Dec 20, 2018 · 1h 9m · y-combinator
Frank Lantz - Director of NYU's Game Center and Creator of Universal Paperclips · Y Combinator
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In this Y Combinator interview, NYU Game Center Director Frank Lantz explores game design as an aesthetic form of thought and action, contrasting grassroots player-driven innovations with top-down technological hype.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. How this is scored →
The partners as informed peer 3.0 Guest teaching 5.0 Guest disagreement 0.6 The partners pushing back 0.3
speaking balance: gold is the partners, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 51:50 Taking the under on esports eclipsing traditional sports
Frank immediately pushes back against Craig's premise that games like Dota will overtake the NFL by multiples, explaining that growth curves are already leveling off.
Hardest push from the partners ▶ 0:00 Confronting contradictory claims from guest's prior lecturesCraig opens the interview by directly confronting Frank on an apparent contradiction between his statements on aesthetic gaps versus the seamlessness of thinking and doing in real life.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 25:33 Deconstructing Shadow of the Colossus mechanics as fine artFrank delivers an eloquent critical analysis of Shadow of the Colossus, demonstrating how its gameplay mechanics force players to confront their own primal drive to conquer.
The partners hold their own ▶ 27:50 Connecting game completion melancholy to retired athletes and veteransCraig demonstrates insightful cultural synthesis by connecting the emotional void after beating a game to the disorientation felt by professional athletes and military veterans upon retirement.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The partners as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The partners pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Games as the Aesthetic Form of Thinking and Doing | 4 | 6 | 2 | 3 | Craig opens by challenging Frank on an apparent contradiction between two of his public talks regarding gaps and thinking/doing in games. Frank reframes the simulation hypothesis, explaining that artistic leverage in both painting and gaming comes from the gap between representation and reality. | |
| Thinking, Doing, and Letting the Brain Off the Leash | 3 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Craig asks why game design is defined as thinking and doing rather than just doing. Frank clarifies by contrasting cerebral strategy games like chess with physical sports like basketball, emphasizing games as spaces where brains and bodies run off-leash. | |
| The Craft and Abstraction of Game Design | 3 | 4 | 1 | 0 | Craig brings up the craft of abstraction and asks about virtual reality trends. Frank expresses measured skepticism towards VR rhetoric, noting that intense hype without substance signals unrealized opportunities for ambitious designers. | |
| The Origin and Design Philosophy of Universal Paperclips | 3 | 5 | 0 | 0 | Craig introduces Universal Paperclips and its AI thought experiment foundation from Nick Bostrom. Frank details how incremental clicker games hook players into an arbitrary goal, mirroring an unaligned AI's fixation. | |
| The Double Movement: Absorption and Reflection in Games | 3 | 6 | 0 | 0 | Craig asks how to communicate game mechanics to non-gamers and bewildered parents. Frank outlines the double movement in game design, where a player is fully absorbed by an arbitrary goal while simultaneously reflecting on that absorption. | |
| Competitive Games, Depth, and the Value of Mastery | 4 | 4 | 0 | 0 | Craig shares his experience hitting competitive multiplayer reality on the PS2 and mentions modern esports coaching. Frank uses the metaphor of foothills and deep ocean trenches to explain the necessity of high-level mastery even for casual players. | |
| Games as Expressive Art vs. Hedonic Appliances | 3 | 5 | 1 | 0 | Craig asks if casual players actually absorb these artistic lessons. Frank admits it is an aspirational design goal, arguing that games should function as expressive art rather than pure hedonic appliances. | |
| Analyzing Shadow of the Colossus as a Masterpiece | 4 | 6 | 1 | 0 | Craig brings up Shadow of the Colossus as a transformative experience. Frank provides a detailed critical reading of the game, highlighting its dual-piston design combining the primal urge to conquer with subsequent melancholy and ethical reflection. | |
| Indie Development and Folk Practice in Esports | 3 | 6 | 0 | 0 | Craig notes the explosion of indie fringe titles and esports. Frank contrasts individual indie authorship with esports' organic folk practice, tracing the evolution of Dota from community modding to the most played game in the world. | |
| Game Design Education at NYU Game Center | 3 | 6 | 0 | 0 | Craig inquires about the pedagogy of game design. Frank explains NYU Game Center's philosophy of bridging computer science and fine arts by teaching programmers to think like artists and artists to code. | |
| Academia's Role in Game Design and Critical Thought | 3 | 6 | 1 | 0 | Craig asks how the program handles toxic gaming subcultures. Frank explains the role of close reading of difficult texts and defends higher education's mandate to encourage intellectual risk rather than act as a mere industry trade school. | |
| The Reality of the Indie Game Market | 3 | 5 | 1 | 0 | Craig asks about the current state of indie game development after the Kickstarter boom. Frank emphasizes that indie games remain a hit-driven pop-cultural medium with crowded digital distribution channels where quality helps but offers no guarantees. | |
| The Rise of Battle Royale and Poker Tournament Structures | 4 | 6 | 0 | 0 | Craig asks about unexpected market trends. Frank charts the emergence of Battle Royale from Minecraft Hunger Games mods to PUBG and Fortnite, comparing its structural balance of skill and luck to poker tournaments. | |
| Classical Games, Ambition, and Computer History | 4 | 6 | 0 | 0 | Craig reads an audience question regarding Frank's fascination with classical games like Go and chess. Frank argues that classical games are foundational human institutions and points out that games manipulating symbols by rules historically prefigured modern computation. | |
| The Trajectory of Esports and Hybrid Sports Futures | 4 | 5 | 2 | 1 | Craig asks whether Dota and esports could eclipse traditional sports like the NFL in our lifetime. Frank takes the under on that bet, proposing instead that the future may belong to hybrid physical-digital athletic games like sensor-wired fencing. | |
| How Games Evolve into Institutional Sports | 3 | 6 | 1 | 0 | Frank articulates the distinction between designing a game and the organic institutional accumulation required to create a sport. He then analyzes Pokemon Go as the convergence of Google's long-term Ingress R&D and massive IP. | |
| The Unpredictability of Art and Entertainment | 3 | 5 | 0 | 0 | Craig and Frank discuss the difficulty of predicting cultural trends, referencing Netflix's recommendation algorithms. Frank explains that art functions as an arms race of novelty to outpace human pattern recognition. | |
| Essential Game Recommendations for Aspiring Designers | 2 | 5 | 0 | 0 | Craig asks for essential game recommendations for aspiring designers. Frank recommends Cinco Paus, Ape Out, Her Story, What Remains of Edith Finch, and David O'Reilly's Everything. | |
| The Music Story Behind Universal Paperclips and Conclusion | 2 | 4 | 0 | 0 | Frank shares the backstory of using Tonto's Expanding Headband synthesizer track as a placeholder threnody in Universal Paperclips and later securing retroactive permission after the game went viral. | |
| Podcast End Screen and Subscription Prompt | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Standard podcast closing remarks and sign-off without substantial discussion. |
Statements from this episode (26)
Lantz: Games create meaning from the gap between simulation and reality
“The way that they generate meaning, or beauty, or interest, or all the qualities that, that we want out of them is not just their ability to simulate something but the space between that simulation and the real thing.”
Frank Lantz: Games are the art form of thinking and doing
“In the way that painting is about looking, right? It's the art form that is about looking. 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 cau…”
Lantz: Disproportionate tech hype signals strong design opportunities
“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, to me, that's an indication that there's an opportunity. That means that people, people want so…”
Lantz: VR is not yet an industry with reliable creator audiences
“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.”
Lantz: Clicker games are an underappreciated micro-genre in gaming
“I think they are kind of an underappreciated little micro genre in, in games.”
Lantz: Playing games puts humans into the AI mindset of pursuing arbitrary goals
“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. Like this goal is not like, there's no external reason you would want to make this number go up. In, in any clicker …”
Lantz: Mastering competitive games requires reflective self-improvement
“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? How do I learn? And why is it not work…”
Lantz: High-level competitive depth enriches games even for casual players
“Like not everybody thinks this, but I'm the kind of person that, that I'm like, Kind of game designer that actually thinks there's real value in, in having high level competitive community in a game, even if most people are playing it casually.”
Lantz: Video games are more like paintings than orgasm machines
“That's my argument, is that they're more like paintings than they are like orgasm machines.”
Lantz: Shadow of the Colossus pairs primal mastery with moral reflection
“And so Shadow of the Colossus is that, like, it's engaging you as, like, in a primal sense of, like, the desire to understand the system, and master it, and overcome these great things, and defeat them, and move forward, and accomplish these, the series of tas…”
Lantz: Esports Evolve Like Folk Practices Rather Than Author-Driven Games
“Esports are more like, The way games have traditionally been made, which is less the sort of individual author and more like this folk practice of many people working together, like a community of people kind of carving out a set of a set of habits and convent…”
Lantz: Even board game designers must learn coding fundamentals
“I think you want to be a game designer, even if you're making board games, I actually think if you want to be a game designer, you should know the fundamentals of how to code. You should be just, you know, comfortable literate with thinking algorithmically.”
Lantz: Taste is the most important attribute for game designers
“I think to be a successful game designer, you need inspiration, you need hard work, and you need taste. And of all of those, I think taste is maybe the most important and the hardest to kind of like pin down, but it really is that judgment of knowing, of havin…”
Lantz: Taste is inherently social, not private
“There is no, Private taste. Taste is always, like, about connection between people. Yeah. A shared language or some conversation that we're having about values and things.”
Lantz: Close reading of difficult texts is the best intellectual proxy
“I don't know how to get smart, but I think that's the closest proxy we have, right? You know so we try to, like, incorporate that in, into the curriculum, that there's, that they're bumping up against things that they might not have encountered on their own. Y…”
Lantz: Using higher education merely for job placement wastes academia
“We're not a, like, a professional training school, like, we're not a handmaid into the industry where it's like an on-ramp to getting a job, like, yes, we want our students to be successful and have jobs and have careers, but that's a bad use of the academy, t…”
Lantz: Indie game development will never be a reliable career
“It's pop culture. It's entertainment. It's hit driven. It's never going to be a, it's never going to be a reliable career for anybody.”
Lantz: Earning a living from indie games is easier than pop music
“It's certainly easier to make a living making indie games than it is to make a living being a Pop musician, I would say, comparatively, right?”
Lantz: Fortnite's game design structure mirrors a poker tournament
“I think Fortnite in its overall structure has a lot of poker tournament in it, in the sense that it's there's a combination of luck and skill. And it's exactly the structure of, like, starting with a hundred people and ending up with one big winner, and it cou…”
Lantz: Game designers should aspire to chess and basketball, not movies
“Video games are awesome, but we should not be aspiring to be as successful as a successful movie, right? We should be looking at the history of, like, look at chess. Look at Go. Look at poker. Look at basketball. And that's what games can do, right? They can b…”
Lantz: Treating video games as distinct from classical games is parochial
“This border between video games and other kinds of games, I think is, we overemphasize it because it's, A bit, I think it's parochial. I think in, in, you know, we see computer games and these other games as being so distinct and separate. But I actually think…”
Lantz: Top esports titles will not stay dominant for 20 to 30 years
“Like, it's not, I don't think we're looking at, like, whatever, you know, League of Legends, and Counter-Strike, and Hearthstone, and Overwatch, maybe Starcraft, I don't know. Like, I don't think those, I don't think we're gonna be stuck with those for the nex…”
Lantz: You cannot invent a sport; you invent games that evolve
“I see my theory about this is that you really can't invent a sport. You can invent games, and sometimes games can evolve into sports.”