Lantz: Shadow of the Colossus pairs primal mastery with moral reflection
Frank Lantz · Frank Lantz - Director of NYU's Game Center and Creator of Universal Paperclips · Y Combinator · Dec 20, 2018 · at 27:27
Frank Lantz, director of the NYU Game Center, discusses why the video game Shadow of the Colossus succeeds as a standalone piece of art.
0:00 / 0:23exact quote · 23.1s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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 tasks that the game is giving you. But then also the ability to think about what that means in a larger sense. Such a masterpiece.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Frank Lantz
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: 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: 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: 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.”