#10 - Frank Lantz: The Beauty of Games

29:42I want to make like smart, interesting, cool pop culture that isn't corny, you know? And then poker. I think I, I don't know what, because I played poker a lot. But then at a certain point I realized, I think it was even in a bookstore maybe. And I saw that there are all these books. It was probably like Sklansky, those early Sklansky books. Super System. Super System. And I was like, oh, wait, like poker is like chess? People can study poker and get good at it? Wait, really? You didn't? I kind of didn't realize that. because I had played poker just casually as one does. And this is before the boom, you know?

30:22And I thought it was just a gambling game and I really had never thought about it, you know? I'd really never thought about, it seemed closer to bingo, you know? It's like, oh, you sit around and whoever gets the better hand wins. How dare you. I know, right? But that appealed to me, like the discovery that it was like, oh, again, I love this juxtaposition between the way that something looks. Right. And I think for most people, to them, it still is like, it looks like just a game where you wait until you have the best hand and then win and then occasionally you bluff or whatever. But the idea that it has all of these like technical things and this kind of strategic approach that you can study and get good at, just like, I loved it.

31:00So I got very deep into that. And that had a huge influence on me because it just changes your way of seeing the world. Like it's amazing how much room there is to change your fundamental tools for understanding the world. I was a full-on grown-up, and it kind of had never occurred to me to think of the world probabilistically in this way. I was just like most people. You think deterministically and cause and effect, and if you're wrong about something, you were just wrong. Something either is or isn't. It did or it didn't happen, therefore it's 50%. Some people literally go around the world thinking that's how probability works.

31:40You parked in the illegal space and you got a ticket. And how simple is that? And it's like, well, no, there was like some chance that you would get the ticket. And in some cases, you should park in the space where you might get the ticket because there's this thing called expected value. And it's like, that is such a fundamental change in how to look at the world. And it really delighted me, like this idea that your beliefs could level up, that you could become much better at looking at the world and interpreting it and thinking about it. of all the games I've played, poker is by far the one, it has the most diverse range of skills that it challenges people on.

32:18And it maps clean, those skills map most, they transfer the best to almost every facet of life more than any other game. Is that a mark of the game's complexity or is it because it has just the right sweet spot between luck and skill or what is it? There's a whole set of good qualities that are associated with gambling in general, right? The ability to control your emotions, the ability to think probabilistically, the ability to be gracious in defeat, to be trustworthy, like you can't exist as a gambler unless you have a certain set of kind of personality traits that are admirable, right? That you're trustworthy, that you believe in fairness.

33:17And there's a whole set of things that I think that if you're a good gambler, right, that they bring out the illicit, these good qualities, then they're all of the good qualities of being like a strategy game, someone good at Go or chess, which is this ability to focus and to calculate and to have good heuristics and to have a desire to seek out the most difficult problems and to improve by losing over and over again. You know what I mean? Like the kind of discipline to have an appetite for the kind of endless losses that you need to get good at any strategy game and as well as just like a good keen mind for calculating and for doing all that stuff.

34:12And poker brings these things together. Right? So it's a weird mix but I think it's one of the reasons that poker has this special quality and you see like it's interesting that you I mean it's It's an interesting question. You see people go from like StarCraft into poker, Magic the Gathering into poker. I think it's partly, it's just a financial thing, right? It's partly that poker is more lucrative. Right, if you want to be a professional games player, that's one of the better ways. Yeah, like if you're like a - And you don't have to be that good to sometimes win a big tournament. If you're a Yu-Gi-Oh player who's making like$1 ,000 a year and being an expert at that game, then you're like, well, wait a minute, I should be spending this much effort and making 10 times that much.

35:04So it's partly just, yeah, the incentives. But I think it's also, there is something richer about the social aspects of poker. The fact that one of the things you do in poker is this deeply social skill of knowing who you're at the table with and extrapolating from their behavior to kind of trying to reverse engineer what their strategy is. You're trying to reverse engineer what their model of the world is by looking at their behavior. That is a really deep and interesting and fun problem. In fact, it's probably the most deep and interesting fun problem in poker. The problem of playing GTO poker is fine.

35:56To define that, that's game theory optimal, which means basically playing a style of poker which cannot be exploited by anyone. There is no strategy your opponent can do to improve upon their own strategy if you're both playing game theory optimal. Right. It's called a Nash equilibrium. Unexploitable, yeah. But in some ways, that's just a big math problem. And if you look even at the origins of game theory, John von Neumann the reason he was studying poker in the first place is because it wasn't just a math problem. He looked at chess and he's like, that's not a game. That's just a math equation.

36:37It's like a big, hard math equation. You can figure it out. But poker, now that's a game. Because it's deterministic. Yeah, because in poker, it is this recursive process of I'm trying to figure you out and you're trying to figure me out at the same time. and the way that I can figure you out is by looking at your behavior and vice versa, but your behavior are also the moves in the game, right? So they have this double meaning, right? It's like, which I think is beautiful, right? I think Bridge has this too. I think Bridge is also beautiful for this reason that the thing you're trying to communicate with your partner, but the only way you can communicate is through moves in the game.

37:15So I'm trying to win the game, but I'm also trying to like communicate, I'm trying to win the game by communicating something to you by making moves. When we're in the bidding process, I'm bidding and that has both, I'm committing to a certain move in the game and I'm also trying to communicate something to you, my partner. And poker is like an adversarial version of this. I'm trying to win this hand. I'm trying to make the optimal thing in this hand. But I also am trying to confuse you. I don't want you to know what my strategy is. I don't want you to have a perfect read on me. and so that is so rich and such an interesting problem and it's so recursive and infinitely complicated that I think that's one of the things that makes poker really special.

38:04So as a game designer, what do you do as a sort of starting process? Like a friend of mine who's a musician, an artist, she says that before she starts writing a song or an album she often has literally a visual aesthetic in her mind she makes almost like the cover art of her album first and then the music comes is that what happens with you as a game designer do you have a kind of visual in mind or do you have a core principle or is it much more logical and on the drawing board how does it work? I definitely have a similar thing Like I sort of, when I have an idea for a game, I kind of like squint and try to see it.

38:46I'm like, okay. And I'm trying to look, I'm trying to look at the finished thing. I'm trying to look into the future and see the finished thing. But I think the reality is that we don't know and we can't know because that's what creativity means, right? Creativity by its nature, like by definition is the thing that can't be predicted. and I think games can start in terms of inspiration they can start from anywhere like I often start with a mechanic like I'm kind of a game designer who likes interesting mechanics like rules the way rules interact so I might say oh what's a reverse auction like could you have a reverse auction where the lowest bid wins what about an auction where I'm bidding for you okay let's do an auction where I bid for you you bid for the person to your left.

39:35Things like that, right? You're just like, oh, how would that play out? And then you start to extrapolate. So that's one approach. Or I think where most people start is you're just like, I want to make a slight variation on this game that I love. Right? Like Minecraft was based on a game called Infiniminer by this brilliant game designer, Zaktronics. And Marcus Pershen, who was just a fan of Infiniminer and wanted to take it in a different direction. He's like, I think it should be more like this. And so, yeah, so Notch just took it and tweaked a couple things and ended up with Minecraft. So, yeah, I think most games start as slight variations of existing games.

40:18I wonder what the first ever game was. Oh, that's a really good question. So, anthropologically, it's things like the royal game of Ur. Is that? There's this old, old kind of, they're all like Backgammon style race games basically the oldest games that people first person to get their things to hear yeah they're like the oldest things that we've ever found I mean we're only going to find the things where there was a physical artifact right? yeah exactly there must have been plenty of games before that I'm sure like in like caves or something like children were probably like I mean technically who can throw the rock closest to the wall absolutely I mean imagine being a kid in cave people nothing to do of course you're running around throwing rocks at stuff Is that not a game?

41:02Of course it's a game. And I think there was also a lot of overlap between religious rituals and games. I think a lot of these early games that they found, they have lots of traces of being a thing that you would engage with like a religious ceremony. and they would be about fate. You can imagine why. Like rolling, like when dice were discovered, I think they were probably as much about divination and telling the future and as they were. And then there's this like weird thing where all of a sudden, it's like, well, this isn't great at telling the future, but it's like a really entertaining activity.

41:48And also you can get good at it and maybe, you know, make a little drachma. You know what I'm saying? Like, you know. So actually it was probably gambling. Yeah, exactly. So there's like a lot of like overlap between religion and gambling, I think, in the very early prehistory of games. It all comes back to gambling. Yeah. You, in your book, you describe what makes making games hard is that it's everything that's hard about building a bridge combined with everything that's hard about composing an opera. Yeah. Can you elaborate on that a bit? So games are like engineering problems. Like even board games are engineering problems.

42:30Because even if you're not making software, like you're making a complex system of rules that can have all of these fail states, you know? They could just like not go. Like most games, if you sit down to like figure out a game, it just doesn't go, right? And it just fails to go like an engine. It just doesn't take, right? You have to tweak the rules and the affordances and the incentives to make a thing that actually even just works as well as tic-tac-toe. So it's an engineering problem. But at the same time, the thing that you're trying to make, it has all the irreducible qualities of a hat. What makes a nice hat?

43:17It's not just an engineering problem. Men in America used to wear hats. We all just wore hats. Like it was a thing. And then at a certain point, they just stopped. Like, what's going on there? Like that, that's like, what is it? It has all of these circular and recursive properties of being culture, right? Where the thing has a meaning that is kind of irreducible to its, you can't just explain why certain thing, like a certain combination of notes makes your heart skip a beat. and then most combinations of notes don't. That is the question of art and expression and creativity. There are certain things that will never be reducible to a formula, partly because there is this adversarial relationship between the creator and the audience, and between the creator and themselves, because I'm trying to make something new because I'm bored.

44:17I don't want to play Monopoly again. I want to make something new. right? And if this thing I was doing, like making a game, was reducible to a formula in the way that engineering problems are, like engineering problems don't have this extra quality of operatic difficulty because it can be reduced to a formula. I can follow a formula and produce some chemical thing out of some other chemical thing. I don't know how chemistry works, But I can't do that with a game Because Just like with a movie Or with a song I'm trying to avoid this thing of being Boring Predictable Corny Mid You know like Dull And if you go to a movie and it's formulaic And you can see the formula You know that she's going to end up with the guy There's going to be a car crash Oh they're having this conversation in front of a busy street like countdown to him stepping off the curb and getting hit by the car three two one and there's the car right it's like well it worked in this other movie yeah okay well too bad your movie sucks like and there's no but that that same bit might work in a different way right with just the right bit of knowing this or or like you think it's going to happen and then they play with that expectation it's the way jump scares work in horror movies like they keep having to like play off your expectations of where the jump scare is going to be and then your expectations of where your expectations are.

45:50And it's like poker. It's like this recursive process. It pushes us further and further into the unknown, away from the formula. So is it the case that with games, audiences will reward you the more unpredictable your game is? No.

46:09It's just purely unknowable. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they want more of the same and they'll reward you for cranking out a carbon copy of what you've done. Sometimes they want something different and they didn't tell you. But sometimes you do something different and they don't like the thing that you did that's different. And then sometimes you get there, but you just never know beforehand when you're going to get there. When you get there, you do something new and there are people there who are like, yeah, I wanted this. I didn't know I wanted it, but now I know I want it. And that's like, oh, thank God, you know?

46:48How many, what do you think the ratio of games that kind of make it versus ones that just end up in the like graveyard of ideas? I love this question. Because I think the answer is maybe that that is incalculable. I think it's maybe uncomputable. Because there are an infinite number of games. and so imagine this huge infinite like set of all possible games, right? Okay. And within that, an infinite number of those are great, truly great, world conquering masterpieces, the kinds of games that you love for your whole life and they're brilliant. Like there's an infinite number of those within there, but it's also the ratio of those to the other ones is also infinitely small.

47:36so the infinite size of all the other games that aren't beautiful and meaningful and fun to like it's like so it's just it's weird because sometimes it seems so easy sometimes it's like it's like i don't know let's try this and then you're like whoa that was really fun and then you've like made a game you can make a great game in an afternoon like minecraft was made in a weekend right this is like oh i bet if i stuck if i took this infiniminer game and stuck this other thing in it or tweaked it a little bit. It's like you can get there like instantaneously. And so, and that's delightful. So when at the NYU game center, we, we often are just like, look, the first thing to do is like start making games.

48:18Just start now, like today, right now, because part of it is that first of all, you never know, and you should just be making, constantly making things and learning by doing. But also part of it is if you make a small game quickly and it works, then in your head, you get over that weird hurdle of thinking, oh, I guess game design is this thing that requires years of hard work. And then at the end, you'll have something good. It's like, no, it requires five minutes of trying something and getting lucky, but also having good taste and good instincts. And then there's as much work as you want to pour into it, like anything else.

48:58Then it becomes incredibly challenging to go deep. But yeah, it's a paradox, I think, this question of how many games are good. It's also, the reality is that goodness is not a quality that is inherent in a thing. Goodness is a quality that, it's an emergent quality. Like as good as Go is, as beautiful as Go is, I think a lot of that beauty is that we've been playing it for thousands of years, right? Like we've excavated the beauty out of Go. Do you think there's like some kind of fundamental truth emerging that maybe there are these like little natural convergent points within idea space? You know, the fact that Go has persisted for thousands of years and presumably variants of it that didn't.

49:53Do you think that's what is it? What's the X factor that it has? I think there are certain qualities of formal systems that make them more or less capable of absorbing, of being sites to excavate beauty, right? Of being places that we agree to kind of meet and coordinate our actions and then discover what is there. And I think it has to do with certain kinds of predictability, like this property of being semi-predictable. The property of being semi-predictable is a way of leveraging human agency. I think of it like a golf club is a simple machine it's a kind of wedge let's say that magnifies the player's actions and so I can hit this ball and send it a really far way it's a simple machine for taking my action and amplifying it but golf itself is a simple machine for amplifying choice and action for taking like slight differences in how I hit the ball and magnifying their consequences in this larger system of evaluating what I'm trying to do, you know?

51:23And so that property of like certain combinations of rules amplify your agency, amplify your your ability to to solve problems to explore a system to understand it to extrapolate from a set of rules to the overall behavior of a system to to dig deep into like little details that end up like having large consequences so I think some some systems some combinations of rules have that property. And when they do, they unfold like a flower or like a fire. It's like when you're trying to start a fire and all of a sudden you get the right combination of heat and it just goes. And then it's like self-sustaining.

52:17And it like unlocks a new sort of treasure trove of, you know, your tech tree opens up and you've now got a whole bunch of stuff to go. I'm curious what your thoughts are on the sort of concept of audience capture. You know, like the video game industry now is roughly 10 times the size of the movie industry. It's just, as you say, it's games are now the art form of the 21st century. And I noticed there was some, it seems like the game design community is split somewhat about whether video games are actually a good thing or not. And there seem to be like, feel like purists who are like, they're not, you know, they're just doing things for commercial interests.

53:00they're trying to just like make the next big blockbuster you know kind of like the same way you see certain like aspects of hollywood it feels like it's like oh we've got another superhero movie like they're just doing they're like pounding out the fourth version of i don't know the avengers or whatever for like because it you know it's it's it's tried and tested and they know that it makes audiences are going to spend money on going to see that movie is you know what what do you what's your feeling about that like is it a is it a legitimate concern have you noticed yourself like ever like being sucked into optimizing for what you think will actually appease audiences or is it something you actively resist yeah it's a it's an important dynamic like you can't have a healthy cultural form without without an audience without some kind of well informed audience who is pushing the creators right there has to be this dialogue i think between the people making the stuff and the people consuming it.

54:03And it has to be a kind of

54:11positive adversarial relationship. It has to be like a positive sum adversarial relationship. You need to have an audience that is going to be putting pressure on you to innovate and who's going to be literate enough to like appreciate what the things that you appreciate that you're trying to do. If you're a creator and you're trying to do something, you want an audience that is like on the same wavelength, you know, heading in the same kind of direction. And then you have this like rich push and pull. I love the image of Bob Dylan going electric. To me, there's always something beautiful about this moment.

54:52He had such a huge folk fan base and the folk fan base was just these purists. They hated rock music. They hated amplified guitars. And then Bob Dylan just showed up at these folk festivals with this electric band playing music. I didn't know this story. Yeah, he knew they were going to hate and they hated it. And they were just like, and to me, it's like, it's just such a beautiful scene of the arrogance of showing up at a place and knowing that this is where I'm going and I do not care. And in fact, I'm feeding off of this. But I think, yeah, if you're in a position where you are making something for somebody else that you think, oh, this is, I'm going to satisfy this set of preferences in this audience because I want to make money on Steam or I want to make a hit game or a mobile game that has a high ARPU or whatever, like that just, yeah, you can do that and it'll work for a while.

55:54But that's just like, you're not, that's not really why you're in this, right? You're in this to be in like, just out ahead of the audience, but just slightly. where you're trying to figure out stuff that can work and make money. Like you want an audience. Like you don't want to make a thing and be like, oh, I'm in an ivory tower and this is just for me and my friends. That's legitimate actually. I mean, people can do that. And sometimes you can make a great game that way. But I think where true greatness comes is when you get the back and forth, the dialectic of wanting to be successful, wanting to be rich and famous, definitely wanting to have a hit, but also being you, being your unique person that sees the world in a way that no one else on the planet does and wanting to do something that reflects that and do something that is new, that no one's done before and have people admire you for it and be like, wow, I wouldn't have thought of that.

57:09We've talked a lot now about the beauty of games, the upside of games. I would like to talk a bit about the dark side of them. I mean, very mild example, but somewhat funny example for me at least. I got so addicted to chess, I've had to delete it from my phone. It got to a point where, and to be clear, I'm not good at chess as well. This is how bad the addiction was. I don't want to actually learn and get any better. It's just something about, it's like a form of escapism. Like my brain seems to converge upon. It's like I can grab my phone and I can just play some like bullet games. You know, I went from playing 10 minute games to five minutes to three minutes to one minute.

57:51So I'm not thinking, I'm not getting any better. It's just like a rat clicking, you know, the heroin button or something. And so, you know, I managed to like delete the app for a while. Unfortunately, I've fallen back off the wagon. I have it currently back on my phone. Igor's telling me it has to go by next week. Anyway, so I've had a little taste of what it's like. You know, I think I have the brain chemistry for it. And, you know, I Googled game addiction before this and there's loads of websites now of like all these scary stats about like 3 % of adults have official, you know, have a formal game addiction, 8.5 % of children, 5 % of gamers play more than 20 hours a week, etc., etc.

58:34The World Health Organization in 2019 recognized it as officially as a disease, a mental health condition called gaming disorder. What's your take on this? Do you think this is a bit overblown? Because I truly don't know whether it's actually as bad as they're making it out to be. Yeah, it's a hard problem. I mean, if you look at the chess example, yeah, chess is famously like this. I forget who it was that said, oh, if you want to... kill a promising young man. Don't use poison or a knife. Just teach him to play chess. You'll never have to worry about him again, right? He'll be out of the way, right?

59:11On the other hand, it seems like a life devoted to playing chess and playing it well and getting really good seems like a good life, right? As good as any, right? If you enjoy it. Well, it depends on the opportunity cost, right? And from the perspective, you know, if that person, some, you know, a Magnus Carlsen style brain, presumably would have been very good at anything it puts itself to. Yeah. But we don't look at Magnus Carlsen and think, oh, what a shame. What a shame. If only he had gone into marketing or like managed a hedge fund. Could have gone into fundamental physics, something like that.

59:48Oh, God, please. No more fundamental physicists. We've got enough. I think it's another like uncomputable problem, which is, you know. It's what makes art great, right? Is that it's full of these. It's purely a matter of how. It's not a matter of what. It's a matter of how. There's a way to integrate chess or any addictive game into your life in such a way that you will not regret it afterwards. That you'll think, yes, I lived a good life and it was meaningful and it was rich. and this activity added to it and I'm happy about it. And it just continues to unfold with new interesting problems to solve and new opportunities to self-improve and be creative.

1:00:39Or it can be like, oh God, this sick feeling in your stomach or you know you've just wasted six hours and you did it because you just are tired of the world and you want it to go away and you want to go into that place where your mind gets replaced with this other thing, the chess mind, right? I think of it as getting in touch with your shark mind. You know how sharks always have to be moving? Like sometimes when you're playing a game, you're just like, you're just getting in touch with this weird primal version of yourself. And it's just… Yeah, it's like lizard brain, basically. That's what I was saying.

1:01:17I'm not thinking. When I'm in the dark zone of chess, I'm not thinking. I'm just, it's a pure escapism. I've read something horrific, you know, in the kind of research and work I do, it's a lot of like existential risk stuff and scary things. And it's just sometimes I find myself going to chess. Yeah, it's the opposite of thinking in a way. You're like, instead of thought, because at a certain point, thought can become burdensome and you want it to go away. And so this thing, you can put this thing in your head, which just unfolds and fills your head until there's no room for you left in your head.

1:01:48And there's something beautiful about that. It's like meditation, but it's also dark. it'll just destroy people. The reason that quote about chess exists is because chess just destroyed people's lives. Just as bad as slot machines can destroy a person's life. But slot machines can be fun and interesting and good. For many people, slot machines are just a nice ingredient in their life. They do once a year when they pass through Vegas or something. It's not inherent in the object itself or in the system or in the game itself. It's inherent in the context. Right. It's the things that come before and after it that matter.

1:02:24It's the way it's integrated into your life. The really hard problem is that you can't pull those things apart. You can't have the good stuff and leave the other stuff behind. Like, like if I think about my, the thing that I, my relationship to poker is so complex, right? Like of all the games I've ever played, It was the only one where there were times when I felt like I was sticking my face into a plastic bag full of broken glass and tightening that bag around my neck and then jumping into a lake. Been there. Yeah, right? But if you told me, oh, would you wish that you would never have had that experience?

1:03:08I'd be, no. It does feel like there's some subset, you know, certain companies, I'm sure there are certain game design companies which are just like going all in on maximizing addictiveness of their games. Yeah, but those games suck. And they are sort of addictive, like these mobile games that are just about... So what about like Candy Crush? Would you put that in that category? I think Candy Crush is actually a decent game. I don't play it myself, but I think any mobile game that is in the kind of modern mode of trying to maximize for engagement has this problem. And they're like advertising, particularly if frequency of players correlates with their revenue as opposed to just a one-time download.

1:03:52They're just trying to maximize time on device, just like slot machine designers. I'm just thinking of any practical metrics that could be devised to sort of figure out this, to evaluate whether a game is going into that category. And I think what it is, it's like the function of learning something new over time. If it plateaus out, but somehow people keep playing it, now you've fallen into like shitty, addictive slot machine territory. Yeah, I mean, I think the safest way is self-reflection. And I think self-reflection is also the path that I am trying to encourage people to follow. Like in part of this book, I don't know if I say it explicitly in this book, but one of the things I'm hoping that this book does is get people to just like slightly tweak the way they interact with games, to be a little bit more conscious of their choices and to reflect on their own experience.

1:04:51I think that's the way to do it. You can't look at a game and point at it and say, well, this doesn't have the qualities that a good game has. You have to play a game and then afterwards think, okay, well, what was going on? I was enthralled, but do I feel good about that? Do I want to do it again, or do I feel a little sick to my stomach, like I've just been conned? And you know in your heart of hearts afterwards. And it's funny, I once had a student who was complaining to me about his girlfriend. And he's like, oh, well, she sees that I'm addicted to League of Legends. I'm playing League of Legends all the time.

1:05:31She doesn't understand that really what I'm doing when I'm playing League of Legends, it's like I'm doing this collaborative problem solving, this really deep, interesting thing. And I'm also getting better over time. I'm studying this really deep, hard problem. And he was saying to me all the things he knew I would like. He was rehearsing this excuse to his girlfriend by trying to explain his League of Legends habit using all of the kind of ideas and concepts that he knows I would like. And I was just thinking, it's like, okay, don't fool yourself. Like you and your girlfriend should work this out separately, but like you're trying to fool me and you're trying to fool yourself.

1:06:13Like instead of that, just be honest. Like it's not, it's okay for a game to be self-medication. Sometimes we need a little medicine. It's okay. hey, it's okay for something to like be a thing you use to like wrap yourself in this Markov blanket, you know, that protects you from the world. You know, it's okay for you to have a little bit of that in your life. Just don't kid yourself that you're on this journey, you know, that you're on this journey of self-overcoming and where you have this like rich, deep experience with this game. It's like, just be honest with what your experience actually was.

1:06:50And if you actually think, like your girlfriend does, that you're spending a little too much time doing it and that it's not really making you a better, more interesting person, you're not really enjoying it on this level, then pay attention to that, right? That's signal. Why do you think there are, you know, we had Gamergate and all these other sort of controversies where it seems like some portion of gamer culture, at least, cultivates this kind of toxicity, not only in terms of sheer behavior, but it almost seems like it cultivates a toxic competitiveness. if you hear someone said like oh you i don't really play these online games where you're like speaking live to people that much but i've heard that i mean i'm not easily shocked but some of the stuff i've heard relayed is like so shocking yeah a are there certain types of games that typically cultivate that um is it like something to do with like certain games appeal more to masculine than feminine energy um and like is it okay is there a solution to it and do you think it's actually a problem that needs to be addressed?

1:08:00In some ways, it is the problem of civilization, right? How do we improve the ways in which we interact and make better kind of collective decisions? And yeah, gamers as a community have not really comported themselves well in this department. And I mean, it's complicated. It's partly their roots in adolescent male culture of one-upsmanship and poking and insulting and shit-talking. And, you know, that's just, that is what it is. It's a thing that exists. And, but it can, you know, at a certain point, video games were consciously marketed as boy toys. Like, this is a thing that isn't just organic.

1:08:48Like, it also is related to markets and capitalism and stuff like that. And so it became weirdly overdetermined at that point, you know, in the 80s, 70s and 80s, that this is a thing for boys. If you look at the aesthetic, actually, of those games, typically it's like Street Fighter, they're more classically aggressive games. You know, so there's that element. I would very much like for games to be a positive force for culture and society and civilization overall. And I think overall they are. Yeah, so you talk about in the final chapter of your book about this concept of systems literacy. Yeah.

1:09:33I think it's really beautiful because you're saying literacy doesn't have to be just about reading. There are other forms of literacy that we can develop. You know, now 85 % of the world, fortunately, can read. Yeah. And we're now getting to a point where there's this concept of just as people can learn to read books, they can learn to read systems and understand how systems work. and sort of this, you know, hold many concurrent hypotheses concurrently in their head, understand incentive structures, that kind of thing. And again, you should describe it as literature was to books and helping people become more literacy, written literacy.

1:10:14Games can be to improving systems literacy. And, you know, as you said, part of this, one of my goals with this podcast is to figure out ways where we can like better navigate these incredibly complicated complex problems um you know how do we solve the mutually assured destruction you know nuclear wars permanent perpetual shadow that we live under um how do we uh fix these moloch problems as i call them where you know these these these everyone's incentivized for the short term and if everyone ends up doing it creates long-term destruction have you thought about building a game that can like help people think about these concepts better and where would you go about starting if you were to do that um all of my games help people feel think about this stuff better uh no um yeah it is i'm i'm fascinated by this question and uh i'm a big fan of uh david chapman who's uh has this website called meaningness and um and is someone who writes brilliantly about this idea of meta-rationality.

1:11:19And he's very inspired by, there's a psychologist by the name of Keegan who has these stages, like different stages that you go through and stages of development as a human. But in a way, societies go through them as well. And when you start out, you're like just purely like instinctual. And then at a certain point, you become just really ego-driven. And then at a certain point, you're very much a social creature. You're, you're motivated by your social relationships and that's sort of everything. And then beyond that, there's a kind of systemic, like all of a sudden you realize, Oh no, I am not just my relationships with other people.

1:11:59I am, I'm, I'm part of a system of commitments. Like I have projects and ideas that I'm committed to. And that's really what informs me. And it sort of roughly corresponds to the kind of rational turn where you start to look, you start to think of the world more analytically and you can oh i can break things down and see them as a system you can break things down to the parts and see how they interact and stuff um and but then there's a stage beyond that right which is oh okay i'm not defined by these systems that i'm inside of these these my roles and my projects and my commitments i can move between them right i am something else right that there's an even higher stage right so it's like having different, yeah, like being rational is having a sort of model for the world.

1:12:49Yeah. And meta-rationality is... Is understanding that there are different models. And models of thinking even. Whole different models of interacting and thinking and perceiving the world. And there isn't one global universal one, whether it's Christianity or rationality or, or neoliberalism or whatever. There isn't a single system that is global and universal and answers all the questions and then doesn't break down into inconsistency at some point. And this kind of goes back a little bit to why gamers often are kind of retrograde troglodytes in a way. because I think one of the things that happens when you're in this stage, when you're in the kind of systemic stage or the rational stage, is that you realize this limitation.

1:13:48You realize that every system is just a self-perpetuating thing, that they're competing with each other and there's no perspective, there's no systemic perspective from which to stand and evaluate the difference between them. And to say, oh, from this global system, I can tell you that this system is right and this system is wrong. It's like all systems have this limitation of being finite. And one of the things that can happen when you realize that, you can become a nihilist. You go, oh, nothing matters. It's all bullshit. Everything's bullshit. Well, the Marxists think it's like this and capitalists think it's like this.

1:14:26And it's really, they're both, it's just self-perpetuating. There's the systems of ideology that people are trapped inside of. And so nothing matters, right? There is, you know. Or you can become a relativist, which is like the other end of the spectrum, but it's a similar thing. It's like, oh, well, your truth is your truth. And, you know, this is fine for you and that world is fine for you. And everyone has their own world and we're all fine inside of our own perspective. And that doesn't work because then there's no collaboration. Yeah, neither one of them actually works because they're both kind of self-defeating in a way.

1:14:54The reality is that we do manage to live in the world and do good things and think and solve problems, even though the systems that we're applying and inside of are limited in this way and none of them are universal and absolute. It's okay. They still work. They just work in the way that they work and you have to recognize that you're outside of them and moving between them. But it's a really hard thing to do and falling into this kind of nihilistic thing is very typical of like the Gamergate mentality. It's like, oh, it's all bullshit. Did you ever struggle without yourself? I don't think so, but it's hard to know.

1:15:33Like maybe I am struggling with it now. And like, it's so hard to have a good picture of that. But, you know, I've always just been trying to stay ahead. I don't know. I read Godel Escherbach when I was a very young person. I was like 14. It's like the perfect age to read Godel Escherbach, this amazing book. And which in some ways kind of laid the foundation of how I think about this stuff. In Godel Escherbach, of course, it's sort of like, well, what are the roots of being a person? What does it mean to be conscious? This is one of the great books about artificial intelligence and what it means.

1:16:16And so I think I've always had this slightly outsider, maybe very kind of arrogant in a way, kind of like thought of wanting to not be caught, wanting to not be trapped in any particular net. Where do you see the future of game design now that we're in the era of generative AI? And I mean, by generative, I mean not just like visually, but it seems like we're just being able to use AI to come up with everything. I don't know. I don't know. I want to know so bad. I want to know. I've spent the last like five or six years thinking about this. I just, I, like I saw it coming and I was like, oh, this is, and I was like, I want to figure out what this means for game design, right?

1:17:04Because these new kind of generative AI, these transformer models and all the kind of like neural net stuff that's popping off right now. I was like, oh, I'm going to figure out what this, and I have messed around with it quite a bit. I've made a bunch of stuff. I don't know for sure. Like, I think in the industry, you can see that it's going to be a powerful tool that is going to get used to kind of like automate like a lot of stuff. And I just don't care about that. Like the idea that like it's going to cost them less money to make Assassin's Creed 8, you know, I don't care. Like I'm interested in like, what are the new kinds of games?

1:17:41What are the new games that are coming? What are the games that we could not have imagined? Exactly, exactly. Brand new games. I'm interested in AI as an aesthetic in the same way that when they invented the synthesizer, like, oh, this is a tool for mimicking the sound of other instruments. You can mimic the sound of an orchestra with this. But then craft work comes along. It's like, no, that's not what synthesizers are. Synthesizers are about this other thing entirely. An entire new genre. A new genre, which is about the aesthetics of machine. It's machine aesthetics, right? It's like understanding machine aesthetics.

1:18:22That's where I'm at with AI. You want to understand the aesthetic of AI. I want to be the Afrika Bambaataa of AI. You know what I mean? what is the what are the you need to talk to my friend Grimes that's exactly her thing I mean she's given her voice away to the world of Voodoo 2 yes and see what comes out using AI and people like Holly Herndon is another example of I don't know if you know Holly's work but she's amazing and you know but the camera is the same way at first the camera is like oh this is a tool for recording a play and then then you figure out oh no it's actually not it's something much more than that it's a whole new aesthetic it opens up a new set of possibilities.

1:18:59So I think that's where we're at with AI and games. I don't know where it's going to go. I have my own projects, my own ideas, and I'm just like, you know, squirreling away at them. But I do think it's going to be weird and cool. I'm super excited to be alive at this time. You know what I mean? We're on the hinge of history right now. We get to find out how this all works out. Isn't that great? It seems like it in our lifetime. Well, you're more worried about it than I think some people are. I mean, I am simultaneously extraordinarily excited and extraordinarily terrified. And I don't even think I'm oscillating back and forth at this point.

1:19:35I've just figured out how to live with both in existence, speaking of the holding concurrent hypotheses. It's going to change so much about how we think about software and how we think about computers. and I think games have a kind of responsibility to help humanity make this transition to whatever it is that's going to happen. Like, because games have always, first of all, games invented computers a little bit. To a degree. Well, long before there were computers, there were computer-like things that were games. Like chess is like this weird abstract, computational device that we do for its own sake, for fun and for pleasure.

1:20:25But it's doing it like it's this little rule set that is symbolic. It's kind of digital in the sense that it doesn't matter where this piece is, except that it's on this square. Like it's physical. Instead of continuousness of reality, it's discreet. And digital in that sense. And it was a big inspiration for the origins of computers looking at things like chess and for Babbage to look at like the mechanical Turk and think, oh, how would you make that? You know, like the first, you know, Turing wrote in his head, kind of wrote a program for playing chess. That was one of the first, before he had even invented the idea of a computer, he was like, oh, how would you algorithmically capture what it is to play chess, right?

1:21:10And that was like one of the first programs ever conceived of. So there is already something in games that is about computation. It's about creating a system out of rules and kind of logical operations and then having its behavior evolve over time and trying to extrapolate and predict it and understand it. And so I think, and then of course, Video games have often been about trying to figure out what computers are good for. You know, my university got this giant machine, the UNIVAC, and we use it to calculate missile trajectories. But then at night, the nerds sneak into the computer lab and they figure out what it's really for.

1:21:59We're just making up imaginary spaces like a big cave network that you can get lost inside of. and that, you know, and so figuring out, like think about how games drove the market in graphics cards, which then sort of enabled this new generation of machine learning, right? The fact that we had these like, like it's a weird tangled relationship. So I think games have always been in this position of helping figure, helping us figure out what these things are and what they're good for and what we want with them. What do we want to do with computers and software? Like what kind of world do we want to live in that's shot through with software and digital stuff?

1:22:47And I think now it's still very much the case where figuring out AI and what it is and what the future of humanity is going to be with AI in the picture, I don't think it's just a matter of solving the engineering problem of making AI safe. I think it's also about this other harder to pin down question about like, well, what's good about it? Like, what's interesting about it? Like, what do we want from it? Like, of course, we just want the cancer cures and we want to solve global warming. We want all these practical things, but that's not enough, right? It's not enough to just say it's going to be a powerful tool because it's something else.

1:23:34It's something more than just a tool.

1:24:04I will catch you all again in two weeks. Happy win-winning.