, not just being player one yourself?
Frank Lantz: Yeah, that's a really interesting question.
Frank Lantz: I mean, first of all, that experience you're describing, I think is one of the main ingredients that makes. Games what they are and not every game experience provides this or [00:46:00] even trying to provide it, but occasionally they do and when they give you access to that moment of what this famous psychologist chick sent me highly calls the flow state where you're just, it's kind of an optimal.
Frank Lantz: Experience of attention and awareness where you aren't where your mind is temporarily, as you said, your, your cash is cleared, you know, your mind is temporarily emptied of the chatter and the clutter of all of the little busy, you know, all the busyness, you know, that is in there and instead you have this moment of just being in the world and doing a thing.
Frank Lantz: And it is like, you, you get why people. Go rock climbing. You know, I don't do rock climbing, but I think there you can sense that there's this beauty of like, no, I am doing one thing right now, because if I slip, I die. And while it's not true that in tennis, you'll die if you don't pay attention, it's [00:47:00] still is guiding you towards that same state.
Frank Lantz: And then you can just be in the moment doing a thing. And it's just Fabulous, you know, whether you can get that from watching sports or e sports, I think sometimes get a little bit of it and there's a version of it or it's, it's there as one of the ingredients. in the cocktail, but I think it's a more complex thing when you're watching people stream a game.
Frank Lantz: You're watching people stream a competitive game, but I, I really do love it. Like in some ways it's kind of cheating because you get, you get a glimpse of the intensity without having to put in the effort. You get to kind of hitchhike along while someone is Really drilling down into the depths of a game and you get to kind of a surf on the surface enjoy Watching them do that.
Frank Lantz: But obviously it's a people love do it people love watching sports. I love watching eSports That's like as you said GeoGuessr is is a recent one That is [00:48:00] I just think is great super entertaining super fun to watch One of the things that makes GeoGuessr really good Like, I've been watching chess recently.
Frank Lantz: Like, chess is surprisingly entertaining right now. Like, chess is kind of in a golden age right now. You would think that now, whatever, 20 years after Deep Blue, humans would be over chess, because it's like, well, computers solved chess, and now we're But instead, the opposite have happened. Chess is, is hotter than ever.
Frank Lantz: We've got Magnus Carlsen, who's not only super, charismatic, but not, and not just the best living chess player, maybe the best chess player who's ever lived. And he's out there making content and streaming and scandals and, and whatever. And we just had an amazing candidates cup that was like super fun to watch.
Frank Lantz: But when I'm watching chess, I'm like, I'm mostly just admiring someone else's cognitive performance and seeing, like, just glimpsing a little bit, because I'm not literate enough at chess to really understand what's going on. But when I [00:49:00] watch GeoGuessr, when my wife and I watch competitive GeoGuessr, we are right in there participating.
Frank Lantz: So as soon as the image comes up, we're like, okay, I guess it could be Australia. I don't know. Is that, is it Australia or is it South Africa? You know what I mean? Oh, I bet it's South Africa. Oh, maybe it's Lesotho, you know? And so we're trying to kind of, you get to play along and at a game that is genuinely weird and fun and cool.
Frank Lantz: So it's a little bit closer to poker and that's another game that we like to watch a lot. And in poker, you also get to play along with the players and think, okay, what would I do in this situation? But you get the extra. You're given the, the superpower of knowing what the whole cards are of your opponent.
Frank Lantz: So it gives you kind of this extra edge over Daniel Negreanu or whoever that you actually know what their whole cards are. But you could imagine, you can sort of like think, okay, what would I do in this situation? Would I fold or would I, would I call? And so it's a little bit of that vicarious playing along.
Frank Lantz: I just think, yeah, [00:50:00] it's such a great time for, there's so many things you can watch either on Twitch or YouTube. It's like a, it's like a golden age of what, you know, the thing that we are obsessed with now is bridge. Do you guys play bridge at all?
Joseph Rueter: Fifteen two.
Frank Lantz: Yeah. We tried to learn bridge. My wife and I years ago, back when we were young enough that it was like cute.
Frank Lantz: Oh, look at these young people playing bridge. Now we're old enough that it's not even interesting that we, cause we're just like all the other old people playing bridge. We never got good at it, but we like to watch There are people who stream bridge and they stream this weird format on where they're playing against robots, playing with robots against other robots and stuff.
Frank Lantz: But it is by far talk about brain games Bridges and i've seen like looked at so many games and watched and studied and thought about so many games bridges. I think by far The most complex, most challenging game ever. In terms of the strategic depth of what you're doing, [00:51:00] the problem solving you're doing over and over again, and the fact that it was at one time more popular than Taylor Swift.
Frank Lantz: Like, that is shock, that is amazing, that's a fact, a historical fact that a game that's harder than Fortnite, harder than Hearthstone, harder than League of Legends, harder than Dota, harder than, than Paths of Exile, harder than whatever game you want to think of that's a big, complicated, hard game to play.
Frank Lantz: Bridge was, and it was just pure, difficult, hard, abstract problem solving, and it was as popular as Taylor Swift. in the world. How did that happen? And how can we make that happen again? That, in my head, like, when I think of brain games and mind games and smart games, I think, okay, that is it. That is proof.
Frank Lantz: That is existence proof that people have an appetite for difficult, challenging, intellectually [00:52:00] complex abstract, strategic games and given the right opportunity, we could get back to that. And wouldn't that be nice if to have a game like that, because I love all e sports and stuff, but like a tired of the wizards and the magic and the dragons and the space Marines.
Frank Lantz: Do you know what I mean? Like, I kind of, it's a little bit, after a while you're like, what are we doing guys? Are we really just like, do we really need these big billboards that say, hi, this is, this is for eight year old boys. This is a hobby for, for young boys. Do you know what I mean? Do we need to have quite so many wizards and space Marines?
Frank Lantz: Can't we just like, You know what I mean? And Bridge, and the fact that it still exists, but it's very, very small. There's a tiny little niche of people who are doing it. Most people don't even know that it exists. I think, I don't know, for some reason, I just, I'm obsessed with this, and [00:53:00] I kind of want it to, I want to understand the lesson and figure out how to get back to that.
Joseph Rueter: Yeah, that's super curious. There's math in there.
Frank Lantz: It's a lot of math. There's everything. There's psychology, there's gambling, because it is, you know what I mean? Like, it's like poker in the sense that it's all, it's all like statistical. It's all, all like you're comparing probabilities. You're constantly preparing, comparing probabilities.
Frank Lantz: And, but there's also just a lot of chess in there. There's a lot of like, kind of straightforward, if then deductive reasoning. And then there's a lot of psychology because the whole game is built around these weird conventions that we have for like, communicating through this narrow channel where we're going to use our bids to like, say things about our hands to each other.
Frank Lantz: And then extrapolating from that, Oh my God, the game is so deep and
Joseph Rueter: We're just about ready to pull the trigger on some Arthur Ashe tickets for [00:54:00] this fall, but maybe we should just hang out on Twitch. What are Arthur Ashe? Oh, tennis. Tennis the US Open. Is that a
Frank Lantz: tournament? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The US Open. Oh, the US Open, of course.
Frank Lantz: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Arthur Ashe Stadium, you mean. The stadium, yeah. Got it. Arthur Ashe Stadium, yeah. Gotta go see the big ones. But you should just watch Twitch. Well, tennis is pretty good on TV. It's not as good as, look, football is great. Football is a great TV. I think basketball is great TV.
Joseph Rueter: Well, if the last minute didn't take 15 minutes, it might be easier to watch.
Frank Lantz: Yeah, yeah, and that's kind of true. Although, boy, there's some great last minute basketball games. The Knicks game that recently happened was unbelievable. But I would say, yeah, some games are better on TV than others. I would say that Fortnite is especially bad, I think. It's interesting that [00:55:00] Fortnite is Battle Royale format.
Frank Lantz: It's just they haven't figured out a good way to make that good TV. It's fun to watch along as, if you're watching one single streamer play through a Battle Royale, that's entertaining. But trying to watch an overall Battle Royale, I don't think they figured out how to do that. I think Counter Strike is very hard to watch.
Frank Lantz: I think shooters in general are hard to watch, compared to, StarCraft, I think a real time strategy was great to watch, and you could just see the whole thing, and it was like hard but doable, and it's kind of sad that we've lost StarCraft as an eSport, it's no longer really a thriving eSport, and there isn't a real time strategy game to replace it.
Joseph Rueter: So, where do games go if we're going to spread some beauty? We might, it might be bridge. Right? It might be study of systems design. It might be teaching folks to think about their thinking. Because it seems like that's the disconnect and the observation that [00:56:00] you can find ways to recognize your behavior in a system and then adjust.
Joseph Rueter: What are your hopes? What are your dreams outside of everyone playing Bridge? Aaron, you're going to have to go to Tokyo. Somebody play Bridge.
Frank Lantz: Step one, everyone should buy my book, The Beauty of Games. Forget Bridge. Buy the book. Okay, that's step one.
Joseph Rueter: It's a good book, by the way.
Frank Lantz: I don't have, I'm not big on predicting.
Frank Lantz: I think it's like these things are too big and too complex to really predict. I like to try to identify things that are happening early enough that you can Do you know what I mean, that you can get a sense of?
Joseph Rueter: Yeah, this is where I was thinking, like, where, where do you hope it goes, right? I mean,
Frank Lantz: I would love for, for games to continue to, to thrive, to grow and evolve, to continue to, like, what's one of the things that's cool about them is that they're very surprising.
Frank Lantz: We don't know, you know, where they're going. And I'm a novelty junkie. You know what I mean? I like. Like I said, I grew [00:57:00] up reading science fiction and, and I love moments when you can confront something in the world, when you experience something in the world and you're like, Oh, I'm living in the future. Oh man, this is weird and cool.
Frank Lantz: And like, yeah, walking into the. To like a giant, sports coliseum to watch the League of Legends World Championship felt like a science fiction moment. I'm like, whoa, this is weird and cool. Like this is strange. So I like that games. I want them to continue to just be surprising and weird and do and go places that no one is expecting.
Frank Lantz: I would love for games to continue. I think I would look for games to have more. To participate more in conversations about the world, about things that matter to us in the way that novels do and film and music even, I feel like has a kind of, you know, way we think about these, how does culture [00:58:00] reflect and reflects our reality.
Frank Lantz: help us understand and interpret the things that are happening in the world. I would like for games to be kind of less isolated and off in their own little corner. And sometimes people look in, Oh, what's happening over there? Okay. Well, go back to playing your games guys. We're going to go over here and whatever, do, do the important work of, you know, I would like there to be a little bit more interaction there.
Frank Lantz: And I think, I mean, I think there is, like, if you think about games in a broader sense, games have contributed, like, profoundly to things like, I mean, look at probability theory. Probability theory, which is like an important part of modern science and, and modern, and how we understand the world, comes out of studying games.
Frank Lantz: Probability theory has its roots in people studying card games. Mathematicians trying to understand how card games operate and then using that to understand the science of, you know, complex events that we have partial knowledge of, you know. And [00:59:00] or you look at game theory, right? Game theory has transformed modern science and sociology and to a degree philosophy and politics and everything else.
Frank Lantz: And game theory comes out of John von Neumann thinking about poker. Like it wasn't just like, Oh, it's not just a metaphor, right? He was literally, he played poker. He liked poker. He thought about poker. He invented game theory. And we're still living downstream of that. We still now have a whole new set of conceptual tools for thinking about competition, decision making in situations of uncertainty and when there's multiple agents and all of that stuff that really helps us understand the world.
Frank Lantz: I would like that to continue. Like, especially now. Now that we're living in the age of ai, I think games have something to contribute there. Like what, how should we think about this question of, synthetic intelligence and software that can do something that [01:00:00] is, that appears to be something like thinking and software that appears to have some of the features.
Frank Lantz: of intelligence and agency, and, and where there are big questions about whether that is an existential risk, whether that's, that's a danger, whether that's an opportunity, how is that going to play out and unfold? I would love to know. for people to recognize that games can contribute to that question. I mean, that was universal paperclips was about that, right?
Frank Lantz: Like that was about AI, you know, the risks of existential destruction that could come from a runaway AI, but it's also more about giving people a concrete way to explore. A set of abstract ideas, instrumental convergence and what's called the orthogonality thesis about, about these issues about, about AI safety.
Frank Lantz: And so, yeah, I would love for, for games, you know, for some [01:01:00] people to be interested in doing that with games. And obviously I think it is happening, you know, it's happening in all kinds of different ways, but I just want to encourage it and, and get people to do more of it.
Joseph Rueter: Yeah, I suppose there are podcasts that might be doing this.
Joseph Rueter: Is there like a talk show? Is this part of like an under current of conversation right now? It was like you almost need commentary, social commentary.
Frank Lantz: I'm embarrassed to say I don't, I kind of don't know. I'm trying to think I love podcasts, but I honestly don't. There's a podcast called Game Tech, which a friend of mine does, which I like a lot.
Frank Lantz: But it kind of touches on some of these issues, but I'm trying to think about my Podcasts that I follow and I don't actually follow that many game podcasts So many of them are just they're really just more about video games as a as a hobby and as a kind of
Joseph Rueter: well I wondered if you'd have you need Rolling Stone a [01:02:00] magazine that takes apart a new album or you need you need the critics of Broadway To talk about the plays and what they're saying about culture, or you need.
Frank Lantz: I will say that there are some examples. Okay. So like Nate silver is interesting case, right? Nate silver, the kind of quantitative journalist guy, you know, he started out as a, as a poker player and then, you know, as a sports analyst, he's applying a lot of kind of game, game intelligence to larger issues about, about politics and democracy and things like that.
Frank Lantz: There's another guy that I follow, Z Vitz, or he just goes by the, the Zvi or the Zvi ZVI. He's got a, a more intense version of that as well. And he started out as a, as a magic, the Gathering Pro and is now doing kind of news journalist, kind of analytical journalism and, [01:03:00] and, and punditry. So you do get nerds like that, you know, who are going to start out in games and then kind of get to a broader, sense.
Frank Lantz: But it would be nice if there was something, yeah, like the New York review of games, there probably is something literally called that. There should be something like that, a pretentious, snooty, intellectual, but this is what, Eric Wolpaw and Eric and Chet were, even back in the day, the old man Murray days of 20 years ago, kind of making fun of this idea.
Frank Lantz: They used to refer to themselves as Cahiers du Virtuacop. So Cahiers du Cinema is the famous French journal that, that the New Wave, the French New Wave, those guys, who were those guys? The French New Wave. Truffaut and, and Jacques Riviere, yeah, yeah, Godard, Godard and Truffaut. Those guys started out as journalists writing for this very pretentious French magazine called Cahiers du Cinéma.
Frank Lantz: And Eric Wopaya used to [01:04:00] refer to O'Memory as Cahiers du Virtuocop. And just like, mockingly, like, because there is something absurd. Of taking this hobby for nine year old boys, which is about dragons and space marines, and then trying to like extrapolate like deep, you know, social truths or like Yeah, what's
Joseph Rueter: actually going on here?
Frank Lantz: Yeah, but it is, but that's the process that we're in, right? That is the way this stuff is evolving and not, not just become more intellectual and pretentious, but just to become more complex and to include within it. The whole spectrum, the full spectrum, just like film does, you know, from just, from pornography to, to art and everything in between and journalism and everything else, you know,
Joseph Rueter: do it for fashion.
Joseph Rueter: We do it for food. Yeah.
Frank Lantz: You do
Joseph Rueter: it for art.
Frank Lantz: So I think games are on the same journey. It's just, it's just complicated and circuitous. Oh, fantastic.
Aaron Kardell: All right. [01:05:00] Well, this has been a fantastic conversation, Frank. We really appreciate just, hearing about your journey and all of your takes on gaming culture.
Aaron Kardell: If people want to find you online, you know, obviously everybody go by the book, the beauty of games, if you haven't done that, but my understanding is you've got a newsletter that people could sign up for where, where's that at?
Frank Lantz: Yes, I have a sub stack called donkey space. So if people just search for my name or donkey space, they'll, they'll find my sub stack and I write about games and art and AI and stuff like that.
Aaron Kardell: And, is there any where else that people should follow you other than your newsletter, Frank?
Frank Lantz: I'm on Twitter, still, or X or whatever it's called now. And then we've got some cool projects we're working on at Everybody House Games, which is my, my studio that I run with my wife and son. Actually, it's kind of a family game design studio.
Frank Lantz: And we've got some cool projects that'll be coming out [01:06:00] later this year or next year. So, so keep your eyes out for that. But yeah, if you sign up for my sub stack, you'll get all the All the news.
Aaron Kardell: Love that. All right. Well, thanks so much for being here, Frank.
Frank Lantz: Thank you so much for having me. This is great. I really appreciate it.
