#106 - Frank Lantz

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's episode is with Frank Lantz. Frank is a game designer and the director of the NYU Game Center. He co-founded Area Code Games, and most recently released a game called Universal Paperclips, in which you're an AI that makes paperclips. Frank's on Twitter at F L A N T Z, and his site is franklantz.net. All right, here we go.
I was watching one of your talks earlier this week, and you said something that essentially in game design, the most compelling experiences are made out of gaps. But then in another talk, you said games are the aesthetic form of thinking and doing.
And if you think about thinking and doing in real life, it's not that many gaps. So how do these two things work together?

**Frank Lantz** (0:52)
Okay, so the thing about gaps is that comes from me having a skeptical take about the explanation of games that focuses on them being simulations. So there's one view of games where you look at it and you're like, oh, yeah, I see what video games are. That's where you get to be a Viking. It's like a virtual reality thing where you get to live out your fantasy and they're crude now, but eventually they'll be like the holodeck and they'll be these seamless simulations that are infinitely complex and dense and detailed. And that's where they're headed. And so that's what games are. And my view is that games have an element of simulation in them often and often that's a core ingredient of what they're doing.
But the real value comes from the difference, right? Not from the similarity, not from the seamless identical quality, but in the same way that like a painting of a horse, you don't want it to run around, right? You don't want to climb on it and have it carry you from one place to another, right? And you want it to be realistic in some ways, right? You want it to capture the way a horse looks and express something about the visual identity of a horse, but you don't want to have to feed it hay and carrots, right? So that's the way painting works. That's the leverage that painting gets on the world. And that's the way paintings are meaningful and expressive, right, that gap between the thing that looks like a horse and an actual horse. And you know, you can try to close that gap. You can have trompe l'oeil paintings that try to trick you. But at a certain point, it starts to be like kitsch, right? Then all of a sudden, you've got the sort of the mechanical horse that you put a quarter in, you're riding, and it's sort of like, you know, you've lost something in trying too closely to meld those things. Like you want to have that space in between. And the same is true of games, that the way that they generate meaning or beauty or interest or all the qualities that we want out of them is not just their ability to simulate something, but the space between that simulation and the real thing.
And that space allows us to reflect on that thing. It gives us some perspective.
And I think that's important.
And in the way that painting is about looking, it's the art form that is about looking, games are the art form about thinking and doing, and about our ability to have a goal and pursue that goal and accomplish it, to solve problems, about cause and effect, about systems and how they work, about being an active agent in the world.

**Craig Cannon** (4:33)
And why not just doing?

**Frank Lantz** (4:36)
When I say thinking and doing, I'm, I guess, trying to get you to picture chess and basketball, right? So I don't want to mislead people into thinking about games in a very small way as being a certain set of games, like the games that are strategy games where it really emphasizes cognitive, cerebral problem-solving and decision-making.
I'm talking about the full broad spectrum of games that includes that kind of very deliberate, self-conscious thinking and problem-solving, but then also games that are about, you know, running around and about more intuitive, automatic physical responses, about skill, about unconscious behaviors, about spinning in place until you're dizzy, right? You're gonna be like, those are games too.
And I think in all of those cases, they are sort of opportunities to carve out a little space, a little space separate from the ordinary world where we solve problems and do things, where we think and do for its own sake, right? As an end in and of itself, not in order to accomplish something else in the world, but just because we're indulging ourselves in art. It's like you let your brain off the leash. Our brains are leashed to all of the things that we need to get done in the world. And then in a game, we take our brain off the leash, our brains and our bodies, and we just let them kind of like run wild for its own sake because it's beautiful and weird and interesting.