Ep 003: Frank Lantz
Caitlin McShea: Hi, Frank, how are you?
Frank Lantz: Hello! How are you, Caitlin? I'm doing good.
CM: I'm good as well. I guess you're in New York right now. Is that right?
FL: I am I'm in New York. And where are you geographically?
CM: I’m in Utah.
FL: Okay. I like that you have the Utah monolith as your background. Very nice.
CM: I figured it was appropriate given the subject of this podcast. So, let me take a couple of minutes to introduce you in terms of your interplanetary overlap, and how it is we know each other. So Frank Lantz, for those who don't know, is the Director of the New York University Game Center. And as a result of that work, you and David met in New York to converse about the possibilities for what gaming might provide to those who are trying to engage with complexity. And then you came to Santa Fe for about a week or two, and worked a lot with me and a lot with our education department…and we played a lot too…to figure out where there's merit in gaming. There's a lot ,it turns out.
And then last year, when we were allowed to have large gatherings, Frank participated in our InterPlanetary Festival and hosted and moderated our “Game Design” panel, which was the most streamed panel of the festival, by the way.
FL: Excellent.
CM: That’s a feather for your cap. And now that we're remote, we get to converse over zoom.
FL: Yes.
CM: The new normal.
FL: This is the new normal apparently, yeah.
CM: So, what have you been up to since I saw you last?
FL: Well, let's see, I have been teaching remotely, which is a mixed bag. I mean, it's not ideal, but it's interesting and it's a different way of teaching. We're trying to make it work. We feel like we're the lucky ones because the game industry is already very remote in how it operates, so learning how to make games, and collaborate, and be productive, and be creative under these conditions is a good skill we have. Our students are making the best of it. And I am finishing a book, I'm writing a book about games that is coming out from MIT Press hopefully next year. So, let's say so I'm putting the final touches on that.
CM: Does it have a title?
FL: The Beauty of Games.
CM: Fabulous!
FL: So it's my sort of my grand unified theory about games as an aesthetic form. Like, what does it mean to think about games within the context of music and theater, literature and fine arts? How are they meaningful and beautiful in ways that are similar to those other things, but also unique and different? So that's what the book is about.
CM: That’s exciting!
FL: Yeah, I'm excited about it. And I have been working on other game projects. I am sort of in the early stages of starting a new studio, and I'm collaborating with folks and making games that are focused on using machine-learning and other new forms of artificial intelligence that are emerging…these kinds of contemporary, new, data-driven methods for doing cool generative stuff and procedural stuff. I'm interested in discovering what new kinds of games are lurking in that technology.
CM: Is that “Hello Planet?”
FL: Yeah, that's the new studio, Hello Planet, yeah. So, it's just early days getting that going, but I’m super excited and doing a lot of experimentation and exploration using these new techniques.
CM: Are you finding you're having fun in that world, the machine-learning/AI world of game design, as it continues to emerge?
FL: Yes! It is amazingly fun. It's weird, and fun, and it feels…I mean, that's what I live for! I like trying to discover new things. I am a novelty junkie. I want to constantly be surprised and confronted with things that are new, and different, and interesting. And that's one of the reasons I got into games in the first place, because games are new, and interesting, and different. They're weird as a form of culture, they're also ancient as a form of culture…
CM: Precisely…
FL: …but also, in some ways they feel like they're a little bit from the future. Do you know what I mean?
CM: Yes, I think so. I also think there's kind of a novelty in gameplay itself, depending on what the game is, not only if it's a brand new game from brand new technologies that allow you to build it, but that gameplay itself is a novel experience because it's a little more immersive and participatory than other aesthetic forms of art and media. So, it's constantly “novel.”
FL: Yeah. Good games are always surprising you in some ways, right? It's like, what makes a good riddle is when the answer fits, but you weren't expecting it, right? A good puzzle is where you can find the solution, but there's something interesting, and different, and unexpected about the solution. And you feel like you've gotten a little flash of insight. And good sports, too. Sports are about generating surprise, you know? Like a thing that you weren't expecting that happens turns the game around at the last minute. They’re drama engines. And so, I think in some ways, all creative expression is like this.
Literature is also about surprise. It's about generating suspense in the mind of the reader. What's going to happen next? I'm anxious in a certain way, like, “Oh, I hope that person doesn't get run over by the train,” and then the hero swoops in and you're like, “Oh, I wasn't expecting that.” So, I think there's an element of that in all art forms, but I think it's especially present in games – this idea that with just a combination of a few simple elements, we can produce something really fascinating, and unexpected. That's really kind of a hallmark of how games work.
CM: Totally. And I guess when I think about the games that have been most successful over the history of time, what's interesting for me is that they’re quite limited, like Chess, for instance. It's only 64 squares, but the combinatorial nature of it makes it new, and different, and challenging every time. And that includes the people playing. Like that, the players, seems like an element towards the combination. For me, I enjoy playing children more so than experts.
FL: Chess is a great example, because, well, first of all, Chess is fascinating because it's experiencing a little Renaissance right now.
CM: Yes, Netflix, thank you!
FL: Chess is kind of blowing up. You got “The Queen's Gambit,” but it’s blowing up on Twitch, the streaming game app. Tons of people are playing Chess. And I guess Nakamura – I can't remember the guy's, name I think it’s Nakamura – who's the great speed Chess/blitz player has kind of staked out some territory on Twitch and gotten a lot of people excited about Chess.
And one of the things that's interesting about Chess is there's this tension in Chess between the creative problem-solving part that happens when you are in the zone, and you're looking at a position. When you are generating possible moves with creativity and using your intuition to spontaneously generate brilliant, brilliant moves. That's one part of Chess. That's the sweet spot of Chess, But, there's a big part of Chess that is about memorization and calculation in a way that feels more rote, but especially this kind of book-memorization – openings, and that kind of study. So, you see in that the tension between surprise and a kind of novelty on the one hand, and then something that is static and predictable on the other hand.
And, and in Chess, there is a lot of interest in evolving Chess to drive it towards that sweet spot a little more. So even Bobby Fischer, back in the day, invented “Fisher Random,” which was a variation of Chess where you had random arrangements of the pieces, so that you couldn't study openings, you couldn't memorize openings. It would just like throw you into that middle part of the game sooner.
CM: What a simple variable, but also, what a complication!
FL: And so, there are people who are interested in that and there was even a recent paper where the AlphaZero team was using AlphaZero, not just to play Chess, or to come up with more and more optimal strategies for playing Chess, but to come up with variations on Chess. So they're kind of like working with AlphaZero to look at the design space of Chess and think, “How can we evolve it to introduce more of this kind of surprise and that elemen?” So, yeah, Chess is a great example.
CM: Yeah, it seems that Chess has the capacity to be quite evolvable. And, you know, I was thinking about this schism between the rote memorization of openings; it almost seems like if an expert has that in their toolbox, then there's still room for this intuitive move, like which tool to play in the current iteration of Chess, as we know it. But, I like the idea of just reducing the amount of pawns and seeing what happens with more space, or when there are little tweaks that can be done. I think that’s really interesting.
FL: I actually think that one of the cool things that happens with games is that by being so focused, by being these tiny little micro worlds where you get rid of everything except the handful of elements and a handful of rules, and you think, “Well, that's way too simple, like there's no way there's going to be anything interesting about that,” but it always turns out that there's something interesting left. No matter how much you pare it down or focus in, there's always something fascinating and unexpected.
And I think that's part of what games are – they are lenses that you apply to a corner of the world. You just pick a corner of the world and you say, “Look at this!” and then, “No, no, no, look at it. Really look at it!” And you're like, “Yeah, I get it. It's a ball, it's a ball. It goes into a basket.” It's like, “No, no, no, really look at that.” Right? If you really look at trying to throw a ball into a basket, you get this amazing thing, right? Basketball is enormous. It's like a world you can live inside of, but it's a tiny world. It's a world that's made up of just a handful of objects, and the human body, and these very simple rules. Everything else is abstracted away, and yet, it's still almost endlessly fascinating. We're still discovering things about it. Like, it turns out three point shots are the best. Who knew? Who knew all this time, we weren't taking enough three point shots?
CM: Or even outside of the game, let's have the Dunkathon challenge. Let's just see how style plays within the realm of basketball. It’s not quite the game, but it's an element of the game that we all enjoy.
FL: Yes, and then there are people trying to evolve basketball as well. I don't know if you've ever seen slam ball. It's basketball played with trampolines that are embedded in the court. So, like it's not, maybe it’s not right.
CM: Reminds me of that that terrible movie, which is also hilarious, Baseketball. Just the combination of baseball and basketball and who knows what other sport.
FL: I prefer the film Dodge Ball.
CM: Dodge Ball is great too. A wonderful film about team building.
FL: “If you can dodge a wrench, you can Dodge a ball.” That's my motto.
CM: That's great! May I ask, I don't know if it's too nascent, but is there a particular game you're excited about that's developing out of Hello Planet?
FL: Well, there's nothing announceable, yet. We haven't really announced anything, but I will tell you this. We have been playing around with GPT-3. Do you know GPT-3, the language model from open AI? I think there's something really special there. I feel like there's a threshold that we've crossed with GPT 3, and it's not that it is itself an example of general artificial intelligence, right? This there's this kind of Holy Grail that people are seeking out, this idea of general artificial intelligence, and it’s clear that GBT 3 isn't that. But, what's funny about GPT-3, is that it does exactly what it says it's doing. There's no mystery to it. People are like, “But is it really smart? Is it really intelligent?” No, it's not. No, it's exactly what it looks like: it's trying to predict. It looks at your billions and billions of examples of human text, and then you give it a little fragment of text, and it just tries to generate what it thinks is a plausible prediction for what comes next.
And what's surprising about that is how interesting that is, right? It doesn't seem like that would yield the kind of results it does, but it tells us something, I believe, about language, about how much meaning and structure and pattern there is in language itself, before we get ahold of it as individuals and start turning it into sentences and trying to make or say things. Before we try to say smart things or original things, there's already embodied in language, some strange nascent kind of meaning, and it's really putting us smack dab in the middle of a bunch of unanswered questions, which I love!
And that unanswered question is, “What is meaning exactly?” I mean, is “meaning” a thing in the world, or is meaning a way of talking about our relationship to things in the world? It's not a property that things in the world have, but it's a property of the human mind and its relationship to the world, somehow, and there are questions that I think are the next set of questions after Claude Shannon and his pioneering work on information theory. Claude Shannon came along and no one thought about information in this way, but Claude Shannon came along and said, “Oh, no information is a thing that can be measured, and we can talk about it the way we talk about voltage.” And to do that, you need it to kind of abstract away a lot of the other things, but once you did, you've got this really powerful model for how information works, and it gives us a whole new vocabulary and language. I feel like we're now in the next generation of that same question. And instead of “information,” it's about “meaning,” you know, “what is meaning?” Is it something measurable? Is it something that we can approach with this kind of engineering mindset that Claude Shannon brought to information?
And of course, games have always been related to that. Claude Shannon came out of a Bell Labs, and one of the things that the nerds at Bell Labs loved to do was go to Atlantic City and play blackjack. It was like the first generation of people applying the scientific mindset to understanding a game like blackjack and breaking it down to its very foundations, saying, “Oh, there is such a thing as optimal play and here's what it looks like.” So, yeah, I'm just fascinated by that, and I feel like games have a responsibility to help people navigate some of these questions.
I think we're going to have trouble, Caitlin, understanding artificial intelligence. I think we're headed for some turbulent times. We're trying to make sense of this thing. We have it, it's everywhere. It's embedded around us, and in all of these systems. It's putting people in jail…
CM: …it’s deciding who gets a home…
FL: …who gets a loan. Right. It's guiding our lives and our institutions and our structures, and in all kinds of ways; some of which are explicit and some of which are hidden and embedded. It's driving our cars! And we haven't really figured out yet what it actually is. So, I think coming to terms with that and figuring out what it is and how we want to structure our relationship to it, and how we want to think about it…I think games have a role to play in the near future helping us navigate that, and that's what I'm excited about.
CM: That's really exciting! I'm curious to know how you think that games could help you navigate this, because I know a lot of people who fear greatly AI and hate that all of their economic participation is kind of selected for us by our preferences and the predictive nature of AI, too. I don't know if you remember Oscar Sharp from InterPlanetary last year, he's a filmmaker…
FL: Absolutely!
CM: He recently helped me gain access to GPT-3, and we literally did an Alien Crash Site interview with it.
FL: Amazing.
CM: And of course, it just starts interviewing itself, and it selects these amazing objects, they’re all on the website. But I think what he and I were discussing is how GPT-3 seems to provide a gloss across these categories that humans don't recognize are already built into the languages that we use and the thoughts that we share, and so it was really illuminating. I think a gamified way of exploring that gloss would be really, really fascinating. But it would still be important to recognize that those categories are the average across all examinations, they're not quite individual, but they work, mostly, to predict. You know, like the ads I see on Facebook. Yeah, I do like that rug. I do like that sweater.
FL: I don't know how this process that I'm suggesting will unfold, this process where games can provide some value, but because I think it is this necessarily kind of irreducible thing. I think of games, like I said, as something alongside other art forms. And the way that they do their work is similar to how art does its work. And we can't really put that into words exactly. It's not that I tell you, “Oh yeah, the reason it's good to spend your life reading great novels is because then at the end you'll be happier” No, there is some value in confronting the lives outside your own, in coming into contact with deep or deeper truths of human experience, in kind of wrestling with challenging ideas and trying to kind of wrap your head around them. In tapping into the shared humanity, that feeling of common shared humanity that you get from a great novel. These are things that they're not good because they have some transactional value in some other marketplace. They're good in this intrinsic way.
So that's the job of art, it's to open up a window on these things that are good in this intrinsic way. That doesn't translate exactly into the language of how we explain what things are good at. You know, I can tell you why medicine is good or why a bridge is good, or why a house is good: It's strong. It keeps the rain out. You know, I can give you reasons why it's good, but why this song is good? And why it's good to have music in your life? You can't explain that in the same way. So, I do believe that that value is there. And I believe that the same thing will be true of games in their relationship to these questions of systems, and artificial intelligence, and logic, and abstraction models, simulations.
Like all the things that go into games, these are things that…part of what we're doing is trying to understand what they are. And we're trying to understand them in a way that isn't the way that the scientists understand things and explain them. It’s not just about prediction and explanation, but it's related. And so, for example, I've already made a couple of games about AI. One of them was a science fiction story about a paperclip making AI.
CM: YES!! Universal Paperclips! I know it, it's great. I almost had a paperclip factory behind me in your honor. I'll link to it here for anyone who's listening. It’s super fun!
FL: Yeah. That monolith does look like one of the things that you make in the game, when, in the end part of the game where you're managing big fleets of drone warriors, and in order to motivate them, you have to create these kind of giant artworks that get them fired up and inspired. It looks like one of those. Yeah.
So, the question is to unlock the alignment problem, the values alignment problem, right? That's what that game was about. And it was an exploration of that idea, not from the perspective of like, “Oh, here's how this stuff works. And let me do a game that explains it.” But like, “This is fascinating. It's kind of unsettling. It's clearly interesting.” Let's just make a game that explores it, that puts you in that relationship and gets you to think about these issues. Like, what does it mean? What are values? Where do they come from?
When I play a game, I take on an artificial value, like I'm trying to get the ball through the hoop. Why? Because that's how you make the game go, right? It is artificial by design. It's not a goal that you actually have in the real world. That's the whole point. By taking on a goal that you don't have in the real world, you get to learn something about goals, about the world, because you're coming at it from a different angle. All of a sudden, you're not enmeshed in values. You've been pulled out for a second and you get to observe how values work when they are a little artificial machine that's been generated and you see, “Oh, wow.”
This is really like when you're playing Universal Paperclips, you really want to see that number go up. And, it's sort of like a suspension of disbelief, but it gives you some insight into this question, “What would it be like to be in artificial intelligence? What does it mean to be completely enthralled to a value function that is imposed on you from outside?” And so that was my attempt to kind of explore those ideas, which I think are really important.
And then I made “Hey Robot” which is a party game that you play with your Alexa. So, if you have a smart speaker like Alexa or Google Home, there's now a party game where you're trying to get Alexa to say a word on a card. When you ask her a question, you can't use the word in the question. So, it's a classic kind of party game, and in that case, it's a totally different kind of game.
Universal Paperclips is a classic kind of dystopic science fiction story. It's this whole epic story. And it's big and it's dark. It's like the darkest game.
CM: It’s viral metallurgy.
FL: I think it's maybe the most violent game anyone's ever made. How could you make something more violent than a game about the total elimination of…
CM: life…
FL: …all meaning in the universe? It’s clearly the worst thing that could ever happen. And yet it's also kind of funny. Hey Robot is the opposite because it's like, okay, well, you already have an AI living in your house, and you just don't use it for anything. Cause it's not that great, but it's kind of funny. And it actually has a little bit of a personality and you could actually invite it to the table and play a game with it. And, and so it's reminding people that they already live in the future. Like we already live in a world where we have robot assistants and we've gotten so used to it we don't even notice it. This is a way of noticing it.
And it's funny, it's weird. It's like, oh, this thing is strange. This thing I have in my house. And it's got a little bit of a personality which I didn't notice before, but it's funny and weird. It's like a character. And so those were two ways to kind of get at it. And now the kinds of things I'm working on with GPT 3 are more like conventional video games, right. You're walking around in a world, you're interacting with characters, but those characters are generated using these new kinds techniques. It's weird, Caitlin, really! You know what? I feel like these new AI-like machine learning and generative adversarial networks, and these new kinds of things, I feel like they have a psychedelic energy to them, honestly. Like maybe we're heading into a new era of a kind of new psychedelic sensibility, something that’s got some high weirdness to it.
Because you can see it, sort of, in like in Deep Dream, you know, in the image generation AI with the swirling kind of eyeballs…
CM: …those demon doggies…
FL: Here, there is a sense in which there is a dream logic happening in these generative techniques that is truly strange and interesting. And so, yeah, I'm having a blast working with this stuff. But at the same time, I also think maybe I've gone off the deep end, because I'm in territory that I don't quite understand how to make sense of, but I'm doing my best to turn it into something that will be fun, you know, that will be surprising and cool in all the ways that a good video game is. So that's my journey right now.
CM: Great. I also find it very interesting in terms of this psychedelic energy that you bring up, the fact that these AI are trained by us, and we essentially give them a very logical and rudimentary process through which they can make these decisions…and so, it's really strange to see that the architecture that actually emerges is more dreamlike than rational. Like what does that mean about what we're implanting into these? About us? It’s wild.
FL: What does it tell us about logic, about the use of logic and the limits of logic? Logic is amazing and powerful, and I'm personally fascinated by the idea of meta-rationality, which I don't know if you've encountered this term, meta-rationality. There's a guy that I really like, he used to do AI research back in the day, and he got into Zen Buddhism, and now he’s a writer and a thinker. His name is David Chapman and I'm a huge fan. And he has this whole project on meta-rationality, which he is working out, and has this little website called “meaningness.” And what meta-rationality reflects is not a rejection of rational methods. It's not like, “Oh, rationality is just one more type of religion and it's all the same.” It’s not that the kind of relativist approach or nihilistic approach, it's not that. It’s understanding that there is something beyond rationality, that rationality is one mode of interacting with the world.
And it's a mode that you want to be good at. You want to develop your capacity for rational thought and you want to be able to apply it, and to achieve the things in the world that you want. But it is not a global, universal, eternal context. It is not the final context. And we thought for a while, it might be.
CM: We certainly value it as such, and we have for a while.
FL: We did. And, you know, there was this project of the logical positivists who thought, “Oh, we have it now,” and you can see why they might think it's true. Like after an eternity of believing in a kind of superstition and this just metaphysical gobbledygook, it's like, “Oh, no, here's a way of thinking about stuff that actually does work. And you can use it to do the things you want to do.” Like if you want to make medicine to keep babies from dying, great. Or if you want to go and walk around on the moon, it's like, “Hey, this thing really works.” And so, for a while, it was like, “Okay, now we're done. From now on like, this is the end of philosophy,” right? “This is the end of thought,” because now we have the method that works and we can just apply it. But I mean, just look around you. It didn't turn out that way. Look at our current president, look at our response to COVID-19. The 20th century was this strange encounter with the limits of that as a mode, but starting with logical positivism itself. It's not a going concern in philosophy.
But also with things like, you know, Gödel and the limits of mathematical logical systems, and Church-Turing, the limits of computation. But even in fine art people like Marcel Duchamp come along and put a toilet in a gallery. Like, what are the limits of fine art as a context or for making meaning? What are the edges of that system? People just discovered that systems have edges, right? That there is no global system that just contains the whole world. And once you discover whether that, it's God or logic or love, there just isn't one, there isn't just one single global system. And what this idea of meta-rationality suggests is that we, nonetheless, make meaning in our lives. We are still in a position where you move…
…It doesn't mean that the project is over and that we give up. That's nihilism. It doesn't mean that you just reject everything. It means that you have to do the work of moving between these systems and modes: sometimes rational and sometimes in a different mode that isn't rationality. That's another ingredient in the mix that I think AI is demonstrating, and I like that. AI, which is just a mathematical process, just an algorithm, it is completely deterministic. And you can look at it and you can just see the rules and you can see how they're operating and you can see the results, and yet, the results are sometimes chilling, sometimes moving, sometimes dark and disturbing. But there's something, there's a window that we're kind of peeking through.
CM: Yeah, quite often, it's like this uncanny revelatory thing. It reveals something that you maybe didn't know or didn’t want to see, but it's there and it’s not good. Or I mean, it's not comfortable, but it's good, ultimately.
FL: It's real. It's in the world. And I feel like it's related in some ways to the practice of divination, of trying to tell the future, by throwing the yarrow stocks for the I Ching, or the tarot, or knuckle bones, or whatever. We've always been engaged in trying to figure out what can we say about the future? What can we predict about the future? What can we know about the future? And It's going to be an interesting time.
I'm excited. I just want to be in the mix. I feel like the next 10, 20, 50 years might be the most interesting time in the history of humans. I know it sounds arrogant to say, “Oh, my neighborhood is the best. I happened to be born at just the right time,” but I feel like I kind of feel that way. Don't you ever feel that way?
CM: I do feel that way, but I'm extremely optimistic, as you know. What's good is that I find often, most people are like, “I was born in the wrong time. If only I could live in the future on Mars,” or “If only I lived in the twenties in Paris,” and rarely are people satisfied with the time that they find themselves in. I am. I'm glad that you are. You obviously are.
FL: Yeah. Like Jonathan Richman. Do you know Jonathan Richmond, the musician?
CM: Absolutely!
FL: He's in love with the modern world.
CM: Totally.
FL: He loves the modern world. He loves driving down the highway, listening to a pop song on the radio. The modern world is great!
CM: I'm going to link to some good Richman videos. There is a great performance that I watch quite often. It's just so natural and fabulous that I have to link to it. Could I change tack just a little bit, maybe go back to… or I guess this is related to what we're talking about…but when I think about AI or this time that we have ahead of us, for which we're both excited, it does seem as though there's still a progress narrative there. Like we're getting more and more tools or more ways, or more lenses as you put it. But earlier we were talking about how art in general has been this way that we can almost cross pollinate with ideas that are larger than ourselves, but that we don't necessarily engage with quite that often.
And a novel is an example, a painting, a golden toilet, whatever. But I'm wondering if there's a limitation for things like games, given the technological nature of the medium. I almost wonder if there is somewhere, some game library where I can go play Atari for a bit, because it pre-dates me, but could also play Sega Genesis because it was right when I was like developing an interest in certain games, and then future games as well. Like I can pick up a novel from the 1800s no problem, and still engage with that. I wonder if you have any thoughts about how the medium of game might be limited.
FL: Well, first of all, there, there is such a place. It's the internet archiveand doing such a good job of recording the history of games.
CM: Duh, of course.
FL: And if you go there, they have an arcade and you can get access to all of these games, and it's so valuable and useful, and they're even saving flash. You know, how flash was like this thing that we're just at the tail end of, this important era of internet games that were built in flash, and flash is being sunsetted because Apple sucks.
CM: whoa
FL: But they're doing a good job of preserving a lot of those flash games. I made a bunch of games in flash so I’m glad that there's going to be some way of not losing those. So, on a practical level, yeah. You can still get access to all that stuff. And then, you know, it's such an interesting question about the relationship of video games to the grand narrative of technical progress. There is a sense in which people have a kind of intuitive understanding that video games are on a certain trajectory, which has an endpoint. And that endpoint is the Holodeck. It is perfect simulation, seamless, indistinguishable from the real thing where you can do anything and think anything and encounter anything.
I think the truth is just more complicated. I think there is a sense in which video games are always about exploring the affordances of the computer, “what can this thing do,” right? Some of the very first video games were just demos. Like, oh, we have this big honkin’ computer, what can it do? Think Space War, like, “Oh, let's show it off. Let's show off what this thing can do,” right? And I still feel like that's one of the big ingredients, like “we spent a lot of money on this computer, let me go get a thing that really shows what the computer is capable of.” And so, I think that'll always be the case. Then you also have this kind of symbiotic relationship where games push the technology forward.
CM: Right.
FL: Games invented the GPU, and then the GPU turned out to have this general application that it's now sort of like…
CM: Ubiquitous!
FL: Yea, you know, it's like crypto and like all this other stuff kind of lives in this world that was kind of pioneered by games. Like the idea of having a graphics processor was first to make video games. So, I think that there is this nice relationship, like where we are, again, trying to make sense of these things. That's part of the process I'm describing. That's part of the process of trying to make sense of: what computers are and what they're good at, by asking the question, “Well, what do I like, what do I enjoy about them? What makes me happy? What gives me pleasure about computation?
So it's not just enough to know the most powerful computation I can run. There's a more important question, which is what's the funnest computation I can run? I like that question, asking ourselves what we find interesting or beautiful, fun, surprising, meaningful. That is something that we are trying to figure out about computers, but I don't think it’s on this like asymptomatic path towards getting closer and closer to one particular ideal. I think instead it's going in a bunch of different directions. And I think that'll never stop. I think we'll always be in a kind of friendly arms race with our tools and with our art. I think that's what art is in a way. It's like – and maybe this is just the mind of the game designer thinking – but I think there is a kind of contentious relationship that we have to art. We were like, “Oh, show me something beautiful.” And the artist said, “Well, here's something you didn't even know that you thought was beautiful.” That's what a masterpiece is. A masterpiece is not a thing that we already knew we liked…
CM: It’s not a rose…
FL: Don’t show me a bunch of stuff I already know I like. If you show me the thing I already know I like, intuitively, I might think that that's what art is about. Oh, give me another dose. Give me another slice of that thing I know.
CM: Hit me.
FL: Yeah, one more! But I think in reality…well, there's a certain amount of that in art…but I think great art is about discovering together this thing that you do find beautiful, that you didn't even know you found beautiful. It's like a new gear. It's like adding another gear to your ability to appreciate beauty. And that's the co-evolution that we're in with our art, it's like a jungle gym you're designing. And so, you see that in challenging art, in difficult art. People who like to read Ulysses or watch challenging cinema.
CM: Like Stalker
FL: There you go. Part of what they're doing is showing off and saying, “Oh, look at me, I have great taste and I'm on erudite, and I have the equipment needed to interpret and understand this stuff.” That's part of it, but then there's also a sense in which genuinely, we're climbing a ladder, you know what I mean? Like we're not just circling, we're not just dog paddling. Like we're actually kind of like figuring things out, and moving in a direction so that we're different than when we started.
CM: And like spiraling upward, too. It's a little of both dimensions, I think.
FL: Yeah. I think you're right. There's a lot of spiraling. And then sometimes it goes down in the other direction.
CM: Right. Sometimes an older idea proves to be more relevant when we have more information, so it's like every direction.
FL: Yeah. When you describe it like that, it's maybe overly simplistic, the way that I'm thinking, “Oh, it's obvious that there is a direction,” but really what that process is, is discovering what is the space that we're moving through? What would a direction mean? Like what's a vector in the space of different kinds of tastes and different kinds of beauty? But that's, to me, the fundamental, endlessly fascinating, impossible question to answer.
CM: Yes. Impossible, but exciting. Or impossible and inviting!
FL: Yeah. Yeah.
CM: So then may I transition to the crux of the conversation, speaking of great art, if you agree that this is a great piece of art. When I invited you to this conversation and told you the premise, you enthusiastically told me that you love the novel Roadside Picnic. And so, if you would indulge me, or humor me for an aside, I haven't actually had the opportunity to discuss the book on this series yet. We discuss the premise, obviously, and I will ask you for your object, but is there something that was really revelatory or difficult…or what is it about that book that makes you claim you love it?
FL: Well, first of all, the Strugatsky brothers are just great. Everything they do was great. I really like their work. I like Roadside Picnic. I really like, they have a story called Monday Begins on Saturday, I think, which I really love. Yeah. And there is this book, which is another great Strugatsky book. By the way, one of the great things about Roadside Picnic of course, is that it, it became Stalker. It was turned into this masterpiece of cinema. And then this, this one also produced a lot of weird films. There's, I think, a 2013 Russian movie based on this one, which is very strange, and hard to watch, and weird, and maybe good.
CM: Let me just say for anyone who's listening instead of watching, that the book you're holding up is Hard to be a God.
FL: Yes, that right. And so, what is it about the Strugatskys that I like so much? I don't know. There's something about that era. There's something about science fiction that comes out of a Soviet era, the post-Soviet era, Eastern Europe. I'm a big fan of Stanislaw Lem, the Polish author, and his literature of ideas. It’s particularly smart and interesting in ways that not all science fiction is. Sometimes fiction can become, it can really indulge in the pulp pleasures, which is great, or space opera, and then it becomes more like adventure stories that use technology as a setting.
But I think the Strugatskys and Lem were more interested in the ideas themselves, and what is at the heart of science fiction is this idea of speculation, of imagining alternate worlds and other kinds of other possible realities and other forms of logic. How do we make sense of the world? And so, yeah, so Roadside Picnic of course, is about the edges of human understanding, and encountering things that are genuinely beyond our ability to process and to interpret. So, this is the idea of encountering the truly strange, and not trying to domesticate it. Not taking the strange and putting it on a leash and walking it around and saying, “Oh, look at my strange pet,” which is what a lot of science fiction does. But rather being with, you know, the truly genuinely strange in a way that is unsettling, that doesn't get resolved happily and neatly, but that leaves the world unraveled. This is what the best science fiction does. Phillip K. Dick, I think does this. J. G. Ballard does this, and I think the Strugatskys do this, too. Yeah. So, it's a great book.
CM: It's interesting that you put it that way, the idea of leashing this unknown thing and making it a pet when it's not meant to do so, because I think you're right that the book itself succeeds in not doing that, but the premise of course, is everyone's attempt to take these strange unfamiliar things and put them on a leash and make them useful. So it's, it's a great contradiction to revel in.
FL: Yes, you’re right! In a sense, it is a book about science fiction.
CM: Yea!
FL: And I guess I hadn't thought of that until you put it in that way, but really they are exploring… when we use our imagination as authors, especially in this setting, and the idea of doing so in a type of literature which is about speculation and encountering the unknown, what's going on when we do that? And we could do that in a way that is about trying to go and harvest something and bring it back and get rich, or apply it to achieve some worldly goal.
But can you do that or do you get lost? And do you want to get lost? Is there a sense in which we want to go beyond, do we want to encounter the space beyond the familiar domestic ordinary boundaries that we're trying to protect? Like maybe we shouldn't protect them. Like, let's just go there.
I think Annihilation is a good example of this as well.
CM: Well, yeah.
FL: Right? To me, Annihilation – which I love both the book and the film, they're quite different – but the Southern Reach trilogy, I think, is a great set of books and contemporary science fiction. But the movie, I think, is aware of the fact that it's in Strugatsky territory…
CM: …and Lem territory. It's all over.
FL: It really knows that it's exploring the same idea of the Zone. I guess the book is, too. I think, now that I think about it, it definitely influenced that book, the idea of going into the Zone and being an kind of intrepid investigator and then discovering something stranger than you even knew was possible.
CM: Yeah, well, at the risk of making you an instant hypocrite, may I ask you the question, the object question, which is if the risk of great peril and at the risk of death, what do you want to make your pet?
FL: Yeah. Okay. So, the object that I brought back from the Zone is a Russian/English dictionary from, I guess, about the mid-seventies, 1973, I think. It's in surprisingly good shape for being in the Zone, as you can see. It's a little musty
**smells book**
FL: but that's one of the interesting things about it right off the bat. It's also just very ordinary. There's nothing particularly magical or weird about it, except what's interesting about this dictionary is that there are a bunch of words that are missing. And that's it, that's the only anomalous quality of this dictionary: that there are a hundred or so words that aren't in here that you would expect them to be. And the thing that kind of makes it special is that there's no pattern, there's no logic to the missing words. I mean, for all effect, it really looks like a puzzle. It looks like a message, right? It's a dictionary that was found in the Zone and it has this weird property of little gaps, but it isn't a message, or we don't know whether it's a message or not. But if it is a message, it's a message of a kind that we don't know how to interpret.
The words that are missing are: club, movement, loan, declaration, brilliance, pitch, acquit, architecture, victory, spy, intervention; they don't add up. They're just like genuinely random. So people have spent a lot of time trying to make sense of this, trying to find how do these things add up - these missing words, if there's some constellation that's then pointing us to some…
CM: Like the cipher that you need to set your encoder ring, to understand whatever the message in this dictionary is…
FL: Exactly. That was one of the first things they tried. It's like, “Oh, this is obviously a code of that kind.” But, you know, there were a lot of code breakers that dulled the teeth of their best equipment, trying to hack out the meaning from this thing. And in fact, one of the things that's happened is that as an artifact, people have just lost interest in it. You would think that, oh, this is a mystery that people are getting into, but there's something about it, it's almost like it resists our attention. You've never heard of it, right?
CM: Nope.
FL: They recovered it almost a decade ago now.
CM: Whoa.
FL: And for a while, there were a couple of papers about it. There was a lot of interest in it. There were computer scientists that were going to attack this from a computational complexity point of view. And yet somehow, it's as if there's nothing, there's just nothing to it. It's like, it's almost as if there's a meaning here, it's not a meaning that exists in the way that we think of meaning. Like we think we understand how meaning works. That there's pattern and at the same time there's nebulosity right there. There's regularity and structure, and then there's surprise and novelty. There's predictability, and then there's randomness. And we have this apparatus that we use to determine if this thing is meaningful or not? Somehow this doesn't fit in that. It may be meaningful in some other way that we don't [know], but it's not a way that we can make sense of. And as a result, people have just kind of lost interest in it. So now it's just sitting on a shelf in my office, and I don't think anyone even remembers that it still exists.
CM: Maybe we'll reprise the interest with this interview.
FL: Maybe… I'm hopeful that at some point maybe someone will come along…
CM: So, it's interesting to think about it in this way, too. Like, I mean, if I lift the veil, so to speak, about the premise of this podcat coming from the Strugatsky brothers novel, obviously humans made that book, right? The book that you possess is human made. But if we imagine that it's something that you unearthed from a Zone…
FL: There's a publishing house in Moscow that it’s supposedly from, but we don't have records of it.
CM: Huh?
FL: But yes, humans made it. Sure.
CM: Well, let’s say, now if we imagine that this is something that you personally unearthed from the Zone, the mystery of the missing words becomes really fascinating when you try to use it in a way to understand not only the meaning of the message, but the thing that left it behind in the first place, what the lack of need for those words demonstrates about that species. And the assumption is that the species is more sophisticated than us, right? Well then why do we need these words? Like, you know, what do they know that allows them to exist without these?
FL: It's like, how do you know your ruler is the right size? Well, you get another ruler, and you compare it. But how do you know which of them is correct? Like at a certain point, it's hard to know for sure that we've got the right, that there's a foot somewhere, like a platonic abstract, 12 inch measurement that everything else is measured against.
But how do we know we got that one right? I think that's what this book suggests. It's hard to know when you've got that one right.
CM: Right. And it's easy to rely upon it when it's become familiar, but then when you encounter something unfamiliar, you suddenly doubt it. So, for instance we're still on the standard system. You can talk about feet. That's great. But someone in the UK thinks that we're stupid because we're not using the metric system. And there's like no regularity between them. I don't know. It's just interesting to see that we fail in our own capacities as humans, without the visitation.
FL: Yeah. It's all good.
CM: Yeah. All right. The Russian/English dictionary full of wonder and mystery.
FL: This is partly inspired, because I love the Strugatsky brothers, but you know what I also love? I love SCP Wiki. Do you know, SCP Wiki?
CM: I don’t.
FL: Okay, so here's another one for the links. SCP Wiki is a collaborative writing project that I absolutely love. It's a kind of science fiction literature that is being generated like Wikipedia by a bunch of people working together. And it takes the form of a site for this institution, the SCP Foundation, which stands for Secure Contain and Protect. And this is like an institution that goes out and finds anomalies, anomalous objects in order to study them and in order to keep them from destroying the world.
**laughs**
FL: It's wonderful, it's delivered in this very dry kind of bureaucratic way where every entry in the Wiki, and it starts with, “okay, here's the procedures for containment,” and it's just these steps that you need to go through. But then there's a particular sub arc, there's a narrative within SCP Wiki, which is the anti-memetics division. The anti-memetics division are the people who study memetics and counter mimetics. So memetics are ways of remembering, and anti-memetics are ways of forgetting. It’s this idea that there are lots of anomalies that protect themselves by being unnoticeable. You can look at them, but you don't, you can't pay attention to them. They have evolved in such a way that they're protected. They have a protective layer of not being a thing that you can notice and pay attention to. And there's lots of them, and they just they live among us.
CM: They’re hidden in plain sight.
FL: Yeah. It's like the opposite of Infinite Jest, you know, the Infinite Jest thing that people couldn't stop thinking about. But there's lots of like anti-infinite jest, infinitesimal jests, if you will. So go to SCP Wiki and hang out there and just check it out a little bit, and then go to the anti-memetics arc. There’s a set of stories, especially written by this one author who I love, who goes by the name, Q N T M, pronounced “Quantum.” Her stories are just, I think, brilliant. And if I had millions of dollars, I would make it a film. I think that there's a great science fiction movie to come out of that.
CM: Okay, so Quantum ( Q N T M ) under anti-memetics arc, under SCP Wiki. Perfect. That sounds fabulous. It's like a whole new universe.
FL: Yeah, that’s my pick to click.
CM: Frank’s “pick to click,” you heard it here first. Excellent. Well, I think that's a great place to stop because I'm curious to log off, find that and delve in. Thank you so much for coming onto this weird new project.
FL: Thank you Caitlin. I love SFI, as you know, it's my favorite place, and I love the work that you guys are doing and what is coming out of that, and just the threads that you guys are tying together. So, it's a pleasure to be able to participate.
CM: Well, thank you so much, Frank. We love the work that you're doing, and we want to keep finding ways to collaborate, even if we can't in-person. So, all this and more. And hey, maybe the games next year will be a way to do that. We’ll have the book, and we'll have Hello Planet, so I could see where they converge.
FL: Yeah. Awesome.
CM: Well, I hope you have a lovely Thanksgiving. We'll remain in touch, don't you worry.
FL: Okay. Thanks a lot. Bye
CM: Bye, Frank, thank you.