Frank Lantz is a game designer, writer, and educator. Frank co-founded the experimental game studio Area/Code which was acquired by Zynga. His games span genres and include favorites such as Hey Robot, Drop7, Babble Royale, and Universal Paperclips. Frank has taught game design for over two decades at New York University where he helped to create the NYU Game Center. His new book, The Beauty of Games, is coming out from MIT Press in 2023.

In this conversation, Frank joins Chris Sparks to share how a leading game designer sees the world. What do games have to teach us? Can studying game theory and game principles make us better humans? Learn how to make sure you play the right games and become aware of the games you are playing without even realizing it.

For the video, transcript, and show notes, visit https://forcingfunctionhour.com/frank-lantz.

Welcome to Forcing Function Hour, a conversation series exploring the boundaries of peak performance. Join me, Chris Sparks, as I interview elite performers to reveal principles, systems, and strategies for achieving a competitive edge in business. If you are an executive or investor ready to take yourself to the next level, download my workbook at experimentwithoutlimits.com. For all episodes and show notes go to forcingfunctionhour.com.

Thanks for joining me, Frank. Very excited for this conversation.

Great to be here. Thank you very much, Chris.

So, Frank, you've made a career out of creating, teaching, and playing games. What do you think makes games such a rich field of study?

I think there is something like magic that happens with a game. There's something about having just the right combination of rules that produces a kind of endless amount of fascinating behavior. And I just think they are bottomless wells of weird, interesting, complicated and important ideas. So yeah, I just, I love 'em.

Where did your love affair with games begin?

That's a really good question. I didn't grow up—I mean, I grew up playing games like an ordinary person. I wasn't super drawn to games. I would say I had more of a kind of average relationship to games as a kid. I played games and I liked them. But I wanted to be a cartoonist. You know, I was really into drawing and art and I studied art in college, but when I was making art I was really interested in the process, and I was interested in kinda rules-based art, I was interested in conceptual art, the ideas—I was really drawn to art that explored the sort of systems of meaning. Semiotics and representation and iconography and—And I started making art that was really rules-based and trying to get outside of my own head and outside of my own taste by exploring procedures, you know, kind of process-based art and things like that.

And around, I think around that time I also really was getting inspired and influenced by things like the book "Gödel, Escher, Bach," by Douglas Hofstadter, this really important, you know, kinda early philosophical exploration of computers and artificial intelligence and—So those were a lot of the things that by the time I really started working with computers professionally as kind of a graphics guy—I was doing, you know, computer graphics and things like that, it really became obvious to me that the thing I was really interested in was software in general. Not just using software to make graphics into images, but like the process and ideas of computers and software. And that was right around the time that, yeah, I started to really decide, okay, this is—Games are what I wanna devote my life to.

How do you think this background as a cartoonist, as a graphics designer working with computers affected your approach to games, when you decided to go that route?

I always saw them as primarily a form of culture. As a form of expression, creative expression, as primarily an aesthetic form, something similar to fine art, similar to painting or literature, theater, or movies, or something like that. Which I think is maybe now an accepted way of thinking about games, you look at games, well, yeah. They're something like TV or movies. But even now I think it's a little bit of a novel way of looking at them. I think to a lot of people, yeah, you don't look too closely. Especially computer games, video games. They just look like maybe they're an appliance or something, you know, you just like—"An appliance for fun." Like you plug it in and then it, you get to pretend you're a fireman." Or something. And whereas I was really interested in them as pop culture with all of the potential of something like pop music, you know what I mean, which goes all the way from light and kind of simple and easy to understand and catchy and accessible all the way up to challenging and difficult and complicated and sophisticated in all the different ways that music can be.

And so yeah, that's always really informed my approach. I'm not primarily a computer guy, I'm primarily, like, an art guy. Like that is my approach. But I think games, especially video games, are really the art form of computers. In a way. They're software as an art form. Like what if we think about software for its own sake? You know, what's interesting and meaningful about it? And really explore what it can do to create new experiences and things like that.

So yeah, so that's really how I approach the whole topic.

I had this experience over the weekend here in LA where I went out to a restaurant with a food critic and realized that the way that I experience eating out is just completely different from the way that a professional experiences this. And it really transformed my impression of what to look for when I was at a restaurant. So I know you love to play games almost as much as you love to create them. How is your experience of playing a game different given your experience of designing?

I think there's a danger when you do something as a vocation, as a career. That it can become professionalized, and there's a danger that the kind of deep and intuitive pleasure that we get from something can become brittle if we over analyze it, if we see every game through the lens of, "How is this working? Can I take it apart? Can I understand it and analyze it, and what do I think about it? How is it—" You know. You become self-conscious in a way that can be really counter-productive.

So I think that's always a danger. And luckily I'm a lazy person. I'm not constantly looking for ways that I can improve myself as a game designer and analyzing every situation. I—It's easy for me to slip into the mode of the, just having gut-level reactions to things. I'm very much in touch with my base-level instincts, and I bounce off of games and I don't bother to go back to them, or you know, occasionally I will fall in love with a game and just go deeply into it and let it kind of take over my life in the way that games can sometimes do, and you know, become deeply enmeshed in it and have to kind of claw my way back to the real world. But at the same time, I do think that most game designers really do cultivate a kind of voracious appetite for games. I think that good game designers play very broadly, they are open-minded and play across different genres and can devote themselves to difficult, challenging, serious games, and they can flip that switch and decide, "Okay, I'm gonna try to get good at a difficult game." And then they can also, you know, hop on a plane and go to Vegas and just, you know, float on the surface of randomness that people do, and they're able to kinda like navigate between these different approaches. I think that's actually a really valuable thing to cultivate as a designer.

Taking a small step back, I know this is contentious, but it seems useful to define "what is a game?" In your estimation, do you know, do games have common characteristics? What do you think makes something a game?

Yeah. I mean, I'm a big believer in, you know, functionalism when it comes to definitions. I think that we understand words by how they're used, and 'game' is, while famously ambiguous—'Game' is the word that Wittgenstein chose to demonstrate the whole complicated problem of definitions in general. He's like, "Look, there's no way to say what is or isn't a game. There's no technical definition that can hold up." And that's very true. But at the same time, we use the word 'game' all the time. If I asked you, "Oh, it looks like a game on the chest of drawers behind you, is that a game?" You're like, "No, no, no, that's just a vase." Like, I would understand what that means. It doesn't mean that you can't take a vase and use it as a game, you know, or you can't play a game with—You know. It's just we understand games as little stylized activities that are usually some form of problem solving, right, that are defined by a goal. That, something you're trying to accomplish. And some set of rules about what you are and aren't allowed to do.

And we do them for their own sake, right, they're not things that we do—Or typically, anyway, they're not things that we do in order to accomplish something else in the world. They're things we do when our work is done. You know, when we've herded all the cattle and we've mended the fences and we're sitting around the fire, and you know, just like we use that time to tell stories and sing songs, we use that time to play games.

And you know, that's basically what they are. I think they're often social, they're often these little stylized social interactions. And in fact, historically that is primarily what they've been. They've been little ritualized encounters with other people where we do this kind of dance, this thing that's like a dance-like interaction. And then recently with computers, there's been this explosion of games that are solo, that are more, you know, for one person, one person engaging with the complex software that kind of simulates worlds or other people.

And, yeah. But I think that's the general definition, in my mind.

You shared this wonderful definition of designing a game, that you're trying to sift the right combination of arranging rules. And I love this definition of, you know, creativity really coming from constraints. You're constraining what a player can do and nudging them toward certain behaviors by what you're incentivizing. So I'm curious about some of these intentional choices that you make as a game designer. Maybe zooming in on rules. Like, what makes a good rule in a game?

One of the hallmarks of a good rule that game designers are typically looking for is this concept of elegance. When you make a game, yeah, you're combining these different rules about what you're trying to do and what you can do and all these different elements you put in the game. Maybe they're points and maybe they're different actions you can do, or different tools, or weapons, or there's an environment you're designing. And each one of these things is like a rule in the sense that it informs what the players can do. It creates obstacles or affordances that determine what choices the player has, what actions the player has. And when you add a rule to a game, there is always a kind of—You're adding a cost, in a way, from the perspective of the player. And a good game designer is the player's advocate. Right? That's one of the hallmarks of game designs. You're always trying to think from the point of view of the player. What is the player doing, what is the player's experience? 'Cause that's really what the game is about. It's like, what is the player experiencing? So you're trying to put yourself in the player's shoes and see the world, see the game through their eyes.

And a rule is a burden to the player, in a way, 'cause it's a thing that I have to know about and pay attention to. Like, "What is this? Oh. I can collect cactuses, and cactuses give me the ability to do this other thing, and when I—Okay. I guess I get that." Right? There's a little bit of administrative overhead that you're asking the player to do. And so you better be getting something from that. Right? I mean you better be, like, you really want—Like the thing you're always looking for is the little rule or the little tweak to the rule that then has a huge leverage that actually changes the experience in a really interesting way. That opens up the set of possibilities that are the kind of second order things that are extrapolations from that basic rule. All right? You have to learn the basic rule that X does Y, but then once you've learned that X does Y, all of a sudden there are all of these follow-on effects that you didn't even think about that are just like, like tendrils that are growing out from a seed, or things that are like a firework exploding into lots of little other fireworks.

So it's looking for those moments when you get that kind of leverage, where a small rule or a small change to a rule then leads to this exponentially large set of consequences. Interesting consequences.

And yeah, so that—And we often call that 'elegance', as game designers. Like that, you're trying to compress a lot of that complexity into the smallest set of core rules.

It reminds me of the concept of emergence, where the idea is the sum is greater than the parts and you can't necessarily predict the output based on the inputs. I imagine a decent part of this process is just good old trial and error, and trying things and seeing how the players respond to them. Do you find that a lot of these elegant effects are unexpected?

Yeah, very much so. I mean I think that idea of emergence is at the heart of many games, and certainly my love of games is deeply connected with their ability to have this kind of surprising second and third order effects that you can—It's not like you put them in there, it's like you've discovered them, as a designer. You know what I mean? It's like you're digging around in this space of different possible rule sets. You're digging around and you're searching for the ones that have this quality of, this emergent quality.

And not all games are like this. Some games are more composed and top-down. But I think there is something—It's almost universal in games, that they have this quality of emergence and this kind of surprising ability to yield a lot of really interesting, complicated behavior from a very small rule set.

Even something like Tic, Tac, Toe. When you think about it—It's weird. Like, you think about the billions of human life hours that have been sunk into this thing, and from our perspective as an adult you look at it and you're like, "Well, this is, this is broken. This is not even interesting." Which kind of is just—It's a nice perspective to have, to be able to look at this thing and realize that it looks like completely like a closed system, that you can understand it completely, there's no mystery or interesting thing there, but like it has hypnotized a lot of people for a long time. There is something about this little arrangement of rules in Tic, Tac, Toe that just works. And so yeah, as a game designer, you know, you're always kinda looking for things that are like that, but at a larger scale.

That's an interesting point. As you describe games as an art form, if being in a category similar to that of literature or film—In your estimation, what do you think makes a game meaningful?

In any art form, in any creative form, you're taking an activity and you are doing it for its own sake. Right? So when we look at a painting, we are looking—In a way we're looking at looking. Right? We're absorbed in the act of looking, and it just kind of overwhelms us. You know, like a great painting might just sort of overwhelm us. We're not even consciously thinking about it at all, we're just allowing this visual effect to do its work on us. But then at the same time there's an element in which we are invited to kind of become aware of looking and to analyze it and think about it. "Oh, how does—How do colors work? How do shapes work? Why are certain forms appealing to me and not others? Like, what is it that I like about this or that?" And I think both of those things are kind of in a dynamic relationship in any art form. And for music, that is about listening. It's about sound, and about listening.

And for games, I think that the core activity is thinking and doing. It's just like being an agent in the world who is solving problems and trying to reach their goals. And we are just—That's a thing that we are obviously embedded in. It is a kind of defining quality of us as beings that we are these problem-solving beings, that we are active agents, that we're seeking out things, trying to accomplish things, and we do things, and we're using our minds to perceive the world and try to understand it and model it and come up with actions that take us towards our goals. And it's so much the fabric of our experience that we cannot see it. This is the water that we are swimming in, and it's invisible to us.

When you play a game, it becomes visible to you, because it's a little micro-world in which you enter in and you see, "Oh, this is the process of perceiving and analyzing the environment that I'm in and thinking explicitly about goals and trying to understand how to achieve those goals and then applying myself to doing that." And so for me, yeah. A lot of the beauty and a lot of the meaning of games comes from that core idea, is that they give you an opportunity to become aware of this thing that is otherwise so ubiquitous and so pervasive that it's invisible to you.

And then that can go in any, in so many different directions, right? That's just the wellspring that games come from. But then different kinds of games take that in different directions and do different things with it and create new kinds of beauty or different kinds of meaning with that as the underlying kind of material reality that is being shaped.

I like this invisible game that we are playing without even realizing it. The idea that these mechanics are so embedded into culture, there's a two-way street happening here, that the way we play games affects the way we do other things, and that we are playing games all the time without realizing it. I'd love to hear, in your experience, like what are some other things that have game-like qualities in our day-to-day that we typically wouldn't associate with playing a game?

There are a lot of situations in the world that you can kinda frame as being game-like. Some of them are more obvious than others. When we're trying to maximize the points that we're getting from a, like an airline reward system, right, that becomes like an explicit puzzle. So you sit down and you look at it and you're trying to, like, "Oh, how can I fit this thing together, and how can I maximize, you know, the benefits that I'm getting from that?" That's clearly like a game-like scenario.

You know, sometimes when you're in a business meeting, it can feel very much like, "Oh, this is a little strategic moment where I'm maneuvering and negotiating in a way that is not miles away from how I might play a game of diplomacy," or something like that. And then there are ones that I think are harder to see, because they're more deeply embedded in us. I think the games that we play with other people when we are constantly maneuvering through status space, trying to, like, maintain face and, you know, project a certain identity, and we're trying to sort of—And it's not necessarily even competitive. Erving Goffman is this famous sociologist, 20th Century sociologist, who has a wonderful exploration of this idea of face work. Like, he understood most human conversation as being this collaborative process. It's not a competitive game, it's actually deeply collaborative, where we are all trying to simultaneously help each other maintain the highest status that we can hope for. You know what I mean? Like, I'm, I come into a situation and I say, "Oh, I'm a professor," and you're like, "Oh, wow, what school?" And you know what I mean? Like you're trying to help me.

But we're also checking each other to prevent overreach. Because at a certain point someone might say, "Oh, and also I can tell you what to do." And you're like, "Wait a minute, you can't tell me what to do." So there's a sense in which we're holding each other—We're refereeing this process for each other. And so to me that's an example of a thing that we don't normally think of as conversations. We don't normally think of conversations as games. But in a way they have some game-like structure under the hood. And once you're aware of it, it can help understand, it can help kind of explain what's going on in a conversation. You wouldn't want to go around treating every encounter with other people as a game, because there is a certain kind of—To treat something as a game is to make it explicit, in a certain way. To take the ambiguous and ephemeral and nebulous rules that are guiding a situation and to try to boil them down a little bit and make them more explicit and concrete and discrete, right?

And that's a valuable way of framing a situation, because it can reveal these dynamics. It's like, "Oh, wow, look at this, you're having this problem with your boss. Well, part of the problem is that you guys are jockeying for status in this weird way, and if you just became aware of that, first of all it might help you win at that, you know what I mean, maybe get one over on your boss, or it might help you kind of avoid this conflict that you're having." So it can be useful, but it is a model. Right? It is a way of abstracting something and getting leverage on it by having a kinda simpler version of it that is a lens that you apply.

But I think it can be a very powerful lens. And even something like Darwinian evolution is this just incredibly powerful way of looking at the transformation of living creatures over time as being a kind of game-like process of trying to maximize an explicit goal.

We're still living, I think, downstream from Darwin's, you know, incredible insight, and in some ways it's an example of looking at the world from that lens. So I think it can be quite powerful.

So, if I can unpack and extend that a bit, it seems like almost any form of competition is going to have these game-like mechanics, but also many forms of cooperation. So you mention a conversation, and I like—So, Keith Johnstone, author of "Impro," a book about improvisational comedy, kind of defines friendship as status games turning from competitive to cooperative, that you agree to play with each other, you're playing with status. And I guess it extends to anything that we could see as some sort of score or points where you have some objective or subjective measure of doing well. We're naturally going to want to increase that.

You see machine learning, when it's trained on a new game, all it's given is, "Hey, this is a number, make the number go up. A higher score is good." And the same thing, once we decide something is desirable, we find all these interesting, creative ways to play to try to raise our own standing or our own status in this type of situation.

I think you make a really interesting point around that there's a balance, where clearly some awareness that we are embedded within a game is useful. Having this vision of, "Here is the game I have chosen to play, here's how to win," but if you are overly mechanistic about it, maybe a little too analytical (as you were sharing with your experience playing games before), that it could be like shooting yourself in the foot. You don't come off as natural. Where do you see that balance of, "All right, I understand here are the rules I agreed to, here's what winning looks like," but not becoming too analytical or too deliberate. Where do you see that balance?

I think it has to do with—There's an idea in martial arts about this sort of light grasp, right? Which, the strong grasp that is also light, where you're not overcommitting to grabbing something and holding something, that you know, there is a kind of tentativeness or a fluid quality, right, that you're able to kind of flow in or out of grasping something, that you're not locked into overcommitting to a certain thing. And I think that's ultimately what you want with the—Applying the lens of a game to a world, seeing a situation as being game-like. You don't want to overcommit to it. The whole point of it is that games are things that we enter into voluntarily, and they are deep and dense and complex and rewarding, but they're also frivolous. They're also things that we do and then we can stop doing them any time, and they kinda don't matter. And so being able to have that same kind of light grasp of analyzing the world, seeing its game-like qualities, but then not making the mistake of thinking, "Oh, and therefore the world is a game," right, "And so what I'm trying to do is just maximize X or Y, that's my goal."

It's like, no, no, no. That's one way of looking at it, and it can be useful, but it's never the complete picture. Right? And this is—Like, one of the reasons that people are suspicious of games, right, one of the reasons that we have that we say things like, "Stop playing games with me," like, "Oh, you're just playing games, you're not taking something seriously," right, is precisely because when you look at a thing as a game you are taking this kind of light approach, you're thinking about it as being—In a way you're appreciating that it has these structural qualities that could be different. You're saying, "Okay, this isn't fixed or permanent or natural or universal, it's like a little particular situation that has a particular formal quality, and it actually could be different."

'Cause when we encounter games, like actual game games, one of the things we learn is that, oh yeah. Things are made. Right? They're constructed and they're changed and they evolve over time, and we can change them. If they're not working well, we can change them. So that's wonderful. But if we have too much of that in applying that frame to the real world, we're in danger of maybe falling into nihilism. Right? Falling into this idea, "Oh, nothing matters. Everything is a game. It's all just arbitrary things that we, you know, decide that we're gonna do, and it could be different." And we don't really think that. Right? We actually think there are things that are deeply important, that matter a great deal, that aren't easily changed and aren't just arbitrary, formal constructions but that are deeply, deeply important. And so we don't wanna fall into the trap of treating those things as arbitrary or constructed or easily changed or kind of abstract. You know what I mean?

So like, as an example there's pickup culture. And in pickup culture, there is this kind of mindset of looking at your interactions with other people as a game-like thing. It's explicit, you're following rules, you're applying principles in a very deliberate way, and you're just consciously trying to achieve a specific goal, and you're getting in touch with this kind of instrumental rationality, right, this instrumental problem solving, and you're applying it to your encounters with people that you're attracted to. That you're sexually attracted to.

And there are, I mean, there are reasons that people are grossed out by pickup culture. Right? There is something gross about that. It does break some of our rules about how we want to interact with other people. We don't want to treat each other instrumentally. We want there to be a sacredness that is unbreakable when you encounter another person. You respect them in a way that they are not a piece in a puzzle, they are not something to be manipulated to achieve an outcome. They are, like you, a miracle of consciousness, and we—You have to treat them with this kind of sacred respect. And so this idea of like, "I'm just gonna neg her and then compliment her friend and then get her interested in my hat," and then it's like, people think of that as being too much. And I tend to agree.

However, I will say this: there are some things about pickup culture that are good. There are some insights, useful, valuable insights in pickup culture that I think are maybe pushed too far by the culture of the way they're employed, but there are insights, for example, like self-improvement as a goal. Like, being the type of person that other people want to be around, which is one of the core ideas of pickup culture. I think that's a profound insight. And that is something that is revealed by this conceptual frame. By looking at your encounters with other people as being game-like, as having dynamics, where people are trying to maneuver and are trying to achieve things, and you can—You know, you can gain insight there.

So yeah, so there's—Yeah. It's a tricky balance to strike, I guess is the answer.

Yeah. Presenting it as a model, but only one form of analysis, I think, is helpful. And when you see someone who goes down too far down any path, it feels like they become one-dimensional. As the, this idea of like fox versus hedgehog, that this, the hedgehog knows a lot about one thing, and everything is an example of evolutionary psychology, or everything is an example of (insert topic du jour on Twitter here). And it becomes annoying because they become closed off to alternative viewpoints, as well as the beauty that can come from exploring things from different angles. So there's some nuance in being able to wear the hat, but knowing the right time to put on the hat.

And you make the really important point that people don't like to feel like they're playing even when they're playing a game. So if you're too overt, it can be counterproductive. So I like to think about counterfactuals, and, all right, this is one perspective. What if you embody the other perspective? What comes out the other side? And that can always be interesting if nothing else just to gain some empathy for the other person.

But I think even if we take people out of it and we just zoom in to strategy, that only being able to play one strategy is gonna be very limiting. So how we can be diverse in our approach, not overly instrumental in, "Hey, this is all we have."

I'm interested, like, what do you think games have to teach us? As game players, do you feel that by playing a game you're able to take skills that you learned or developed in the game and play with them outside of the game? I think one that we've talked a little bit about is just a gaining of self-awareness. I think it's an interesting idea of a game as a mirror, as a lens on our own behavior. But what do you think transfers in terms of skills outside of a game?

I think there are things that we are learning as a species from games. I think there are things that we're learning collectively. For example, like, the whole field of game theory, which emerges from a study of games. Or things like probability itself. The whole idea of probability as a scientific concept comes out of analyzing card games. Right? The mathematicians who first developed this, they were trying to solve problems in actual card games. They weren't just theoretically interested in this, they were interested in, "Okay, well what should you actually do in this situation, or—"

And so the whole idea of probability, which is an incredibly powerful concept in science or philosophy, really comes out of studying games. Game theory, this idea of analyzing strategic situations where people are making decisions and those decisions affect each other, has been profoundly influential, not just in economics and politics, but in biology, in studying how ecosystems evolve and how species evolve and how creatures interrelate. And even the study of consciousness, this thing that is now so amazing, it's like this thing that's happening with AI and consciousness where we're starting to feel the shift of this problem of consciousness moving from just being a philosophical question to becoming like an engineering question. All of a sudden people are starting to build these things like, "Wait a minute, is this a first glimpse of us kind of understanding how this stuff works at a mechanistic—" Even that is deeply informed by games.

If you think about some of the theories about what the mind is and what it's doing that maybe, you know, according to someone like Karl Friston, it's this process of trying to predict, trying to minimize the difference between what you're predicting is gonna happen and what happens, or what you're predicting that next chunk of data that you receive perceptually is gonna be and what it actually is, which is like a little game that we're just constantly playing. So maybe at the very basis, the very root of who we are and what our experience is as conscious beings might be you can understand it in these kinda game-like ways.

And then there's the question—That's one end of the scale of how games, you know, can yield knowledge in the world. And then the other end of the scale is like for us as individuals, just as people, how can we gain knowledge or wisdom from the games that we play? And I think there it's a matter of—I mean, in some ways it's sort of like the old-fashioned ways that we've always thought about—I mean, the Greeks had this idea of Arete, which was a kind of virtue. And this was, for them Athletics was primarily—Like, they saw Athletics as this kind of religious and artistic thing. And it was in pursuit of this idea of Arete, of the virtue of reaching your full potential. Right? And they thought of that as being something profoundly meaningful. And I think they were right. I do think that there's an opportunity in games to just get in touch with what our capacities are as problem-solvers, as doers in the world, as beings that can accomplish and achieve things. Getting in touch with that.

And in all of the myriad ways that games can just delight us and entertain us. They don't have to have big lessons or big morals attached to be deeply valuable, right? They can just be kind of intrinsically beautiful, but often they do. I mean, when you play any game, if you really try to apply yourself and get good at it, you're gonna instantly bump up against a bunch of, like, weird artifacts in how your brain learns. You know, you're gonna encounter this kind of stubborn unwillingness to let go of this kind of drive to project your ego into there.

And that's one of the first things you need to overcome. If you wanna get good—You know. You played poker, right? Like, the ego is both a kind of engine driving your desire to get good at poker and also an impediment that is limiting your ability to succeed at poker, because even if you think about, like, how we talk about poker hands to each other, it's like, who is the hero and who's the villain? Well, I'm the hero and the other guy is the villain, and you get this little moral fable. And it's a good shorthand way of talking about it, but it really—To be truly good at poker, you have to get out of that habit of thinking of your cards as belonging to you and you're protecting them. "This is my hand, I'm protecting it. I have some equity in this pot, and I'm gonna fight for this equity."

It's like, no. You're just being offered a bet. You're being offered a wager. Here's the wager, right? There's money on the table and you have a chance of winning it and you just happen to know the two cards that are your cards, they're just cards that you happen to know. They're just information that you happen to have. It's better to think of yourself as not even owning those cards. They don't belong to you, you're not like—They're just cards that you happen to—It's extra information that you happen to have. And you have to get out of the kind of puny, local, parochial mindset of being the hero in a story, and instead see things in this more abstract, systematic way of like, no. There's like a set of dynamics happening, and I just have a particular perspective.

And so that's just one example of, like, how a game can kind of take you to a place where you really encounter some deeper truth about yourself and about the world. And like I said, it doesn't always have to happen. You know, not every game is gonna, like, bring you to some great insight. But boy they sure can. And when they do, there's nothing like it. I mean there's nothing like—I played a lot of Go, and I never got really super good at Go, but I'm pretty good at Go. And then I taught my son, when he was a little kid. I taught him how to play Go, and then we played Go together, and then at a certain point he started beating me.

I don't know what lesson that is, but I haven't ever looked at a painting or read a poem or seen a movie that had that kind of impact on me. You know what I mean? Like, that's something that happened over the course of years, and we weren't doing it for any practical purpose, we were doing it for entertainment, we were doing it for the beauty of the thing itself, you know, and yet it conveyed something so hard to put into words. That—What it means to be part of generations, you know? That is like part of something bigger than yourself. You know what I mean? Like that—It's big. You know, that's what it's all about. I mean, the fact that games can do that is kinda miraculous to me.

Maybe we choose the standing on the shoulder of a giant narrative, there. If you think about hero/villain.

Yeah. I mean, it was like Darwinian evolution in action. I was like hopefully the shoulder on which other giants can stand.

I mean, there's so much we can go down on what you said. Lotta gold there. Since we brought poker into the mix, you know, I can't help myself. So describing how even though there's a lot of short-term luck in poker, we can't help but self-reflect through our own experience. Something that I see as a really big barrier is just that it's very easy to justify anything that we're doing. As you say, the ego drives us forward, but it acts as an inhibitor, because of these inconvenient truths that we aren't the hero that we thought that we were. But you lose enough hands, and you're forced to do some reflection. It's like, "Hey, is it true that I'm the unluckiest guy in the world, or perhaps there's some gaps in my decision-making?" And you can't help but make those adjustments, so that these games can be very helpful to reveal your own biases or perhaps your values or desires in the world.

I mean, this experience you've had playing poker, I would love to hear about, you know, a lesson that came out of it. You talk about probabilistic thinking. Do you find that these types of things have transferred over to other areas in your life?

I hope they have. I think if I were a better person they would have. I think. But I'm, you know, it's, we're all struggling, and I definitely try to remind myself of these things and be consciously aware of them. The big one in poker is just to not, yeah, to not be so convinced about your own beliefs. Right? To have a light grasp when it comes to your own beliefs, to not believe everything you think, and to understand the world as being deeply hard to predict. Deeply complicated. And your viewpoint on it is very small. And that is just an incredibly challenging thing to really wrap your head around. You can sort of understand it intellectually, you can nod along and agree to it, but we often just in our day-to-day lives we act with conviction.

And it's good, in a way, to have this. You don't always want to be the kind of perfect Bayesian who is always suspended between different possibilities and never kind of confidently asserting one thing or another. Like, it's good to have advocates for certain perspectives that come in and say, "No, this is the way things are," and, you know, and almost like a lawyer in a courtroom kind of giving the best argument for things being a certain way. But I think overall we err too much in that direction, and I think that is a kind of story logic, a story-like way of looking at the world, that things are a certain way, and we can extract the proper moral because there's a certain sequence of events that we can understand, having this causal structure, and this tells us, you know, what we should think about this situation. Versus the systemic view of the world, which is that there are forces at play that are producing a kind of dynamic set of possible events. So rather than the story-like view, which is, like, "Here's what happened," it's like the systemic view says, "Here are the set of things that can happen, and the set of things that could happen, and the set of things that might have happened."

And I think poker at its best kind of brings you more of this other ability, which I think is in some ways maybe a new skill that we're developing as animals. Like, this is just—It's not the way that we have evolved, exactly, to think about the world, but I think it may be a way we want to consciously evolve as we go forward, because I think it can be a very powerful and effective way of looking at the world.

It's something that I have observed, that the people who go on to achieve remarkable things just have a tendency of bumping up against reality a lot. That while you root for the really strategic, logical thinkers, they tend to not have feedback loops that are tight enough in order to really make things happen. So I'm always trying to orient myself towards action while still making the use of this wonderful functionality that you highlighted with Karl Friston's work in free-energy, that hey, we are prediction machines, again, within us. We can in a lot of sense predict what's going to happen and change our behavior accordingly, but if we overuse this system too far, then it becomes a crutch where we're moving too slow, reality's changing faster than we can incorporate that information into our model.

So something that I've developed that works really well for poker but I think extends to a lot of things is trying to separate these two modes of thought. So within poker, I like to think of it as like you have 'confident' and 'critical' on two sides of the continuum. And when I'm sitting at a poker table, I wanna be a hundred percent conviction. I am the best player at the table, I know exactly what I'm doing, these guys have no chance. There's also a psychological edge that comes from this. But doing the things to make this narrative come true; I'm being hyper-observant, I'm playing my best, that type of thing. Where I can get away with this, is, "Oh, maybe I'm not so good, maybe I'm washed up, maybe today is not my day, oh, I played that hand really terribly." All these types of things which are very helpful for a global improvement, but can really hurt you in a local situation. So having this separation for when you're in the game I'm fully immersed and doing my thing, and then afterwards I can always analyze it and go back.

So I think about this as a, from a productivity standpoint, I describe it as separating planning from execution. That we decide what we're going to do, and then when we're doing it we just do it, and then afterwards we can run our post-mortem, we can reflect on it. So it's something that I've found very helpful that touches on a little bit of this without being too instrumental, that we can put this hat on, but not when we're in the active mode of playing the game.

I would love to know. You've played a lot of games, you've played a role in creating a lot of games, what's the cheat code? What are the commonalities at becoming great and winning these games we're playing?

Well, I mean, you described one of them earlier. You mentioned trial and error. I think people underestimate the importance and the value of iteration and trial and error and these kinds of tight loops. I think that's the way—That really informs our approach to teaching game design at NYU, this idea of rapid iteration and play testing, and you might have good ideas, but it's once the idea hits the table and you start to play it that it really reveals itself, and then all of a sudden you're in a conversation with the idea. You're not just like dreaming it up as a blueprint to be executed, you're actually going back and forth and kind of like in the push and pull, and the real world is kinda pushing back on you in a valuable and useful way, and other people are in the mix, and you have to confront the reality of the fact that your game is impossibly complicated and hard to understand and boring, and you can't just talk your way out of it because you're watching people try to play it and it's a snoozefest. And you're like, it's, that's the reality. You know? And so it's back to the drawing board.

And you—Being in that loop, not being so much in your head that you think that it's all about dreaming up the perfect solution, but just being in the loop of being in the world and trying things and doing things and seeing what is and isn't working—I mean, I think that's a big part of it. And yeah, and then also just swinging for the fences. I think ambition is also underestimated. I think people think, "Oh, making a great play, that's something that famous people do. Shakespeare did that." You know what I mean? Like, "I'm never going to do that." It's like, eh. Shakespeare was just a guy who was really good and swung for the fences, you know? And just treating every opportunity you get as—You don't know.

I mean, if you look at the sources of great things that go on to be world-changing things—Like, think about basketball. Basketball was made by one guy. James Naismith invented basketball in an afternoon. Like, what? Like, that's crazy. It's mind-boggling, that basketball, this thing that people architect cities around, you know what I mean, like this world-changing thing that people live their lives inside of and is an industry and is a beautiful, weird, mysterious, cool thing that is like—Just a guy! You know, one afternoon, thinking, "Oh, how can I—Maybe I'll try—What if we throw socks into a basket." You know.

It's like, and when it comes to like recognizing that any afternoon that you work on something could end up yielding something like that, some huge thing in the world, that's the level of ambition that I want people to have, that, in games, you know, I think sometimes there's this joke in games about, "Well, okay, what's," in video games, it's like, "Oh, when will we have the Casablanca? When is the Casablanca of games?" You know, like this movie that everyone can point to and say, "Oh, it's really meaningful and beautiful." But it's like, forget Casablanca. Like, look at basketball. That's what you should be shooting for!

So, iteration, and trial and error, and not getting so hung up on like proper rules of design, but just being, "Look, let's just do and try and think." And, and then also this idea of swinging for the fences. That's—To me, those are the most important meta rules.

You mentioned a few games so far. Let's say, you know, poker, Go, basketball perhaps falling into this category that have really stood the test of time. What do you think allows a game to stick around? There's lots of games that are flashes in the pan but don't last all that long, and these games have been around for, you know, hundreds, or in the case of Go thousands of years. But what do you think makes them stand apart?

I think it has a lot to do with this idea of elegance that we talked about earlier. This idea that they pack a lot of experiential depth and complexity into a tight package that makes them super-efficient. That, in a way, is what makes something like Go and backgammon survive for hundreds and hundreds of years to centuries.

But I also think maybe there are just network effects at play that are somewhat arbitrary. Like, look, I don't wanna say that Shakespeare is overrated, but I think if you think about it analytically, he kind of has to be. Right? Shakespeare and the Bible and these things that are kind of these great kind of cultural icons, they are by kind of by definition, there's probably a lot of their weight comes from these network effects. That once we decide that this is the yardstick by which we are going to measure—Like, Shakespeare changed English. Right? Shakespeare was so influential and important that he changed the very way we go about evaluating literature. You know what I mean? That's a network effect. That's not a thing that's in Shakespeare that would under every circumstance always yield the same output. I think there were probably some—

And it's not to say it's a bad thing. I'm not trying to be cynical. It just means that it is a process that we enter into with a game that a community of players commits to exploring a game, and by doing so they excavate the meaning and beauty from it. It's not so much that the meaning and the beauty is there in the game and we're just unpacking it and consuming it. It's like, no. You put on your miners cap and you grab your pick and you go into poker searching for gold. And we've been doing that, now, for a hundred or couple hundred years, and by doing that we are collectively discovering what's cool about poker. And we've been doing that in Go and backgammon for thousands of years.

And so I think that there is a sense in which part of what makes these masterpieces, what gives them their status is that we chose them as a gathering place to bring our minds and our hands and our hearts and to put ourselves, you know, at risk of wasting our time in order to discover something there.

And it's just a corner of the world. I think a lot of games are like this. They're just a corner of the world. Basketball is just a little corner of the world that you can be—"Oh, what is it like to throw a thing to try to get a thing through a hoop?" That's just a little tiny corner of the world, and Naismith framed it in such a way. He said, "Look, here's my promise to you. If you take this little corner of the world, you will discover a universe in it. It looks small. It looks like a grain of sand. It looks trivial, but if you approach it in the right way and treat it seriously, there is an infinite universe of stuff there to examine and explore." And people did. He managed to frame it in such a way that people did and we came together there, and together collectively we turned it into this thing.

So I think that is the real answer to what's going on with these masterpieces.

Do you think that a game becoming popular says something about the cultural context it was created in?

Definitely. It's hard to read exactly what it says. Like, what does Counterstrike say about our relationship to war? To terrorism? To guns? It says something. Right? There's a fetishism about weaponry that is embodied in first person shooters like Counter Strike. You can't deny it. You can't dismiss those games as being nothing but weapons fetishism. Most of—Like, I have friends that are deeply, you know, into those games. They don't care about guns. They don't like guns. They're, they're good Democrats. They want gun control, they don't, you know. But there is something in which, yeah. Counterstrike is a reflection of our culture's relationship to guns as symbols and instruments of precision, agency in a weird way. That's like—You know what I mean?

And that's just one game. I think every game is like that. Any game, like, Survivor. You're a big Survivor fan. Right? Like, what does Survivor tell us about our culture and our world? Well, it's partly about celebrity, it's partly about this weird kind of Truman Show relationship we have with artifice where we're creating this little imaginary society that we enter into, and then it's half real and half fake. It says so much about status, about how we are—How we can become aware of status explicitly, and then once that happens we can, we enter into all kinds of strange negotiations where we can argue about, like, whether status is important, and how, and all of these things, I think, are in Survivor.

So I don't, I think every game is in some ways—You can read it and see reflections in our culture. In the same way that like the ancient Greeks had this deep relationship to sport and athletics and the Olympics. You know, we can read about their culture. The games—Earlier cultures often had a very religious relationship to games, where it's like fate. Because games are about randomness and kind of like uncertainty, then they were often about fate. Like, what do the Gods think of you? Are you, what is their plan for you? What is their—Who's lucky? Who do the gods favor?

Now the games we play, I don't know, Fortnite? It's hard for me to know what Fortnite—Something about building and shooting? I would have to think a little bit more to say what Fortnite means. But yeah, I think every game can yield up a little bit of insight into the society that it comes out of.

Here's a fun one. I find that when I'm playing a board game with friends, maybe it's just the circle I'm in, we start to think about how we would change this game to make it more fun or more interesting or more exciting, or even start to play around with, "Hey, why don't we create our own board game and we can create our own rules and play it the way that we want." And in essence you've done this. If I understand right, with your wife and son, you've created a board game called Hey Robot, and I realized that I have no idea what that process is like. So, how does one create a board game?

Very slowly and awkwardly and maybe reluctantly. Atoms are so much harder to work with than bits. Yeah. But we—We had this game that my wife, Hillary, and I—We had one of these Alexas, and we would sit around at dinner time and try to think of fun things to do with it. And so we would have these little games we played with it. And then one of them really stuck, which was the game of trying to get Alexa to say a particular word. Like, you have a word on the card and then you can ask Alexa a question. You're not allowed to use the world or any form of the word. You try to get her to say the word in response to your question. And boy was that fun. And we taught it to our son and his wife, and they played it with us, and then eventually we were like, "Oh, man, we should probably try to make this into an actual game." And then we did a Kickstarter.

So that's one of the answers to that question, is it's a very common way, even among established board game designers, which I am not. Like, I'm a computer game guy, but like, I was kind of entering into this new world. But even professional board game folks who've done many successful board games still use Kickstarter as a kind of—It's almost like a marketing platform, really. It's a place where people go to find out about games in development and new games.

And so that's what we did. We made a Kickstarter, we talked to a bunch of publishers, we eventually decided that the kind of standard publishing deals for board games are not great. You end up giving away most of your margin, and you end up getting just a little bit on every game, and what they're providing is access to the kind of retail network that gets you into places, and—But we just ended up deciding, "Eh, let's, we're gonna try to do it ourselves." So we have some distribution deals, but mostly we just sell it on Amazon.

And so I don't know if we're doing it the right way, I mean, but it was a lot of fun, and then at a certain point Jimmy Fallon started playing the game on The Tonight Show. And that was amazing, just to watch Tina Fey play a game that you designed and have fun, it's the best. It's awesome.

It's probably like hearing your song on the radio.

It is, yeah, it's just a—For a game designer, the ultimate pleasure is just seeing this little engine that you made out in the world, seeing it operate and not fall over. You know what I mean? Like it actually works and does the thing that you want it to do. So.

So, never to age you, but you've had the benefit of seeing a few cycles in games, where you know, eighties, you have Dungeons and Dragons, it's very back office, you know, you have the birth of console games, you have now the start of streaming, you go to places like South Korea and gamers are the new superstars. So you, things have changed so much over the years with games. Do you find that your view of games, the way that you see them, your philosophy with them has shifted as well?

I think the thing that really helped me was having a kid. The timing worked pretty well. Like, I—We had our son when we were pretty young, and yeah. I guess I was, yeah, I was in my early to mid-twenties, and so by the time I was kind of like deeply into my career as a professional game designer, I was like walking by my son's room and I would look in and I would see him doing a thing that I had no idea what it was. Like, "What is that thing?" And it was like, "Oh." He's like, "Oh, this is a StarCraft mod where it's just towers." Right? You're not playing against another army, you're just trying to build—All you can do is build towers, and there's this wave after wave of enemies coming at you. And it was like, "Oh." I got to see the birth of tower defense as a genre happening in the margins of battle.net you know, where people were making mods. And so I got to see a little bit, yeah, like the kind of the birth of esports through the eyes of a, you know, a sixteen-year-old, whereas I don't think I would have been just in the right place and in the right headspace to be paying attention to things like that if I hadn't had James around.

So I think getting out of your own head helps. Like, paying attention to what other people are doing, other communities of people, people that aren't your tribe, you know? What are thirteen-year-olds—I think the question for the future of game design is always, like, "What are the smart thirteen-year-olds doing?" You know what I mean? Like, seven, eight years ago the smart thirteen-year-olds were playing Hunger Games mods on Minecraft servers, and then like a couple of years later Battle Royale was invented as a mechanic. You know, people started making actual Battle Royale. But that sort of had its roots in what communities of players were doing.

So I like this way you approach games. I think it's smart to have that mindset of, like, "Oh, what would we do to change this game?"

There's a movement from the seventies called the New Games Movement. Have you ever heard of this?

No.

The New Games Movement? Yeah. A guy named Bernie DeKoven and a bunch of other people who looked at—It was kind of a hippie mindset applied to sports and athletics. It's like—And Bernie DeKoven wrote this wonderful book called "The Well-Played Game" where he talks about this process, yes. You should be able to get into a game and deeply commit yourself to it, to understanding it and mastering it, but then you should also be able to say, "How could it change?" Like, "What is it providing to me and the other players, and could it be better?" And again, it comes back to this idea of one of the things you learn from games is that many of the situations you're in are constructed, they're arranged. They could be different. That the world can be different. It isn't fixed, it is set up in a certain way, and it can be changed, and sometimes we wanna change it.

You don't wanna too easily fall into that. Like, you don't wanna like instantly think, "Oh, how can we, like—" Because part of what's interesting about games is that sometimes it takes a long time to discover what's really happening in a game, and that you don't wanna change the rules too quickly, to be like, "Oh, this is boring, let's make it a little bit better by—" Sometimes, you know, it's good to like go deep in a game that does have a fixed rule set and really try to excavate the meaning from that rule set. That's kind of a lost art now, because in esports there's this constant churn of new content in the form of new rules, new champions, new stuff, new environments. And it kind of—In some ways I miss—There was a kind of culture of fighting games from arcades that has a different approach, where it's like you couldn't update the rules to a fighting game. It was a machine in an arcade, plugged in, and it was like you're gonna be stuck with that for several years. And being stuck with it forced people to go very, very deep, and discover, "Oh, there actually are counters within the game, within the existing rule set, that we might not discover if we were too easy-breezy about changing it."

So, again, you wanna find the right balance between the kind of Bernie DeKoven style, like, "Hey, let's evolve this game to better suit us and what we really need," and the willingness to kind of go deep and explore an existing rule set, and not to assume too early that you really understand what's happening there.

But they're both, I think, they're both important, and we need to understand when to apply—That, I think wisdom is in understanding which one of these to apply to the situation that you're in.

Frank, this has been wonderfully fun. Thank you so much for being here. As we start to bring it home, I like to perhaps end on a philosophical note. Something that's, you know, near and dear to me as a poker player, but also as someone trying to, you know, live a good life, is this idea of game selection. How do we make sure that we're playing the right games? You mentioned this idea of wisdom. In your mind, as someone who's going out into the world and playing games intentionally and unintentionally, how do we recognize that we are playing the right games?

I think it's mostly in asking that question. I think once you've asked yourself that question, then you're more than halfway to answering it. Just having the ability to see what kind of games you're wrapped up in and how they're working for you, what you're getting out of them, what potential they have for you in your life, whether they are games that are worth playing and worth continuing to play or whether they are games that you wanna try to master or whether they're games that you just are enjoying and you're just grooving on them, and you don't need to master them, they're just providing some value to you that is—It could be escapism, or it could be comfort, it could be just a little bit of delirious self-destruction that we sometimes need in our lives to get out of our own heads. Or they could sometimes be games that we wanna bear down and like to get really good at. And that's a conscious decision that most people just never make.

And you don't have to make, you don't have to get good at every game you play, but you should pick some games and go deep and get good at them, both in the world of game games that you're playing on the tabletop or on the computer, and in your life, in the kinds of thinking about your commitment to certain projects you have or certain overall game-like things that you're involved in that you can just be aware that you are in them, aware that you might be motivated, that you're being given certain incentives, and just checking, like, how does this line up with the deeper values that I have that aren't systemic, right? That, like, we apply our systemic mindset in order, or within this larger context that isn't itself systemic.

I think, like, you can use games and game thinking as a lens within this larger mindset. This larger mindset is not itself a game, this larger mindset is something else. And that's the one that we want to bring to bear when we're kind of analyzing the games that we're choosing to play and which ones we wanna get good at.

I think that's really apt, and a great note to end it on. Do you have anything that comes to mind in terms of, you know, final words of advice or final thoughts to someone listening, perhaps someone interested in creating a game or just going deeper into the games they are currently playing?

Just to get started, jump into the loop of making things and doing things. Yeah, it's fun. Come on in, join the game. It's easier than it looks, and there's no point in sitting on the sidelines. Just jump in and start making things.

Thanks, Frank. If something you said resonated with a listener, they wanna learn more about you and your work, where would you wanna send them?

Well, I am on Twitter, @flantz. And I have this book coming out, so keep your eyes peeled for that next year, "The Beauty of Games." But mostly, yeah. If you just follow me on Twitter, you'll see anything that I do. I'll give you a heads up.

Definitely recommend "Beauty of Games" from what I've seen so far. Really enjoyed it. We're gonna link some of the games that you've had a hand in as well. I've had fun playing those over the weekend, as well as a couple talks that you gave that I think really you know, drives some of these points home. The one in particular on the differences between Go and poker I think the listeners will really enjoy.

Thank you so much for joining us today, Frank.

Thank you, Chris. It was a blast.

Thank you for listening to Forcing Function Hour. At Forcing Function, we teach performance architecture. We work with a select group of twelve executives and investors to teach them how to multiply their output, perform at their peak, and design a life of freedom and purpose. Make sure to subscribe to Forcing Function Hour for more great episodes, or go to forcingfunctionhour.com to sign up for our newsletter so you can join us live.