Episode 16: Frank Lantz- Game Design: Brilliance & Fallacy of Chess, Go, Poker and the Future of Online Gaming
About Frank Lantz:
My next guest on The One Percent Project is Frank Lantz, Director at the NYU Game Center and Owner of Everybody House Games. Frank was a creative director at Zynga as well after his social gaming company Area/Code was acquired by Zyna in 2011. I discovered him and his work while reading The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win by Maria Konnikova. Maria in the book talks about him and his expertise in game design as she mastered Poker. This led me to explore game design and understand how does this new age discipline work and impact our lives.
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In this conversation, he talks about:
How games are designed and built and their impact on society.
The brilliance of games such as Chess, Go and Poker.
How entertainment companies such as Netflix see Epic Games and sleep as their primary competitor.
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Transcript:
*The transcripts are not 100% accurate.
Frank: .... a practitioner and a teacher at the same time. I have, for a very long time, been both making games and then teaching. I consider myself like a full-time game developer and kind of a part-time academic. I think it's really useful for me, in my own practice, to have both of these contexts and to bring them to bear that when I'm in the classroom, I am drawing from my experience as a developer, I know what it's like to actually have to ship working code. But I'm saying like... like, it is the kind of day-to-day process the nuts and bolts of actually building a game within the context of having a publisher or having a client or having an audience, having bills to pay, and having a team that relies on you, and you're just putting out fires, and you're... and you're just solving the practical problems, that's really useful to bring to bear in the classroom.
But then vice versa, when you're... when I'm doing my work as a... as an indie developer, or with a studio to... to be able to draw from my experience in the classroom, where there's more of a focus on the principles, on the big-picture vision of, “What is it? Why do we do these things in the first place? What's the context for what we're making? Why do we do it? What are the values that we get out of games? Like, what makes them important to us in our lives?” And... and sort of being reminded that this isn't just about putting out fires, and putting nuts on bolts and, you know, shipping code, it's about pursuing a vision. It’s... it's about trying to discover something truly meaningful in the world and convey that. I just like having a foot in both worlds, and not ever being completely comfortable in one of those places. And I've always... I've always enjoyed that kind of back and forth.
Pritish: What is game design?
Frank: Oh, well, I think game design is a... is an ambiguous term, because it can mean many different things. And I think in a general sense, game design is just a way of talking about game creation. The people who make games, we can just refer to them as game designers. And there's an element of design in every aspect that goes into game creation. Video games are interdisciplinary. And they often require input from many different kinds of people, the people who are creating the code, the programmers, the people who are creating the visuals, the artists, the interface, that the music, the sound, the people who are doing the world building, creating the characters, it can have many different kinds of disciplines that come together to create a game.
I think all of that is designed. When it's done in a mindful way, when it is done in pursuit of a vision, when you have... when you're trying to make something original and you're trying to make something genuinely good by... by your own criteria by, and you're not just in it to pay bills or maximize revenue or... but you're really making something to... in pursuit of some creative goal, that's game design. All of those people are game designers, and all of that is game design. That's the broad definition of game design.
Then there's a more specific definition of game design, which is game design is the new discipline, it's the new design discipline, which has to do with how you craft an experience out of rules and goals. How do you... what is the... what is the design discipline that has nothing to do with visuals and graphics or stories, words, pictures, but is about the... the constraints and the affordances of a system that guides the players’ experience by thinking about what they can do and... and what they're trying to do, the challenges they're trying to overcome and they... and the ways that they can... can pursue those goals. That's game design in a more specific way. The person who's thinking about the experience of the players, decisions and actions. And... and like that's a kind of a... that's kind of a new design discipline.
We understand a little bit design in the sense of designing a beautiful poster or designing an album cover or design that goes into various other kinds of existing craft. But this is... this is kind of new, the idea that you are crafting an experience for someone just by the... by determining what... what actions they can take, the space of possibilities. That's game design in a more specific way. And you might think of that as including things like system design. And when you are balancing an economy of elements that fit together, adjusting how these things fit together, and how the player navigates through them, the... through their choices and actions, then that's... that's game design in a more specific way.
And when we teach game design with the NYU Game Center, we really embrace both... both of those meanings. We... we recruit students who are coming from a bunch of different backgrounds. Some of them are code literate and know how to program. Some of them are totally not, and they're coming... they're... they’re graphic artists, or they are... they're writers, are some of them are coming from a background in something totally different. It might be in community building and or activism or psychology or architecture. But we... we do try to teach that... that specific discipline of thinking about crafting an experience like, understanding, what is it about Tic Tac Toe that has made it absorb billions of hours of human attention? Like, not everything does. Like, not every combination of rules, like can be a bottomless pit of like obsessive compulsive activity. There's something that happens there, like understanding what that is. What happens in jump rope? What happens in hopscotch, what happens in basketball? And what happens in World of Warcraft? Like, what is it about those activities that draws people in, fascinates them, gives them some complex, interesting experience that brings them back? And so, we teach that, but we just teach the broader sense of this interdisciplinary process, where people are combining all of these different elements into... into creating an overall experience.
We don't produce game designers, in the sense of we don't... we don't typically graduate people who are just going to write a design document and hand it over. We... we graduate people who are building things, actually people who are... who are shipping code and know how to like model 3D objects and rig them and light them and create like all of the... the elements that go together. But hopefully, within this larger context of discovering their own vision, their own creative vision for why this is coming together, what are you making, and why is it... why is it good? Like, what... why does it deserve to be in the world? Why does it deserve to absorb people's attention? That's my roundabout way of showing you, but it's... it’s an ambiguous and... and multi layered thing, game design.
Pritish: There's so many elements that have to come together...
Frank: Yeah.
Pritish: .... to create an amazing game.
Frank: Yeah.
Pritish: And even then, you don't know what the success would be.
Frank: Oh, you never know. It's... it's a hit-driven business in a way that you just can't predict what... what is or is it going to be successful.
Pritish: You have been teaching game design for more than 12 years now, and at one of the top institutes in the world.
Frank: Yeah.
Pritish: What has teaching game design taught you?
Frank: Well, it makes you self-reflect. When you're... when you're in the classroom and you are standing up in front of a bunch of smart, talented young people and claiming to be an expert on something, it puts the pressure on you to think through what it is about this thing. I think that's for me, it's always been as much a part of my life to... to be... to be teaching alongside being a practitioner, that I see it as being an inextricable part of my whole process. Like, when I write for... I had a studio in New York City called area code that 25 people and we made all kinds of different games, and then that got acquired by Zynga. And a couple of years later, I found myself as a kind of a solo practitioner, and I had to kind of reinvent my practice. And part of the pressure for... for sitting down and... and making universal paperclips was that feeling of, “Well, if I'm going to claim to be an expert at this thing, I need to make sure that I'm still capable of doing it. And that now that I no longer have, you know, this studio that is an act of going concern, I need to figure out like what it means to make a game just by myself.”
I would say a big part of the thing that motivated me to... to sit down and... and build a game just by myself was that knowledge that I I needed to be able to stand up in front of a room full of people and say, “I know how to make games. Here’s... I have something of value to share with you. And I was like, “Do I... do I still know how to do that?” That was like me sitting down and thinking, “Okay, I need to stay... keep my hand in, make sure that I'm able to do this, even as an individual without necessarily having a big team.” And that, I think, was a part of the thing that I learned really from teaching. And it's just... I mean, it's... it has forced me to try to come up with some principles. I'm not... I'm not typically a theory guy. I'm more of a g... I make things, I do things. I'm not that self-conscious about the... about applying a certain specific process. I'm a little more go with the flow. But by... by teaching, I have had to think through my process a little bit more deliberately. I think it has... it has taught me how to do that, how to be a little bit more... how to boil down my process into something that I can articulate and describe.
Pritish: Can game design be applied to business and day-to-day life?
Frank: Yes. I think... I think there's a little bit of a danger zone, which I would describe as being the domain of gamification. I don’t know if you're familiar with gamification.
Pritish: Yes.
Frank: Yeah. Gamification, especially a few years ago, was a very hot topic. And there was this idea that, “Oh, what game designers know is how to motivate people and how to make experiences that are engaging. And therefore, if we can apply some of the stuff that game designers know to other domains, we can get this kind of engagement and we can get this kind of motivation.” And I think there's a little bit of truth in that, but there's a lot of... a lot of maybe BS, I would say. Like, there's a lot of... there are a lot of people who were just selling a kind of a turnkey solution to something that doesn't really have it. And it was a little bit of a snake oil thing going on, I think. And it's kind of died down a little bit. For... but for a while, this idea of gamification that you can... that you can Inject a kind of the magic of games into non-game experiences and get a lot of that value.
And I think part of the... the grain of truth in that comes from the fact that software design itself is a very young field. Software is still often produced without design. Software is still often just the result of programmers and producers and project managers, and business people coming up with a set of requirements and then execute, but without the same kind of consideration of the user’s experience that... that design is all about. And really, what game designers are, is one of the first kind of examples of software designers. Like, it's a well-established version. You still do have like interaction designers as a discipline, but it's kind of a young discipline, and it's not well established. Whereas designers, I think, are a very well-established type of software designer. Really, what's valuable about game design is that it's a demonstration of the power of design applied to software. And it's really... that's... it's not that there's some kind of magic in games that you can extract and put into a non-game application, it's that what game designers do is think about the player and the player’s experience. They put themselves in the player's shoes. They are advocates for the player. They see from the player's perspective. They empathize with what the player is doing, and every step along the way. Because that's what it... that's what games are. I mean, games are all about that player experience.
And so, what game design does is foreground the experience of the player and make that the... the central driving force that guides the development of the software. That's the real value, I think, of... of applying game design to... to other domains, in terms of developing products. And then I would say that there's broader sense, in which, because game designers are crafting experiences by creating systems out of goals and actions out of affordances and constraints, that there is a... there's a kind of systems literacy which a game designer, a good game designer has, that I think is really valuable. And this is... this is related to the kinds of lessons that you can draw from being... from playing a game seriously. If we talk about poker, for example, Maria's book about becoming a better thinker and a better decision maker, by having a deep engagement with... with poker, I think that's the kind of systems literacy that a game designer can bring to bear on other domains. You can look at a at a situation and understand what is inefficient about it, or where it's getting stuck, or why it is in a bad equilibrium. And you can... you can have maybe good intuitions about the kinds of changes you might want to make to a system to have it be more robust, or have it be... to evolve in a more positive way. And so, that, I think, is a... is a more general sense in which game design thinking can... can be beneficial in other domains.
Pritish: So, thanks for demystifying gamification, because it was a business jargon, most consultants would come into a room and say, “Let's gamify this.”
Frank: Right.
Pritish: And usually, there are not very good hard outcomes of people spend... a lot of us, a lot of business guys, including me spent... a lot of us trying to gamify stuff.
Frank: Yeah.
Pritish: And we really didn't get to very conclusive outcomes. And I think it's a bit of a chance.
Frank: It's challenging. I mean, it's not that it can't ever work.
Pritish: Yes.
Frank: If you think of the way that we learn the English alphabet with a song like, “A, B, C, D, E, F, G,” that's kind of a music... music... musicification of the alphabet, right? But it's not... and you can do the same thing with games. But it's always... there's always going to be a... like, it's not that... it's not that you can't do that with music, it's just that that's not the main thing that music does. Music can serve that role, but it's never using music to teach, it's there's always going to be a little bit of a friction there. Because music is such a powerful intrinsic experience, you try to attach it to something else in this instrument away, is a little bit weird.
The same thing is for games. You can trick people into doing the dishes by telling them it's a game. And it is possible to do. And you get people to do other things in an instrumental way by applying games. But there is a kind of a friction there. Like, in some ways... but people are very smart about knowing the difference between washing dishes and playing a game. They pick up on that pretty quick. And because, in a way, what games are is they're... they're anti-work. Games are the thing you do when you're not working. When you're not doing the dishes and you're not building a barn and you're not killing wolves, then you're sitting around the fire and you sing a song or you play a game. And the idea that... it's just there's something special about that. We need a space outside of work. We need a space outside of the things that we're doing that have an instrumental goal where we're trying to accomplish something specific, and we're putting in an effort to accomplish that.
And in games, you get this kind of strange, magical realm where you put in an immense amount of effort for no concrete outcome. It’s for its own sake, because it's... because it truly... there's something magical and beautiful about just running to see how fast you can run, not to carry a message to the next village, but to run for the sake of running, to run to discover how your body works and how fast it can go, and whether you can run faster than someone else and what... what it would take to run faster than someone else. Like, those are the qualities that, as soon as you would try to attach them to something else like attaching an ox to a cart, somehow the magic goes away.
Pritish: Game is a medium. Yes, people can learn ABCD or the initial alphabets using that. It's not a principle like Einstein's relativity thing, right, which will be true in all situations. So, it can help people to do something, and it can work for a lot of people. But it doesn't mean it's a universal principle that is going to work all the time. So, I think that's maybe a distinction between gamification of games as a medium than an actual hardcore principle. Which I think gamification turned out to be saying, “This is the principle that we need to follow,” rather than saying, “This is a medium that we can, you know, explore.”
So, coming to the next thing and coming to game designers, how does a game designer get to an idea that this is going to work, or they need to build it? Like, is their consumer interaction? They... do they look at the market? Or it's a personal insight or the obsession, like universal paperclips?
Frank: Many, many different ways to get there. It is... I would say, one of the main things that game designers do is play a lot of games. So, I think, typically, not everyone, sometimes... some game designers don't play. Like, most good game designers, most truly great game designers, the one thing they have in common is that they are a voracious player of games. And they play a lot of different kinds of games. They expose themselves to what... what's out there, and they're fascinated by games, they're interested in games. And so, that's a big part of it. It's like you're... you're... you're aware of games, and you're thinking always about what's missing? Like, what could you do that's original and different? So, something that's like this, but never been done, or that fixes this problem with this game, or you see a potential here, that could be turned upside down and made different or made better. And so, a lot of it is... is that.
You know, is... as for where ideas come from, we don't know. We can't know, right? Because the nature of creativity is that it is the process of thinking thoughts that could not have been predicted, right? That's what... that's what we mean, when we say, what is... what is... what is the pinnacle of human thought? What is human creativity? Well, human creativity is about coming up with things that you could not have predicted, right? So... and so, it is... now having said that, there's a lot of different... there's a lot of places you can start, right? You can start with a mechanic, right, which means that you start with an idea for a core bit of gameplay, like, “Oh, what about a card game, where I'm holding your hand of cards, and you're holding my hand of cards, right?” Or like, “What about a form of bidding where it's the lowest bid that wins instead of the highest bid?” Oh, okay. So, you start with some little... like, it's almost like a little mechanical thing, and now can you build a game around that, right?
You can also start with a theme. What if I wanted to make a game about... about religious, you know, experience? What if I wanted to make a game about love? What if I wanted to make a game about jealousy or war, right? Or make a game about zombies? Imagine such a thing, right? Or it could be about an audience. It could say, “Well, I have... I have to entertain a roomful of eight-year-olds. I need to design a game for these 58-year-olds to play,” right? It could be about the specific context, you know?
Pritish: Yeah.
Frank: Or it could be about a piece of technology, which is one of the ways I start often with games is, “Oh, look at this new kind of technical thing in the world. Is that a surface that could allow for a new kind of game experience?” You know, what kind of... this is where Hey Robot came from, right?
Pritish: Yeah.
Frank: We... we had an Alexa, we had one of these smart speakers and it was in our house. And we used it for like timing things. That was pretty much it, right? We used it... you know? But it was sitting around and we... we would like just mess around with it. You know, every night when we were having dinner, we would try to have fun with it. And... and we started making games for it, right? What could... what kind of games can you make having this little bit of AI that lives in your house, right? And... and so... yeah, so there's many paths towards... towards creating games.
Pritish: I would like to know the brilliance and the fallacies in Go, Chess, and Poker.
Frank: Hmm. Well, I can I love these... these kinds of games. The... the games that are simple and yet seem to be surprisingly deep. There's a... there's a notion in... in game design. Some... some game designers talk about the idea of elegance. It’s a big thing for game designers is elegance. Because when you're designing a game, one of the things you have to... you quickly realize is that complexity is a burden. You have lots of ideas and you want to add lots of things to your game, but almost everything you add to your game, it's like it's costing you. You have this budget of complexity that you're spending. And the more stuff you add, the harder your game is to understand from the player’s point of view, the more confusing it is, the more unpleasant it is. It becomes a thing that I have to learn and It's complicated and unwieldy. And in an elegant game, you have... you have the... you have maximum output of surprise, interest, cool, fun behavior from the system with the minimum amount of rules and materials.
And games like, Go and Poker, I think, are great demonstrations of this notion of elegance, that you can have a simple set of rules that is intuitive and... and yet constantly interesting and surprising and dramatic and... and... and... and you can pour your attention into it, and it doesn't fill up. It just absorbs all the attention you want to give it. You can... you can devote your life to studying a game like this, and it'll just pull everything you've got out of you. Part of what seems kind of scary.
Pritish: Yeah.
Frank: There's a famous saying that, “If you want to... if you want to destroy a promising young man, don't use poison, just teach him how to play chess.” Have you ever heard this saying?
Pritish: No.
Frank: Yes. Just teach him how to play chess. Like, it’s scary that thought, but there's some truth to it. There is some truth. I think a life devoted to chess can be a...
Frank: If you look at Hikaru Nakamura or Magnus Carlsen or one of the great contemporary chess players, they seem to be living a good life, it's... but there's a little something a little bit scary about this idea that this is a... a well, that you can slip down into and it just keeps going forever. But there is something beautiful about that. And if you... I think, figuring out how to incorporate a game like this into your life in a way that is healthy where it's balanced with the other things in your life, but you... but you have this... this attachment to this deep discipline that you can be a lifelong learner and studying and improving, it's just nothing like it. There's no other... because I think of games as... as works of culture that are lightning poems, or songs or stories or films. But where else can you find a work of culture like Go or Chess?
Pritish: Yeah.
Frank: Where, for thousands of years, people have been playing this, exploring it, enjoying it, teaching it to their children, and then their children teach it to their children. I mean, that's... but it's... but it's something like a song. Go is something like a song. It's an arrangement of rules and it's... and materials that has its own qualities, its own particular characteristics, like a... like a song. But it is like a symphony. But it's like... it's like... it's like a symphony, and learning it is like learning an instrument. It’s like a song that has violins inside of it. It has a whole... like it... like learning Go is like learning the violin. That's the thing you can do. Like, but it's like... like... like learning how to appreciate classical music. It's... it's like learning how to write classical music. It is deep and rich. And that's just 1 game. And it's just like a small game, just a... just a handful of rules.
Pritish: Yeah.
Frank: It just happened to be the rules that are in their balance to produce this kind of like endless... endlessly wonderful, beautiful font of fascination for... for the human mind. And inspiration for it. Look at the relationship of Go to AI. The way AlphaGo kind of like demonstrated certain breakthrough in how we think about what thinking is, it's just... I mean, how can you not love that? It's beautiful. To me, games like that are... are just remarkable demonstrations of the power of... of creativity and... and the potential beauty of... this what I aspire to do when I make a game is to... you just hope to be able to make a thing that has a fraction, has... has a tiny sliver of the... of the kind of beauty that Poker and Chess and Go have in them.
But then if you ask me, like, what's the fallacy? Because that was part of your question. I think that... I think... well, 1 is... 1 way of thinking about the limitations of these games, is that perhaps a big part of what makes Go and Chess as beautiful as they are, is that they were just in their place at the time.
Frank: It's possible that there's nothing particularly special about the arrangement. I mean, I almost... I hate to even say this, because I don't think it's true, but I need to be able to like say it. It's possible that... that Go isn't that special in its... in its arrangement of... of the internal qualities, rules and materials, but it just... because it was in the place at the time, it became a cultural domain that... that people contributed to, and it developed over time. And a... and a big part of what makes Go beautiful, I do think this is actually true. A big part of what makes it Go beautiful is that it has been played for thousands of years. So, the reason it's been played for thousands of years is because it's beautiful. But... but the reason it's beautiful is that it's been played for thousands of years.
Pritish: Yeah.
Frank: But I'm saying it's almost like this weird bootstrapping thing, where it's... it was good enough to draw people into it, and then by drawing people into it, it was the people who excavated the meaning of Go by... by playing these gorgeous games, by discovering the depth of the strategy, by writing beautiful books of literature of... about Go and its meaning, and about how to play well, about people to develop schools to teach it, and... and the whole culture of serious play that built up around it. That... that's a big part of the beauty of Go, that, in some abstract sense, that these handful of rules are magic. It's that we as humans decided to elevate that. And... and it was... and it was capable of doing it. Like, not all systems could do that. And Go could do that.
But... but there is, I think a big part of what makes it special is the history, and... and... and the... and the contributions of... of millions and millions of human hands and eyes and hearts as they contributed to this... this great work that... that culminates, in a sense, with AlphaGo. That, in a sense, AlphaGo I think is a deeply human expression. Even though it's a glimpse of a kind of non-human intelligence or a post-human kind of way of thinking about it, it's also just, to me, it is deeply human. It is like hearing Go itself speak. I think AlphaGo comes from... comes from outside. It comes from Go and kind of emerges from it. And it is... and that's the result of generations of people and... and... and lives that have been devoted to exploring the meaning of Go. There's one last sense I would say it's an important thing to keep in mind. I don't know if Nassim Taleb?
Frank: Yes.
Pritish: Okay. Nassim Taleb has a concept of the... the ludic fallacy; ludic meeting games. And his... his concept of the ludic fallacy is that games of course, one of the things that makes them fascinating is how powerful they are as tools for thought, as conceptual metaphors. And you see this everywhere. You see it in business and biology and linguistics and philosophy, cosmology, everywhere you see games applied as a metaphor for like, “Oh, it's like a game. Imagine this. Imagine playing in Wittgenstein talking about language games, or in biology, thinking about the evolution of an echo system, as different strategies within a tournament teams. Games are this very powerful conceptual model. In fact, the whole mathematical concept of probability, of course, comes out of games. It comes out of Cardano and other early mathematicians studying dice games and card games and trying to get... trying to win at them, trying to... trying to actually get good at them. And thinking about probability as a mathematical discipline really did come out of games. They have this really powerful application, this idea of systems theory that I... that I spoke of earlier.
Now, Nassim Taleb’s point is that we are often fooled by the power of this conceptual model, we overestimate the... the way the world is like a game. We look at how randomness works in Poker, and we think, “Oh, business is a little bit like poker.” And but Taleb’s point is like, “No, the real world is nothing like Poker. Poker is small and tame and domesticated and well understood compared to the real world.”
Pritish: Yeah.
Frank: And if you go around thinking that... that that the real world is like poker, then you're fooling yourself. Because the whole idea of a deck of 52 cards that we think of as being enormous, oh, the permutations of just 52 cards is astronomical. It's like some huge number that you can’t imagine. But in Taleb’s point, it's like, “No, no, that's tiny. Poker is about what you get when you have a tame version of randomness that you've... that you've got that you can hold in your hand and say, ‘Look at this cute... this is... look at cute dragon. Like, I understand how dragons work,’ No, you don't. Because real dragons are the things that are 150 feet tall that are lurking behind you, and that are about to devour you. They're nothing like this tame dragon in your hands.” I think that's a really, really smart and interesting way.
Games are tiny little corners of the world that we carve out. They're deep... they're infinitely deep, and beautiful and meaningful. And they're meaningful, partly because they're small. That's what gives them leverage on the world is that they... that you can hold them in your hand. But I do think it's important to keep Taleb’s point in mind that, you know, the... the kinds of randomness and complexity and the kinds of systems that operate in the real world are much wilder. They're... they're much wilder than you can even begin to imagine. And never be mistaken that these... these little systems that you can hold in your hand are truly good models for the world.
Pritish: Netflix Sea Level very famously said that, “We are not competing that much against HBO, but Fortnite and sleep,” right? So... and Fortnite recently has been screening movies as well, thanks to the pandemic.
Pritish: So, do you really see that gaming has come to a pinnacle or a tipping point where it is going to get into a broader life scope of the daily human?
Frank: It's... it's hard to predict. I’m going to... I am not... I'm not confident that I can tell you where the business of games is going to go. I am pretty confident in saying it's going to continue to grow. And I do think that there is a vast potential for new kinds of experiences that we haven't seen yet. I am personally interested in the intersection of artificial intelligence and video games. I think we haven't even begun to see what's possible when some of these new techniques in AI are applied to games, not just to make the kinds of games we already have more efficiently or more cheaply, but to make brand new kinds of experiences that no one has ever seen before. That, to me, is... is... like that's my new passion. And that's... that's something that I'm working on now. And that's... that's the thing that I'm most interested in.
As for what that looks like in terms of whether it's streaming service, whether it's happening in the cloud, whether it's happening on a device, whether it's wearables, virtual reality, augmented reality, it's a pill you take, a thing you subscribe to, I mean, like... like, it's all... maybe all of those things, maybe things that we can't even imagine yet. But I think that it's not... it's not going to... it's not going to merge with everything else. It's not going to become... like it's not just been 1 big soup of... I'm not a believer in the metaverse theory that everything is going to become boiled down and... and digitized and made virtual. And that's the whole thing is going to be like 1 big game. It's just a big simulation that we're in, and movies and music and everything else is just part of one big... like that, to me, is that particular flavor. It's fine. That's the Wagner. Wagner the composer had this image for what art should be. And that was his... his vision. t was good. Good song comes to work total theater.
You go to a Wagner opera, you get everything. You get beautiful stage sets, it's like architecture. You get beautiful costumes, it's like fashion. You get a wonderful story, it story... you get the drama, you get the beautiful music, it's like a classical music. You get singing, it's like this gorgeous singing, it's romantic. You get everything. And if you sit back and it's just, “Ah, this is...” like that's fine, but what a little bit of that goes a long way. There's also things... there's other kinds of art. Art that is small and private and intimate. Art that... that you... you share with just a few other people. Art that is... that is abstract, that's about concepts and ideas. And it's not about overwhelming you with sensation, but it's about introducing you to one mind-blowing idea, like bluffing, and then like exploring that 1 idea in a... I don't think that the future of games is just going to be Fortnite and everything's going to fold into Fortnite and it's going to be Epic versus Netflix versus apple. I think the future of games is something that some 12-year-olds in Nebraska are doing now that you and I have not even heard of yet. But 2 months from now is going to... millions of people are going to be doing it. And we’ll be like, “Really? That?” And you'll look at it, you'll be like, “What even is it? Is this a crossword puzzle made out of squids that you... you put on your head and then you're dreaming at night?” It's like, “What?” Like that, to me is the best thing about games is that they're constantly surprising me. It's like teenage culture from the future. That's what I want. I just want this endless surprise and delight of novel, weird, cool, interesting stuff. That’s my prediction.
Pritish: Brilliant. 3 quickfire questions. Rapid fires.
Pritish: Okay. What is the hardest thing about your job?
Frank: Email. I hate email. Stop writing email. I mean, you could write email if you really have to, but I don't like writing it and I don't like reading it. It's just too... there's too much of it. And that's the thing I dread is like, “Ugh.”
Pritish: A book or a blog that has transformed your personal and professional life.
Frank: Meaningnes.org, the wonderful website by a guy named David Chapman, who was an early researcher in AI and is now has a project that's... that is about... that is about thinking. I don't know if you've... have you come across meaningness.org?
Pritish: No, I've actually come across David Chapman.
Frank: Okay, David Chapman.
Pritish: I didn't know.
Frank: You this guy. It is... I think he's brilliant. And he... he's exploring this idea of... of meta-rationality, of what it means to, not just be rational, but to understand how rationality fits into other modes. I find it really beautiful and profound way of thinking about thinking.
Pritish: Brilliant. If not a game designer, then what?
Frank: Oh. I wanted to be a cartoonist. But I think now, if I wasn't doing game design, I might just be making movies. It's not too late. Maybe I could just shift gears and start making... why am I making games? I should just be making movies. Maybe I’ll do that instead.
Pritish: You want to bring Iron Man back to life?
Frank: Maybe, maybe. Did I Iron Man die? Spoiler alert!
Pritish: Didn't he in the last one?
Frank: I haven't... I haven't seen that one.
Pritish: Oh, sorry about.
Frank: He’s one of the victims of the guy who... who made half the people die? Okay.
Pritish: Yeah.
Frank: Yeah, I'm going to bring Iron Man back to life. That's my goal.
Pritish: Brilliant. Frank, it was amazing speaking to you. Thanks for your time.
Frank: Thank you so much. I really enjoyed talking to you.