What Are Video Games Good For?

push to talk #43 // frank lantz believes that players should demand more from their games

“We need an audience that rises up to meet our most ambitious creators, to push them, to demand greatness, an audience that sees itself as an active participant in the ongoing evolution of games as a form, not just as consumers of a product, or defenders of a hobby.”
—Frank Lantz, Director of New York University’s Game Center

Lantz’s The Beauty of Games is one of the strangest books about games from the past few years. Though only 164 pages, it has reformatted my brain.

A Substack post with a spicy headline made the rounds this week.

The headline: “Are Games Bad?”

The post title is pure clickbait. Games… bad? You’d be tempted to dismiss the article out of hand—until you learn that it’s written by Frank Lantz, director of New York University’s department of game design (NYU Game Center) and the designer of Drop7, one of the greatest puzzle games of all time.¹

I’ve been following Lantz’s work for years, and my initial, gut reaction to this headline was Oh no. He’s giving up on us.

So it came as a relief, really, that Lantz’s piece is just a measured criticism of the work of Hideo Kojima, and in particular the dialogue in Kojima’s games:

In an industry dominated by the predictable, the formulaic, and the generic, it’s no mystery why Kojima is considered a genius.

And yet. There’s another thing Kojima games are famous for. Interminable cutscenes filled with terrible dialogue. I mean really, really bad. Vast stretches of boring, repetitive exposition, explicating backstories that are so incomprehensibly convoluted that they wrap around into self-parody and back again. Imagine a version of The Bourne Identity where, every other scene, the action pauses for an hour and we have to listen to Matt Damon argue with GPT-2 about The Silmarillion.’

The whole piece is worth reading, but Lantz’s beef with Kojima mostly comes down to his belief that Kojima’s writing is tedious and full of trite nonsense, with “a wafer-thin veneer of thematic seriousness.” It’s not that his games are bad. It’s that they could be better.

Lantz exhorts his readers (and players in general) to stop excusing the weakest parts of the games we love. We should, he argues, hold the medium of games to a higher standard instead of always inventing excuses to explain away the parts that fall short.

So what’s up with that dramatic headline, then?

Here’s how Lantz ends the piece. This gets to the heart of it:

Why do I care about this? Why can’t I just let people like things? Because I think that the puzzle of Hideo Kojima is, in some ways, a microcosm of the puzzle of video games in general. So many of the worst things about video games are not just reluctantly tolerated but enthusiastically embraced because, through association, they have become emblems of our beloved hobby/artform/lifestyle. The same kind of winking, tongue-in-cheek affection that people have for the “bad” parts of Kojima games reflects the way the broader video game audience has internalized their deepest flaws as being, not just acceptable, but welcome. Not just welcome, but somehow necessary. Video games are childish and vulgar and corny and silly on purpose. And we like it this way!

Except we don’t like it this way. Not really. Deep down we recognize that these things are an unfinished project, and it terrifies us. Video games are technical and creative marvels, sublime and ridiculous. They are the cathedrals of the modern world. Only we don’t know what they are for. [emphasis mine –RKR] So we tell ourselves the comforting story that they are just for puppet shows and cartoons and dressing up and make-believe and playing house and playing soldier. But they are not. They are not.

They are the cathedrals of the modern world. Only we don’t know know what they are for. That’s a banger of a line. The boy Franky L is dropping bars like that in a newsletter called, for some reason, Donkeyspace.

But to some, the question "what are games for?" would seem ridiculous. Isn’t the answer obvious? Escape, many would say. To relax. To connect with my friends. Many people do know what games are for, in terms of the value they bring to their own lives. Games are awesome as they are, otherwise why would so many people care so much about them? Do they really need to be cathedrals?

But Frank is always pushing for games to be something bigger. And he’s been doing this for a long time.

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2004: New Yorkers react to an ongoing game of Pac Manhattan, a live-action game of Pac-Man designed to be played on the streets of Manhattan. The game was created by students attending Frank Lantz’s “Big Games” class at NYU.

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He’s designed city-sized games, and a tiny but legendary mobile game that some have argued is on-par with Tetris.² This is a guy who has educated a generation or two of New York game designers—not some frivolous blogger. If he thinks video games are an “unfinished project,” that strikes me as worth consideration.

But maybe I’m just more primed for the argument, because I too have always felt that so many games—even really great ones—are nowhere close to achieving their real potential.

The first time this thought really started to grab hold of me was during a playthrough of Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag. At the time, basically everyone I knew agreed that this was a particularly great entry in the AC series. Black Flag got 9/10 review scores from all the critics, and the word-of-mouth reviews were strong too. So I bought it.

And then—I don’t know—six or seven hours into it, I had this moment where I realized that I just hadn’t been having any fun. The stealth challenges felt silly, the story wasn’t interesting to me, and the combat was boring. But there was something worse than that pulling at me, something I couldn’t articulate. The game has these sidequests where you chase around collectible “sea shanties,” floating pieces of paper that unlock new songs for your pirate bros to sing while out at sea. So I was chasing these things around, jumping over rooftops and wallrunning around scurvy-ridden merchants and prostitutes, when I got slammed with this absolutely overwhelming feeling that all this is pointless.

This wasn’t an idle thought—it hit me in a wave of emotion. I had to put the controller down. The feeling wasn’t reducible to something mild like “oh, this is boring” or “this game isn’t for me” or even “I could be doing something better with my time right now.” It felt like I’d suddenly stared into an abyss totally devoid of meaning, and that if I kept playing, that abyss would suck me in.

Ever since then, that same feeling occasionally starts to bubble up when I’m playing some games. The inner machinations of the game loop start to become a little bit too obvious, and the game loses its magic—accessing a flow state with the game becomes impossible.

This isn’t to say I feel this way about all games. Every once in a while I find a game that can still cast the spell. Last year it was Pikmin 4, which I played through late at night after getting the kids to bed. This year it’s UFO 50, which is so jam-packed with surprises that I don’t think I could ever get truly bored with it. But that’s rare. Most games don’t do it for me, and elements like long dialogue or cutscene sequences, grindy mechanics, and simplistic loops make otherwise interesting games repellant. Games are beautiful, but only a few are really magical.

So I’m drawn to this idea that—really, it’s just because games are an art form like any other. And like any art form, there’s a process of evolution that has to happen, which games are in the beginning stages of.

That’s one of the arguments advanced by a book Frank Lantz published last year, called The Beauty of Games.

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The Beauty of Games

The book opens with a bold claim: Games are the defining artform of the twenty-first century.

A few pages later, Lantz elaborates on what he thinks games are:

Games are an aesthetic form. Which is to say that they are something we do for their own sake, in search of beauty, pleasure, and meaning, a realm in which our subjective tastes and individual experiences are joined together into communities of critical judgment and overlapping but contesting values.

The book—a slim volume of 164 pages—continues on like this, building on Lantz’s argument that games are an aesthetic form (that is, an artform) on par with literature and painting and cinema, and then exploring what that means.

It’s a strange book. There’s like 38 pages of extended meditations on the beauty of Go and Poker in the middle of it.

And then there’s this last section where he tries (I think not totally successfully but with some brilliant flourishes) to make the case that games have the potential to unlock a sort of new phase of evolution for the human brain, inspired by philosophical writings from Karl Popper and David Chapman’s essays on meta-rationality.

That part probably sounds totally insane, but reading it, I found myself hoping that he’s right.

Wouldn’t it be cool if games had that power? If games meant so much that they changed the way humans think about the world?

I’m really taken with this idea. I want to believe it. I want Frank to convince me—and his book almost did it. Reading his post about Kojima’s games this week reminded me of the turmoil The Beauty of Games stirred up in me when I read it last year.

So I reached out to Frank with a couple of questions. What follows is a short Q&A:

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PUSH TO TALK: I want to ask a couple of questions about your Are Games Bad? piece. With Kojima's games in particular, do you think some players are just failing to observe their own response to actually playing the games? In other words: playing the games, ignoring how bad some parts (like the dialogue) are, and perhaps getting swept up in the critical buzz and ignoring their own experience?

FRANK LANTZ: I think it's more that it is often hard to extract an overall judgment about something like this, even when you pay attention to your own response. Some things are easy to judge based on your immediate response - when a joke makes you laugh, when a magic trick surprises and amazes you, when a pornographic image arouses you—but games like this are really complicated works, with lots of interacting features, and it's harder to arrive at a confident judgment with things like that.

You might watch a Tarkovsky film and think "I'm bored, this shot is boring" but then, eventually, you come to appreciate how that initial response wasn't the whole story, how the overall film is working on a higher level that isn't subject to the standard rhythm and logic of conventional movie-making. Conversely, you might find an action movie instantly compelling, but then decide it's shallow and manipulative. I think most people have the same first-level experience of Kojima's awkward dialogue, but then integrate it into different overall judgments, based on a number of factors.

One of the things I wanted to do with this piece is just express the idea that one coherent overall judgment you could have is that, even though these games are, overall, really interesting and cool, it's ok to not like this particular aspect, it's ok to be critical of it.

How do we find out “what games are for?” My default assumption is that we wait for genius artists to make new games that reveal some unknown aspect of games as a form. But is there some way that institutions (even ones like NYU Game Center) can help construct the scaffolding?

First, we need game creators to keep making original games, whether they are "genius artists" or just clever, hardworking developers, or, honestly, lazy and lucky! I think we're doing pretty well on this front. I think there continues to be a profusion of amazing games being made by all kinds of people, motivated by all kinds of design goals, from making something pleasing and fun to making something deep and complex to making something weird and personal and expressive, and many of them reveal unknown aspects of games as a form.

Then, we need an audience that is paying attention and has an appetite for new experiences. We need an audience that is as ambitious and willing to take risks as our most innovative creators. We need an audience that is literate, not just in one game, or one genre, but across games, able to make critical comparisons between games. We need an audience that rises up to meet our most ambitious creators, to push them, to demand greatness, an audience that sees itself as an active participant in the ongoing evolution of games as a form, not just as consumers of a product, or defenders of a hobby.

Finally, we need a culture of game criticism that is willing to tackle the enormous challenge of helping shape that overall process, to be leaders in that dynamic back and forth, to lead by example, not by establishing critical consensus, but by doing the hard work of reflecting on their own responses, crafting their own judgments, and then articulating that experience in a way that forges a human connection between themselves and creators and audiences. And these people need to be able to make a living. I understand that it's hard to figure out how to do mainstream game criticism, mostly because every game is a whole friggin universe unto itself. We need to figure out how to solve that problem. Award shows are not the answer. Fan content is not the answer. 

Yes, institutions can and should help take on this challenge, we see this as part of our mission at NYU and take that mission seriously. But we can't sit around waiting for institutions to solve this problem. This is our problem, and we need to figure out solutions as individuals, and in small groups. 

In your book The Beauty of Games you wrote that "In ancient China, Go was considered one of the 'four arts,' skills that needed to be cultivated in order to be accepted as a scholar gentleman of a certain class. The other skills were calligraphy, painting, and mastery of the musical instrument guqin." If you could dictate a set of modern skills to require for more people, what would they be? (I suppose in this scenario you're designing a new aristocracy, lol.)

LOL! Ok, I'll give it a shot. In my aristocracy, the four arts of the cultivated gentleperson would be:

• Hanabi. The collaborative card game of empathy and deductive logic.

• Search. The ability to use the internet effectively, to reverse-engineer the algorithms that are trying to manipulate you, and get them to produce genuine value.

• Betting. The art of translating vague impressions and nebulous emotions into precise, quantifiable predictions about the future.

• Meditation. The act of sitting quietly and doing nothing.

  

  Rhythm Tengoku is the first game in the Rhythm Heaven series, from the creators of WarioWare

Beyond Poker and Go, what are the video games that you think have gotten closest to revealing the potential of games as an aesthetic form? 

Rhythm Tengoku, Disco Elysium, Portal, Shadow of the Colossus, Wip3out, Crackdown, Nethack, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, World of Warcraft, Howling Dogs, Cinco Paus, Everything, Earth Defense Force, Corrypt, Galcon, Network Wars, League of Legends, Counter Strike, Counter Strike surfing, speed running, stunt servers, God Hand, Persona, Shiren the Wanderer, The Witness, Half-Life, The Beginner's Guide.

At the end of The Beauty of Games, you make the case that games offer "a passage through instrumental reason to meta-rationality." Have other aesthetic forms helped clear the path for the development of human consciousness through its other stages? I’m thinking of film, literature, etc. [NOTE FOR READERS: This question probably makes little sense unless you’ve read Frank’s book. What I’m really asking is: “Can games change our brains, and have other artforms changed our brains?”]

Every art form does this. This is what art does, it changes us, it opens up a space outside of our existing structures and patterns—perceptual, behavioral, cultural, institutional—and gives us room to explore and try and discover and invent.

Painting, music, stories, poetry, games, they've always done this, always contributed to the bigger process of personal and civilizational evolution, for better or worse. It is happening now, with games, whether we want it to or not, it's only a matter of us choosing how it happens, how we want it to happen.

Do we want to be plugged into an escapist metaverse of static fantasy machines? Or do we want to imagine new structures of machinic beauty and meaning that can carry us upward and forward? That can help us figure out what those words even mean?

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That’s it for this week. I’m gonna go learn how to play Hanabi so I can become an aristocrat and bring honor to my family’s name.

I’ll see you next Friday.

1. Drop7 is probably the most critically acclaimed game that also qualifies as “lost media.” Zynga acquired the rights to the game when it bought Lantz’s studio Area/Code in 2010, and subsequently removed the game from storefronts. That’s too bad, given that Drop7 is one of only a couple dozen games to ever receive a 10/10 score from Edge magazine.

2. Game designer Jason Rohrer once called Drop7 a “Tetris killer.” I know at least one former games critic who still plays it every day, having somehow managed to keep the app running on his iPhone despite the fact that Zynga ended support for it years ago.