Video game design process | dstill.ai shared chat

1

52 | Frank Lantz on the Logic and Emotion of Games

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

(someone): It's an expressive aesthetic form in that sense. I don't think you can dictate to culture how culture should interpret things. I think culture is so complicated and nebulous, this process. I try to contribute in my work as a teacher, as a designer, as someone who is out giving talks and stuff. I do try to get people to be aware of what it is that people who love games, what it is that they love. Because I think it can be confusing. Like if you're outside of the world of games looking in, it can look like nonsense. It looks like an explosion in a cartoon factory. It's like, what is happening? This weird, violent junk that my kid is obsessed with. And I do hope that I can help people who look at that understand, no, part of what your kid is doing is deep problem solving. Part of what your kid is doing is exploring a complex system and forming hypotheses and trying to get better at it. Part of what your kid is doing is developing discipline. Part of what they're doing is social and collaborative. Um, and yeah, and and so, um, that doesn't, you know, in some cases, you know, people's, yeah, some most kids play too many video games. They probably do. And, and, but balance. Yeah, but but understanding what is happening under the hood.

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169 | C. Thi Nguyen on Games, Art, Values, and Agency

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

(someone): They're sculpted experiences of practicality. One of the things I think that's interesting here is that this is a radically different art form. So in a lot of cases, I think when people want to talk about the artistic qualities of a thing that an artist made, they want ones that stay in the thing. They want the qualities that are in the novel, in the painting. I think what's interesting in games is, If games are sculpted practicality, then the beauty emerges in the practical action. So in other words, when you play a game, it's not the game that's beautiful, it's you that's beautiful, right? Or funny or awkward, right? In Twister, you're the person that fell comically and everyone laughs at. In rock climbing, I'm the person that's momentarily graceful. In chess, the beauty is in your mind figuring out, right? So it's like, Game designers are creating environments that sculpt our actions where the beauty is supposed to show up, not in the environment of the game itself, but in our action. I mean, it can also show up in the environment. But I think a lot of the literature about games has been going around looking for qualities that are in the game, like, oh, the graphics are beautiful, the sound is beautiful, the story is beautiful. And they're not looking at how radically different games are. And I think there are other things like this. that are also mostly neglected. But the thing that makes games unique is that they're sculpted action.

3

52 | Frank Lantz on the Logic and Emotion of Games

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

(someone): And so what the player is doing is building up a little model of the system that you designed. And they're doing, they have hypotheses and then they do little experiments. And I think there's a lot of kind of like toy science in a lot of games. And so, yeah, this feeling of, the player kind of wanting to understand what you've made and going deeper and deeper. So that feeling of like, Oh, I know what I want to try differently this time. I love it. I also love it in a game where I get this feeling that, ooh, something here is broken. I bet I can exploit. I bet there's a thing here that the designer has not thought of. And so I'm going to use, you know, like an axe and I'm not going to wear any armor. And I bet I'm going to get this weird. And so that feeling of something being almost broken or the potential of it being broken, to me, that's catnip.

Sean Carroll: Well, it goes back to your self-image, right? You're playing a game to get reaffirmation that I'm pretty clever here. I am pretty clever. Speaking being pretty clever. Let's switch from go.

4

52 | Frank Lantz on the Logic and Emotion of Games

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

(someone): have an ongoing career and a practice. And so that's what I've been doing for many years now. And as a game designer in New York, I made a lot of weird kind of experimental games. I had a small studio called Area Code. We specialized in location-aware games and street games, games that took place in physical spaces that incorporated computers but weren't on computers.

Sean Carroll: They weren't video games in the traditional sense.

(someone): Yeah. Instead, we were sort of taking advantage of the emerging kind of ubiquitous computing technology. to create new kinds of game experiences that brought back social interaction into the mix. So I did a lot of games like that. I taught a class in that style of game at NYU, and the students in that class made a game called Pac-Manhattan, which was translating the game of Pac-Man onto the grid, onto the street grid of New York City. So that's the kind of thing that we did. My studio did a bunch of games. We made a bunch of large-scale social games for Facebook. We also did a game called Drop 7, which you may be familiar with.

Sean Carroll: An old favorite of mine. I spent many hours playing Drop 7 on the iPhone.

(someone): Nice, nice. And yeah, so I've made lots and lots of games over the years. And then recently, a couple of years ago, I made a game called Universal Paperclips, which was the sort of first time that I had sat down to program a game, a game myself from from scratch.

5

169 | C. Thi Nguyen on Games, Art, Values, and Agency

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

(someone): He has a game where you're collecting four different colors by this conflict system and your score is whichever color you have the least of. And that totally changes the way you go about the game. Or he has scoring systems where like, or he invented cooperative board gaming where everyone scores together. So the scoring system sets your motivation to set who's on your side, it sets what you're trying to do. And I was like, oh my God, that's so interesting. And I haven't seen, I mean, that kind of insight is all over the game design space, but I haven't seen anyone in this like critical literature talking about it. So I ended up trying to give an art theory based on that, and it's that what game designers do is not just create environments, and they don't just tell stories. They tell you who to be in the game. They, in my language, design an agency, which mostly consists of your abilities, but also your goals. So they create the obstacles for you and your abilities and goals together. And that's the actual art. So the way I put it in the book is that the artistic medium of games is agency itself, right? Someone is telling you what you can do and what you should do, what you should pursue, what your practical relationships are to the world and each other. And that's the heart of game design. That's what makes games special. They're sculpted experiences of practicality. One of the things I think that's interesting here is that this is a radically different art form.

6

52 | Frank Lantz on the Logic and Emotion of Games

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

(someone): I think I think we are getting better and better, which is not to say that it's like a simple, straightforward path. you know, that over time we just get better at. Instead, it's this weird circuitous thing, like all forms of culture. Are we getting better at music? You know, sort of, you know, and yet there are ancient pieces of music that I find deeply moving. And so I think games are similar. As a design discipline, I do think we are developing new methods and better kinds of best practices and a sense of how to do this really difficult, challenging task slightly better. But it is irreducible.

Sean Carroll: Yeah. I mean, one aspect of the self-discovery is, given that there are definitely an aspect of being addicted or being in a zone and losing yourself, there's another aspect of games that let you become more conscious of processes that were unconscious, right? You had that wonderful example of a game where you tried to just walk with four keys on the keyboard, and you realized that walking is really hard if you have to tell your legs what to do.

(someone): Yeah, this wonderful game by a close friend of mine, Bennett Fahdy, who also teaches at NYU. Yeah, Quark, which is just a game where you're walking. And it's hilarious because what he did was this create this incredibly convoluted control scheme, where you control different limbs. And so it turns this trivial thing into this deeply complicated thing. But you can get good at it.

Sean Carroll: I did not get good at it in the 10 minutes that I spent.

7

52 | Frank Lantz on the Logic and Emotion of Games

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

(someone): But you can get good at it.

Sean Carroll: I did not get good at it in the 10 minutes that I spent. Give yourself time. OK, maybe I won't. So what do you think? We should wrap up a little bit. Two things. You can answer which one first you want. One is speculate crazily about the future of gaming. I mean, will it become a bigger and bigger entertainment behemoth or will it sort of blur into the cultural milieu so that games are everywhere in some sense? And the other is, I'm sure we have a heterogeneous audience in terms of some people are avid gamers, some people have never done it. For those who have never done it, How should they approach games? Are there certain games they should think about playing? Is there a gateway drug?

(someone): I want to answer the second question. Because the first question, it's too hard to predict culture. No, you have to answer both.

Sean Carroll: You can just choose which one. Ordering is all you can choose.

(someone): I'll do the first one first, then I'll just knock it out of the park and then move on. The job of a game designer is to answer that question, right? Every game designer is trying to figure out what the future of games is and is going to be and what it should be.

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52 | Frank Lantz on the Logic and Emotion of Games

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll: Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll. And I'm of the opinion that we don't talk about games enough. At least, we don't talk about games enough in an intellectual sense, in a sort of the theory of games. What are games? Why do we do them? Clearly, there's a whole bunch of people playing games. I just looked up the numbers online and we spend over twice as much on video games these days as we do on movies. despite the fact there's a lot more coverage of movies in TV and magazines. Two-thirds of American households play video games, or at least have someone in there playing video games for more than three hours per week. So video games pervade our lives, as do games more generally, right? Chess, Go, card games, etc. But what is a game? What's the definition of it? And why are we so attracted to them? Why do they fascinate us so? I think that my cats, Ariel and Caliban, in some sense play games. Ariel at least plays fetch. But we human beings go to great lengths to invent completely arbitrary rules, play by them, and then invest enormous amounts of emotion into whether we win or lose or how we do playing this game. So today we have on one of the world's leading people who does think about these issues in detail. Frank Lantz is a very active game designer.

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52 | Frank Lantz on the Logic and Emotion of Games

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

(someone): Yeah, there's a lot happening in that world that's really interesting.

Sean Carroll: And for the audience, because maybe not everyone is calibrated here, Compare the size of the video game industry to the size of the movie industry right now.

(someone): It's bigger. I don't know this is It's contentious, but but I think most by most measures it is basically the sort of biggest Pop-cultural industry right now so when a game like Red Dead Redemption 2 comes out It's not just the biggest game launch in history. It's the biggest kind of entertainment launch in history so yeah in terms of overall scale as a commercial industry, it's immense, which is great for me because as someone who is excited about the creative possibilities, I get to kind of like tag along, right? I get to hijack this rising tide, this commercial tide, which is not my primary interest. I don't want to make games that make money. I want people to buy my game. But I'm mostly interested in the creative potential, right? And so, It's good. It's a good healthy, I think, mix, honestly.

Sean Carroll: But there's a difference with other forms of mass market entertainment in that there's some barrier to entry. It's siloed a little bit. Like when a really big movie comes out, everyone knows about it, whether or not they go to see it. Whereas there's huge numbers of people who have no idea what you're talking about when you talk about Red Dead Redemption.

(someone): Yeah, but I mean, maybe less and less so over time.

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52 | Frank Lantz on the Logic and Emotion of Games

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

(someone): The job of a game designer is to answer that question, right? Every game designer is trying to figure out what the future of games is and is going to be and what it should be. And so in the process of making games, we are actively fulfilling that kind of role of predicting what the future of games is gonna be. So that's my short answer to that. The second question of what, yeah, a lot of times people come up to me and, you know, what kind of game should I play? How do I get into this world? What I like to tell them is, find a game that your friends are playing and play that. It's so much more important that you play a game as part of a living community than that you play the right game. Play a game that other people are playing that you can then talk to them about it. Like you can learn from them. You can say, well, what did you like? What did I, you know, I didn't get very far. I'm stuck here. Or that you can play with them. And sort of like think about the game as being part of a social practice where people communicate with each other through the game. I think that's I think that's more important than playing just the right kind of like little masterpiece that's going to, like this whole idea of masterpieces, you know what I mean? Like we have a running joke in game design about Citizen Kane. There's the Citizen Kane of games. But I think games by their nature are so squirrely, right?

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169 | C. Thi Nguyen on Games, Art, Values, and Agency

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll: That's a $75 credit at indeed.com slash Mindscape. Indeed.com slash Mindscape, offer valid through December 31st, terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? You need Indeed. Well, and you've also made the case, beyond struggling and striving, you like to think of games as art, and in particular, art in the medium of agency, which is, you know, those are a lot of big words, and maybe I'll let you gloss them a little bit in this context.

(someone): Great. So, I started this project out of annoyance, which is actually where most of my philosophy projects start. I started the project reading a bunch of books about why games so a bunch of other people are defending games, like, oh, games are important games are art. When you read this stuff, what you find often is that people are talking about how games tell good stories, or have beautiful graphics, or have good characters, or have good scripts, ways in which games are like movies, which is a familiar form of art. So you find this a lot in the history of art. People say something like, oh my god, photographs must be a kind of art because they can be like paintings, and then making photographs that look like paintings instead of doing the special thing that photographs can do. And I was really interested in the fact that there are all these games, these books about games, defending games, and they never talked about choice, skill, difficulty, puzzles, all the stuff that seems unique to me about games.

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52 | Frank Lantz on the Logic and Emotion of Games

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll: And I like the idea of having styles in these different kinds of games. It's a different aspect of this fact that games help with self-discovery, right? Not just self-discipline, but self-expression, sort of figuring out who we are.

(someone): I totally agree and I think any game that you play is an opportunity to learn something about yourself, an opportunity to be on this path of self-improvement, self-overcoming, you know what I mean? Like this path that I personally want to be on as a human, where I'm not just good at what I'm doing, but I'm kind of improving my idea of what good means. Like, what type of person am I trying to be, you know? And I think games give you an opportunity to do that. You don't have to. Most games are not like that. Most people who play games aren't doing that. Many people who play games, they're just wasting their time and they're just disappearing into a pleasant experience. And that's great, you know. But I think along the way, there's always this potential. And that's what gets me excited.

Sean Carroll: If we think about the history of game design, are we getting better at connecting with the sublime in our games? Is that something that is valued in the community?

(someone): I think we are. I think I think we are getting better and better, which is not to say that it's like a simple, straightforward path. you know, that over time we just get better at.

13

52 | Frank Lantz on the Logic and Emotion of Games

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

(someone): have an ongoing career and a practice. And so that's what I've been doing for many years now. And as a game designer in New York, I made a lot of weird kind of experimental games. I had a small studio called Area Code. We specialized in location-aware games and street games, games that took place in physical spaces that incorporated computers but weren't on computers.

Sean Carroll: They weren't video games in the traditional sense.

(someone): Yeah. Instead, we were sort of taking advantage of the emerging kind of ubiquitous computing technology. to create new kinds of game experiences that brought back social interaction into the mix. So I did a lot of games like that. I taught a class in that style of game at NYU, and the students in that class made a game called Pac-Manhattan, which was translating the game of Pac-Man onto the grid, onto the street grid of New York City. So that's the kind of thing that we did. My studio did a bunch of games. We made a bunch of large-scale social games for Facebook. We also did a game called Drop 7, which you may be familiar with.

Sean Carroll: An old favorite of mine. I spent many hours playing Drop 7 on the iPhone.

(someone): Nice, nice. And yeah, so I've made lots and lots of games over the years. And then recently, a couple of years ago, I made a game called Universal Paperclips, which was the sort of first time that I had sat down to program a game, a game myself from from scratch.

14

169 | C. Thi Nguyen on Games, Art, Values, and Agency

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

(someone): They're sculpted experiences of practicality. One of the things I think that's interesting here is that this is a radically different art form. So in a lot of cases, I think when people want to talk about the artistic qualities of a thing that an artist made, they want ones that stay in the thing. They want the qualities that are in the novel, in the painting. I think what's interesting in games is, If games are sculpted practicality, then the beauty emerges in the practical action. So in other words, when you play a game, it's not the game that's beautiful, it's you that's beautiful, right? Or funny or awkward, right? In Twister, you're the person that fell comically and everyone laughs at. In rock climbing, I'm the person that's momentarily graceful. In chess, the beauty is in your mind figuring out, right? So it's like, Game designers are creating environments that sculpt our actions where the beauty is supposed to show up, not in the environment of the game itself, but in our action. I mean, it can also show up in the environment. But I think a lot of the literature about games has been going around looking for qualities that are in the game, like, oh, the graphics are beautiful, the sound is beautiful, the story is beautiful. And they're not looking at how radically different games are. And I think there are other things like this. that are also mostly neglected. But the thing that makes games unique is that they're sculpted action.

15

52 | Frank Lantz on the Logic and Emotion of Games

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

(someone): It's an expressive aesthetic form in that sense. I don't think you can dictate to culture how culture should interpret things. I think culture is so complicated and nebulous, this process. I try to contribute in my work as a teacher, as a designer, as someone who is out giving talks and stuff. I do try to get people to be aware of what it is that people who love games, what it is that they love. Because I think it can be confusing. Like if you're outside of the world of games looking in, it can look like nonsense. It looks like an explosion in a cartoon factory. It's like, what is happening? This weird, violent junk that my kid is obsessed with. And I do hope that I can help people who look at that understand, no, part of what your kid is doing is deep problem solving. Part of what your kid is doing is exploring a complex system and forming hypotheses and trying to get better at it. Part of what your kid is doing is developing discipline. Part of what they're doing is social and collaborative. Um, and yeah, and and so, um, that doesn't, you know, in some cases, you know, people's, yeah, some most kids play too many video games. They probably do. And, and, but balance. Yeah, but but understanding what is happening under the hood.

16

52 | Frank Lantz on the Logic and Emotion of Games

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

(someone): And so what the player is doing is building up a little model of the system that you designed. And they're doing, they have hypotheses and then they do little experiments. And I think there's a lot of kind of like toy science in a lot of games. And so, yeah, this feeling of, the player kind of wanting to understand what you've made and going deeper and deeper. So that feeling of like, Oh, I know what I want to try differently this time. I love it. I also love it in a game where I get this feeling that, ooh, something here is broken. I bet I can exploit. I bet there's a thing here that the designer has not thought of. And so I'm going to use, you know, like an axe and I'm not going to wear any armor. And I bet I'm going to get this weird. And so that feeling of something being almost broken or the potential of it being broken, to me, that's catnip.

Sean Carroll: Well, it goes back to your self-image, right? You're playing a game to get reaffirmation that I'm pretty clever here. I am pretty clever. Speaking being pretty clever. Let's switch from go.

17

52 | Frank Lantz on the Logic and Emotion of Games

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

(someone): I think I think we are getting better and better, which is not to say that it's like a simple, straightforward path. you know, that over time we just get better at. Instead, it's this weird circuitous thing, like all forms of culture. Are we getting better at music? You know, sort of, you know, and yet there are ancient pieces of music that I find deeply moving. And so I think games are similar. As a design discipline, I do think we are developing new methods and better kinds of best practices and a sense of how to do this really difficult, challenging task slightly better. But it is irreducible.

Sean Carroll: Yeah. I mean, one aspect of the self-discovery is, given that there are definitely an aspect of being addicted or being in a zone and losing yourself, there's another aspect of games that let you become more conscious of processes that were unconscious, right? You had that wonderful example of a game where you tried to just walk with four keys on the keyboard, and you realized that walking is really hard if you have to tell your legs what to do.

(someone): Yeah, this wonderful game by a close friend of mine, Bennett Fahdy, who also teaches at NYU. Yeah, Quark, which is just a game where you're walking. And it's hilarious because what he did was this create this incredibly convoluted control scheme, where you control different limbs. And so it turns this trivial thing into this deeply complicated thing. But you can get good at it.

Sean Carroll: I did not get good at it in the 10 minutes that I spent.

18

191 | Jane McGonigal on How to Imagine the Future

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

(someone): You're not in it alone. Even if it's a solo game, you're never in it alone. So we learn to ask for help from others or advice from others. We learn to try again. And truly, it's just it's such a wonderful way of being, being comfortable with needing to grow, needing to improve through our own effort and attention. and it does seem to be transferable to other situations. There have been laboratory studies where you can separate people into groups that frequently game and people who don't, or you can get people who don't game and you can put them through a six-week gaming boot camp and then see have they changed their response to purposely difficult work, you know, intentionally impossible puzzles to solve? You know, do they do they try more strategies? Do they stay engaged? How fast do they give up? Are they likely to turn to the other person in the lab and ask them for help? You know, we see that these behaviors, they they can translate to our real world interactions, not just in the virtual world. And what I have found in my work with gamers and also, you know, validated, reflected in the research literature, is that actually having conversations about this skill set helps it translate. So, you know, I have kids, when I see them not giving up in a game, I make sure to validate that and reflect that back to them. Be like, that's amazing. Like, I know you've been trying to get off this level for a while. How many times have you tried? A hundred times.

19

169 | C. Thi Nguyen on Games, Art, Values, and Agency

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

(someone): He has a game where you're collecting four different colors by this conflict system and your score is whichever color you have the least of. And that totally changes the way you go about the game. Or he has scoring systems where like, or he invented cooperative board gaming where everyone scores together. So the scoring system sets your motivation to set who's on your side, it sets what you're trying to do. And I was like, oh my God, that's so interesting. And I haven't seen, I mean, that kind of insight is all over the game design space, but I haven't seen anyone in this like critical literature talking about it. So I ended up trying to give an art theory based on that, and it's that what game designers do is not just create environments, and they don't just tell stories. They tell you who to be in the game. They, in my language, design an agency, which mostly consists of your abilities, but also your goals. So they create the obstacles for you and your abilities and goals together. And that's the actual art. So the way I put it in the book is that the artistic medium of games is agency itself, right? Someone is telling you what you can do and what you should do, what you should pursue, what your practical relationships are to the world and each other. And that's the heart of game design. That's what makes games special. They're sculpted experiences of practicality. One of the things I think that's interesting here is that this is a radically different art form.

20

52 | Frank Lantz on the Logic and Emotion of Games

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

(someone): The job of a game designer is to answer that question, right? Every game designer is trying to figure out what the future of games is and is going to be and what it should be. And so in the process of making games, we are actively fulfilling that kind of role of predicting what the future of games is gonna be. So that's my short answer to that. The second question of what, yeah, a lot of times people come up to me and, you know, what kind of game should I play? How do I get into this world? What I like to tell them is, find a game that your friends are playing and play that. It's so much more important that you play a game as part of a living community than that you play the right game. Play a game that other people are playing that you can then talk to them about it. Like you can learn from them. You can say, well, what did you like? What did I, you know, I didn't get very far. I'm stuck here. Or that you can play with them. And sort of like think about the game as being part of a social practice where people communicate with each other through the game. I think that's I think that's more important than playing just the right kind of like little masterpiece that's going to, like this whole idea of masterpieces, you know what I mean? Like we have a running joke in game design about Citizen Kane. There's the Citizen Kane of games. But I think games by their nature are so squirrely, right?