Frank Lantz

GONE GONE THE AGE OF SKILL
STRATEGY THE THINKLAD'S SWILL
LABOR GAMES YE'LL NEVER "WIN"
THE ERA OF THE COIN BEGINS

Thank you Heather, we love Unfair Flips and are honored to be the tails to your heads.

THE ERA OF THE COIN BEGINS

Q-UP on Steam Sick of long queues, unfair matchups, and arbitrary reflex tests? Try Q-UP, the coin flipping eSport. It's one part clicker, one part multiplayer strategy game, one part demented capitalism simulator,...

We made a new game. It’s called Q-UP. It’s a coin flipping eSport. There’s a free demo! store.steampowered.com/app/3730790/...

I want to go back there

The mechanics in DE are underrated.

I asked it, are you sure? Can you quote me a verbatim passage from the book supporting this? It told me a chapter number but then gave me a paraphrase. These things are products, evolving in an environment made of laws and money, not organisms evolving in an environment made of stuff. We're cooked.

Things are going to get so weird. The one thing we desperately need to cure our debilitating self-inflicted brain rot is a return of some method for establishing shared truth composed of facts about reality. And instead we get these little oracle machines that are confidently wrong 20% of the time.

Ironically, Hil and I had a funny experience last night. We just finished watching a TV version of Middlemarch and were curious about one thread that wasn't fully explained (who got Casaubon's house?) We asked GPT who confidently informed us that Ladislaw gets it. Which is untrue and makes no sense!

years ago, some flash developer came up with the single coolest idea for a tactics game ever and made a game for the Lego Website called Spybotics: The Nightfall Incident

Today, 23 fucking years later, an indie dev has FINALLY MADE A SUCCESSOR

AND I GET TO PLAY IT ON STREAM!!!!!!

bimbo.city

What we have in common with world-ending AI A chat with the creator of the game every AI skeptic and fanatic should play

Video games are useful for making sense of all the AI bullshit

The search for “non-problematic” fun is a wild goose chase and just bs ethics theater. Every important creative activity is full of problems. I am very much in agreement with Sontag on this issue. We should struggle to see games as they really are static1.squarespace.com/static/54889...

For me all types of fun are problematic, all forms of play and games have an ethical dimension. I also think “players have fun” IS an end in itself, and a potentially radically transformative one. Understanding one’s own pleasure honestly and taking it seriously is a positive political act.

The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology (Mit Press) Amazon.com: The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology (Mit Press): 9780262195362: Salen Tekinbas, Katie, Zimmerman, Eric: Books

Cool topic. I would maybe start with the Rules of Play Reader: www.amazon.com/Game-Design-... lots of good stuff in there. I would check out Bernie DeKoven’s work, esp. The Well-Played Game. I would look at Metagaming by Boluk and Lemieux.

we wish

all maps are competitions!

why not both

Fractal Block World Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Video Games Again

franklantz.substack.com/p/fractal-bl...

I loved learning that in Korea Buddhism and Christianity are sort of flipped, B was the established, conservative, traditional religion and C was the progressive, new age, alternative religion (sort of)

welcome back

how are those first bites tasting?

I also tried a bunch of things to address my other big challenge, ensuring everyone participates in class discussions and critiques.

One approach was assigning roles to authorize students to be more critical instead of just praising.

Anyway, most of the material is here:
mycours.es/playfultheory/

Artt in the Age of Artifficial Intelligence That which we call progress is this storm

open.substack.com/pub/franklan...

868-BACK The sequel to 868-HACK. A cyberpunk roguelike adventure.

This is our world now. The world of the electron and the switch; the beauty of the baud. We exist without nationality, skin color, or religious bias. Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. www.backerkit.com/c/projects/m...

My whole game design philosophy is based on this idea: when you encounter a design problem, quickly stub in a simple, first-thought solution, not something clever, just something obvious, common-sense, too-dumb-to-actually-work. 9 times out of 10, you’ll never improve on it.

"Michael Brough is the greatest living game designer" - Frank Lantz (Chair Emeritus of the NYU Game Center). Honestly this quote is a bit much but if people are gonna say things like that I should probably use them.

yeah fair

The games industry started out as a hobbyist domain, a realm of tinkerers and amateur artist/engineers, the current game industry is tolerable to the degree that it retains some of this legacy

Are Games Good? Or what?

open.substack.com/pub/franklan...

Bridge Notes on a game that is too hard for me.

open.substack.com/pub/franklan...

How to Play a Game It may be harder than we think.

open.substack.com/pub/franklan...