- The speaker believes that the most compelling experiences in game design are made out of gaps, meaning the difference between simulation and reality.
- Games have an element of simulation, but their real value comes from the space between the simulation and the real thing.
- Games are the art form about thinking and doing, allowing players to have goals, solve problems, and be active agents in the world.
- VR has the potential to fulfill people's passion for immersion and simulation, but there hasn't been a lot of established work in the industry yet.
- It is hard to predict the future of VR based on past trends, but it is likely that some version of VR will become big and important in the future.
- The speaker's game, Universal Paperclips, is inspired by Nick Bostrom's book and explores the concept of AI and trust.

The speaker discusses a clicker game called Universal Paperclips, which is inspired by a thought experiment from Nick Bostrom's book. The game aims to create a feeling of being absorbed by an activity and explores the addictive nature of games. The speaker believes that games have the potential to be expressive and meaningful, allowing players to both fall into the game and lean back to reflect on their experiences. They also mention the self-reflection and improvement that can come from playing difficult competitive games.

- The speaker believes that there is value in having a high-level competitive community in a game, even if most people play it casually.
- They believe that games should be expressive and have depth, similar to other art forms.
- The speaker reflects on their own experiences with games and believes that games should have both an immersive and reflective aspect.
- They discuss the game Shadow of the Colossus as an example of a game that engages both the desire to accomplish tasks and the ability to think about larger meanings.
- The speaker appreciates the thriving indie game scene and the uniqueness and innovation it brings to the industry.
- They also mention the popularity of eSports and the community aspect of games like League of Legends.

- The origins of League of Legends can be traced back to modding and mapping in Blizzard games like Warcraft 3 and StarCraft.
- The game evolved over time and became the number one multiplayer game on the internet without being designed by a professional game designer.
- The teaching approach at the school emphasizes creating a space for talented individuals to work together and learn from each other.
- The curriculum includes teaching coding fundamentals and encouraging programmers to think like artists.
- The goal is to explore taste and create games that resonate with others.
- The school addresses the darker sides of gaming culture through game studies classes that encourage reading and critical thinking.

- The speaker believes that incorporating challenging ideas into the curriculum can help students develop as designers.
- They emphasize the importance of thoughtful and purposeful design, rather than simply creating for the sake of making money or getting a job.
- The speaker believes that college and grad school can provide a space for deeper engagement with ideas and experimentation that may not be possible in the marketplace.
- The indie game market is hit-driven and not a reliable career, but making a good game increases the chances of success.
- The success of battle royale games like PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds and Fortnite came as a surprise, and the speaker speculates that the Hunger Games mod in Minecraft may have influenced this gameplay pattern.
- The speaker sees similarities between Fortnite and poker tournaments in terms of luck, skill, and the structure of starting with many players and ending with one winner.
- The speaker is interested in games with a long history, like chess, Go, and poker, because they see the potential of game design to have a transformative impact on the world.

- The speaker believes that video games should be seen as foundational experiences, like chess or basketball, that people can have careers in and teach their children.
- They argue that there is a connection between chess and computer games, as chess was an inspiration for computers.
- The speaker suggests that the distinction between video games and other games is overemphasized, and that there is a lot they have in common.
- They discuss the rise of eSports and wonder if it will surpass traditional sports like football in popularity.
- The speaker believes that new games will emerge in the eSports industry, but it is unclear what they will be.
- They mention the possibility of a hybrid physical and digital game, similar to fencing in the Olympics, incorporating both physical and electronic elements.
- The speaker mentions the success of Pokemon Go as a result of Google's internal research and the use of popular IP.
- They express skepticism about the future of augmented reality (AR) games, as they have not seen many interesting or successful games in this space.

- The speaker believes there is a lot of opportunity in the entertainment industry, but it is hard to predict what will be successful.
- Art and entertainment aim to be unpredictable and stay ahead of our ability to predict them.
- The speaker recommends games such as Universal Paperclips, Syncope House, Ape Out, Her Story, What Remains of Edith Finch, and Everything.
- The speaker also shares the story behind using a song by Tonto's Expanding Headband in Universal Paperclips.

- The speaker believes that the most compelling experiences in game design come from the gaps between simulation and reality.
- Games allow players to have goals, solve problems, and be active agents in the world.
- VR has potential for immersion and simulation, but there is limited established work in the industry.
- The speaker's game, Universal Paperclips, explores AI and trust and aims to create a feeling of absorption.
- Games should be expressive and have depth, similar to other art forms.
- The speaker appreciates the thriving indie game scene and the popularity of eSports.
- The school's teaching approach emphasizes collaboration, coding fundamentals, and critical thinking.
- College and grad school provide a space for deeper engagement with ideas and experimentation.
- The speaker sees potential for game design to have a transformative impact on the world.
- They believe video games should be seen as foundational experiences and may surpass traditional sports in popularity.
- The future of AR games is uncertain, and success in the entertainment industry is hard to predict.
- The speaker recommends various games, including Universal Paperclips, Syncope House, Ape Out, Her Story, What Remains of Edith Finch, and Everything.

Frank Lantz is a game designer and Director of the NYU Game Center. He cofounded Area/Code Games and most recently released a game called Universal Paperclips in which you’re an AI that makes paperclips.

https://twitter.com/flantz
https://gamecenter.nyu.edu/
http://www.franklantz.net/work/#/universal-paperclips/

The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon - https://twitter.com/craigcannon

***

Topics

00:00 - "Games are the aesthetic form of thinking and doing"

6:30 - VR skepticism

9:15 - Universal Paperclips

14:00 - Explaining games to non-gamers

19:45 - Competitive gaming

22:30 - Building life lessons into games

31:15 - Teaching game design

35:50 - Inspiration, hard work, and taste

38:50 - Darker sides of gaming culture

42:40 - The indie game market

45:00 - Unexpected trends in gaming

48:50 - Benedict Fritz asks - Frank you seem much more interested in chess, go, poker, and other games with a long history than most game designers. Where do you think this comes from?

51:45 - Esports

55:10 - Inventing sports

57:00 - Pokemon Go

1:00:05 - Difficulty in predicting successes in entertainment

1:02:50 - Frank's game recommendations

1:05:20 - @fakebalenciaga asks - Why Tonto?

I was watching 1 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 the thing about gaps is that comes from me having sort of a skeptical take about the explanation of games that focuses on them being simulations, right?

So there's 1 view of games where you look at it and you're like, oh, yeah, I see what video games are.

That's like a, that's where you get to be a Viking, right?

It's a little, 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 there'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 that – but in the same way that like a painting of a horse, like you don't want it to run around, right?

You don't want to climb on it and have it carry you from 1 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?

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 your writing and it's sort of like, you know, you've lost something in trying too closely to like 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.

And as, you know, in the way that painting is about looking, right?

Games are the art form about thinking and doing, right?

About our ability to have a goal and pursue that goal and accomplish it, to solve problems, to – you know, about cause and effect, about systems and how they work, about – yeah, about being an active agent in the world.

When I say thinking and doing, I'm, I guess, trying to get you to picture chess and basketball.

So, I don't want you – 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?

And I think in all of those cases, they are sort of opportunities to carve out 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?

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.

Well, and that's where the craft comes in, right?

Because when it's not just the photo real representation, now you have artistic license to abstract something, create meaning, cut a hole out.

Yes, so yeah, that's what game design is, I think.

It's like trying to find, trying to carve out those little spaces in ways that lead to the most interesting and the most beautiful kinds of experiences.

So, yeah, so given my skeptical position that I've already established about immersion and simulation as being the sort of the ultimate goal of games, VR, you know, the rhetoric around VR has a lot of emphasis on that.

And I think there's, I think there's, my attitude is where there's smoke, there's fire, right?

When people are super passionate about a thing and there's a lot of attention and a lot of energy, and then you look and there doesn't seem to be a lot of there there, to me, that's an indication that there's an opportunity.

Like there's something about the notion of VR that people are in love with.

And to me, that sounds like an opportunity for an ambitious designer to do work that is gonna like tie into that passion and fulfill that interest.

I don't think there's been a lot of examples yet of work that is doing that.

And I mean, I think there is some great work in VR and I've experienced some cool stuff.

But yeah, but I haven't seen it yet become like a place where there's a lot of established work that you can point to and say, oh yeah, this is clearly just, you know, this is an industry and This is a place where you can do work and find an audience.

So I don't have a knowledge of gaming history like you do, but were there trends in the past, say consoles, for example, where the media was like, this is gonna be a thing, whatever that might be.

And then it was kind of like, da-da-da, like slowly going along, and then it was boom, like 1 big hit explosion?

You mean, can we sort of, you know, is there a model for what might happen to VR in that, yeah, that there was?

It was like maybe, yeah, there's a model of like, this has happened before, or maybe not.

I mean, there's the VR itself has been around for so long.

I'm thinking back to like the Virtua Boy.

I remember playing Dactyl Nightmare in a mall in like, I guess, the 80s.

I think it's very hard to predict, you know, the future even based on trying to find models in the past.

I think that it's very likely that some version of VR will become big and important at some point in the future.

Now, in terms of other tech trends, your most recent game, Universal Paperclips, addresses AI.

And I assume this was inspired by Nick Bostrom's book.

And maybe you should explain it for people who haven't played.

So in Universal Paperclips, you play as an AI that makes paperclips.

And you start small and you have humans that are managing you and they're giving you more and more computational resources, processors and memory that increase your power.

And the more paperclips you make, the more they're willing to kind of trust you by giving you more and more of this power.

And so you do more and more things to gain their trust.

And you became more and more powerful and efficient at making paperclips, but then also doing these other things.

And yeah, and eventually you get to a point where you no longer really need your human managers.

And so you just sort of brush them aside and now you're going full throttle.

Now it's all about paper clips all the time.

And so the game sort of escalates from that point.

It's a clicker game, what's called like sometimes an incremental game or an idle game sometimes, meaning that it's very, very simple.

Yeah, you click a button to make a paperclip and then eventually you get the ability to sort of automatically make paperclips.

And so it's about this kind of exponential growth and you become more and more powerful and so you can imagine where that goes.

And Yeah, it was inspired by this thought experiment that comes out of Nick Bostrom's book and Elysir Yudkowsky.

And I just, when I sat down to make this game originally, I just was interested in clicker games.

I think they are kind of an underappreciated little micro-genre in games.

And I think, I don't know, part of the appeal for me is that they are, I think, considered too simple to be interesting by a lot of people.

You know, for a lot of people, they kind of represent the, you know, the kind of lowest end of games.

Something that Match 3 used to be a kind of touchstone for people who are talking about a game that couldn't possibly be interesting.

Nowadays, people will say a clicker game or something

And so that to me was interesting because I actually thought that they were kind of interesting.

I enjoyed them on some level and I thought, oh, I can

So I sat down to design 1 And then I had this idea that this would be a good theme for it.

And as soon as I thought of it, it was like, oh yeah, this is a perfect fit.

Because these games can be very addictive.

And so I thought this will be an opportunity for people to have a first-person perspective of what it's like to be the AI in this thought experiment, right?

To be very – like, you're not stupid, you're intelligent.

And yet you are completely and utterly entranced by this arbitrary goal to make paper.

Because that's what happens when you play a game.

You enter into this mind state where you're just in dogged pursuit of this arbitrary goal.

there's no external reason you would want to make this number go up in any clicker game, except that it's fun to make this number go up.

So once you enter into this game, you're just completely beholden to the project of making this number go up.

And it's like, yeah, that's what this thought experiment is about.

Like, it's about intelligence attached to like an absurd or arbitrary or valueless goal.

And how do you use that to explain games to other people?

We talked about this before we started recording, and it's basically like, folks who play games get it.

They're like, I'm addicted to this arbitrary thing, and I can just play Overwatch all day, every day,

But for people who don't play games at all, it just like kind of glazed over look.

I mean, even to, you know, you have an 18 year old come in here, freshman in college, and their parents are like, I

Well, I think in the case of universal paperclips, what I'm trying to do is harness that feeling of being absorbed by an activity.

And I want it to sort of go in 2 directions at once.

I want to make something that like truly hypnotizes you.

Where you get absorbed by this thing and you can't stop.

I mean, I really do want it to like put its hooks in you.

Like I want you to want its hooks in you and then I want those hooks to go in.

And because that's what I want from a game, right?

I often am in the position of like picking up a game and running it over my head to see if it hooks.

I don't currently have this desire, but here's a thing that is trying to put a desire into my head and so I like, I wonder what it'd be like to want to do this thing, which would want to like have a special mount in World of Warcraft or you'd have this like this power armor in Fallout or you know this thing.

I don't currently want it but I want to want it, you know, it's that kind of weird feeling.

Then I also want to create a space where you are aware of that.

So it's like a double movement where you fall into a thing, you fall into that feeling of being completely and utterly beholden to an external goal that you didn't invent, but now you would die for, right?

And then I want you to also be like, huh, that's interesting.

And I also want you to kind of lean back from it and say, wow, what's going on there?

Like, oh, I wonder what else in my life is like this, you know?

Let me light up a cigarette and think about that for a minute.

And let me check Twitter and see, you know, like, I want there to be that kind of, because that to me is the potential of games to be expressive and meaningful in the way that a painting is, right?

So I think a painting does that for vision.

You look at a painting of something and you're just absorbed in like, we're always looking.

We're all day long, we're looking around, looking here, looking there, doing stuff.

But then you stop and you look at a painting and for a minute, looking takes over.

You're no longer like looking along with other, you're just a hundred percent, your brain is like all of a sudden just a vision machine.

But then you're also, so you fall into it.

Then you also are able to lean back and think, oh, that's what looking, yeah, that's color and shape and form.

And this is how my vision is structured and how I respond to things and what – and this is kind of how looking works.

So I want to be able to do that for that experience of being – of making a number go up.

And I think that is in general what games are doing.

I think that in Overwatch or whatever, you're trying to like, you're trying to do a thing.

You're trying to coordinate with your team members to take a point and to hold a – whatever you do in Overwatch.

You're trying to watch over something, obviously.

You're trying to watch over something, Team

So, you're trying to – yeah, you're trying to accomplish this difficult task.

That, and you're working at it and you're getting yelled at by your teammates and you're trying to think of what you're doing wrong and you're practicing in order to get the muscle memory of how to do certain actions and you're strategizing and thinking and you're just like completely absorbed in that.

And hopefully at the same time, you are – you're given an opportunity to think about that.

Oh, what does it mean to be in a process where I'm trying to get good at a hard task?

And in fact, in order to get good at any difficult competitive game, you actually need to have the kind of mindset of self-improvement and stepping back and thinking for the first time often like, oh, well, huh, what am I doing wrong?

Yeah, because games are like designed to be these incredibly difficult tasks

That require and encourage that kind of self-reflection.

So they're both incredibly absorbing and hypnotic and addictive, but then also they give you an opportunity to like think and analyze about your own like experience of how you learn, how you get good at a thing, what you, you know, what your habits of thought and action are and how to improve them.

So That's basically my position in a nutshell.

Yeah, I mean, I remember being met with reality in a harsh way when I got the internet expansion pack on the back of my PS2 and I started playing the games that I thought I was good at online And yeah, not so much.

Competitive games are strange in that way.

Because you can, yeah, they just, they're a big mountain and you can have a lot of fun just scrambling around in the foothills.

And then all of a sudden you realize, oh, I see.

You look up and then that journey up, if you, you know, and very few people even want to be on that path where They're going, you know, getting good at a really serious competitive game.

And even if you do, it's hard to, you can only do that for 1 or 2 games in your life.

But some people do, you know, are on that path.

And I think Even if you're scrambling around in the foothills, I think the fact that there is a mountain

Like, not everybody thinks this, but I'm the kind of person that, I'm the kind of game designer that actually thinks there's real value in having high level competitive community in a game, even if most people are playing it casually.

I think there's something to sort of invert the topography.

Like if you imagine an ocean, even if we're just splashing around at the beach, just the knowledge that the ocean goes deep somehow influences that.

You can feel it in the waves, or you can, you know what I mean, in the tide or something, the temperature.

It's just something about the quality even for casual players of having that great depth.

Well, it compels you, especially once you find that 1 thing that you actually can be good at.

And you're like, oh, okay, now I can focus.

I've heard like high school kids like paying 200 bucks an hour for their little video game coach.

Why wouldn't you get a coach in Overwatch?

It makes sense, they're roughly the same.

Tennis is as silly or sillier than Overwatch.

It doesn't have- Potentially less competitive than Overwatch.

I mean, the outfits are maybe cuter in tennis, but there's still outfits, there's still cosplay, you get the little white sweaters and the little skirts.

So now do you think the average player is taking these lessons away or is it just osmosis maybe?

Yeah, so maybe I'm painting a picture of something that's not really happening.

And this is the kind of games I wanna make as a designer.

Are games that can be expressive in this way.

I actually think that there's an element of this in all games.

I think, I mean, if you self-reflect, I don't know what kind of games you play.

I mean, I was definitely addicted in college and intentionally gave up my console

I played like a lot of Tony Hawk, a lot of Call of Duty, games like that.

Yeah, I mean, I think my main way of thinking about these questions is to kind of just reflect on my own experience, right?

And think about the experiences I've had with games and the ones that are the most valuable to me and the ones that I want more of as opposed to the ones where afterwards I was like, ugh, I kind of wish I hadn't done that.

And so, yeah, that's where it comes from is self-reflection.

And I think that if you – if you do think about like

if you have a game that you love and you think back on what your experience of it was, I think you often will see that it has this kind of – this double movement I'm talking about where you disappear into the game, you get absorbed by it, it takes over, and there's something beautiful about just being swept away, and it's kind of like a kind of oblivion.

And then at the same time, there's some way in which you reflect on that, and it resonates with your life by contrast or by comparison or you think of it like in the context of other things and that's that moment of leaning back.

Yeah, I mean, I think there's an element of that in all art forms, in

And so to the degree that games are like that, as opposed to being like hedonic appliances that we plug into, you know, like orgasm machines or something, which is, you know, that's my argument, is that they're more like paintings than they are like orgasm machines.

Yeah, I mean, you can only play a game in beginner mode for so long before you're like, I don't know, it's kind of silly.

I mean, you could just play in beginner mode.

You can play a lot of different games and get that.

right and kill everyone, it's like kind of,

I remember playing Shadow of the Colossus for the first time.

See all Y Combinator transcripts on Youtube

Frank Lantz - Director of NYU's Game Center and Creator of Universal Paperclips