Hearts and Minds

[Music] so hello everyone and welcome [Music] I have a friend who's an artist and is sometimes taken a view which I agree with very well you hold up a flower and say look how beautiful it is and I'll agree I you think and he says you see as I as an artist and see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist so take this all apart and it becomes dull thing and I think that he's kind of nutty first of all but beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too I believe although I may not be quite as refined as pathetically as here that I

can appreciate the beauty of the flower at the same time I see that much more about the flower that he sees I could imagine the cells the complicated actions and so I would also have a beauty I mean it's not just beauty at this dimension one centimetre there's also beauty at a smaller dimensions the inner structure also the processes the fact that the colors and the flower are evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting it means the insects can see the column it adds a question is this aesthetic sense also exist in the law of forms that does it why is it aesthetic all kinds of interesting questions which is science knowledge only adds to the excitement of mystery and the aura of a flower it only adds I don't understand how it subtracts if you expected science to give all the answers

to the wonderful questions about what we are where we're going what the meaning of the universe is and so on then I think you could easily become the solution done that look for some mystic answers to these problems how a scientist can take a mystic answer I don't know because the whole spirit is still under nevermind not any I don't understand but anyhow if you think of it by the way I think of what we're doing is we're exploring we're trying to find out as much as we can about the world people say to me are you looking for the ultimate the laws of physics no I'm not I'm just looking to find out more about the world and if it turns out there is a simple ultimate law that explains everything so be it that would be very nice it's coming if it turns out it's like an onion with millions of layers and we're just sick and tired of looking at the laser then that's the way it is but whatever way it comes out its nature is there and she's gonna come out the way she is and therefore when we going to investigate it we shouldn't pre decide what it is we're trying to do except to find out more about it you see

one thing is I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which I feel I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things but not to be sure of anything and that many things I don't know anything about but I don't have to know an answer I don't have I don't feel frightened by not knowing things by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose which is the way it really is as far as I can tell possible it doesn't frighten me and so altogether I can't believe the special stories that have been made up about our relationship to the universe at large because they seem to be - simple - to connected to local to

provincial the earth he came to the earth one of the aspects of God came to the earth mind you and look at what's out there how can it it isn't in proportion anyway it's no you saw you I can't argue it I'm just trying to tell you with the scientific view of my father's neo that we should look to see what's true one may be may not be true once you start doubting which I think to me is a very fundamental part of my soul is to down and to ask when you doubt an ass it gets a little harder to believe that was nice right it would it would it would take it would take quite a lot of nerve to to attempt to follow richard fineman so instead let's make walt

whitman do it this is a poem called when I heard the learn'd astronomer when I heard the learn'd astronomer when the proofs the figures were ranged in columns before me when I was shown the charts and diagrams to add divide and measure them when I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room house soon unaccountable I became tired and sick till rising and gliding out I wandered off by myself a mystical moist night-air and from time to time look'd up in perfect silence at the Stars so there we have a scientist and a poet each in their own way addressing the topic that I want to talk about today which is these two different ways of looking at the world like a scientist or like a poet and the tension between them and what games have to tell us about this

tension and what this tension has to tell us about games so with apologies to Walt Whitman let me range in columns before some of the words we use to describe these two ways of looking at the world thought versus feeling intellect versus emotion rationality versus intuition on the one side the realm of science and logic and on the other art and morality here the domain of reducing explaining measuring and objective truth and over here the domain of the irreducible the inexplicable the immeasurable and subjective truth so whatever words you want to use I think we can all recognize these two broad categories of human understanding so the basic idea of this talk is that the relationship between these two categories is important that it's worth talking and thinking about that it's especially important now at this particular moment in human history and that games have something valuable to contribute to this conversation so

one common way that this tension gets framed in recent discussions around games is like this on the one hand associated with the general ideas of logic and rationality you have traditional more structured games with explicit goals a focus on competition on winning and losing problem-solving in general a focus on systems and the idea of what some people call instrumental play you know imagine power gamers min maxing trying to find optimal solutions and that kind of thing and then on the other hand associated with the general ideas of feeling and emotion you have less traditional games with less focus on structured goals and more focused on open-ended exploration on setting theme and story on the moment-to-moment quality of the players experience and on improvisational and imaginative play so this is the way that the attention is framed by for example people like Jenova Chen when he talks about wanting to expand the palette of emotions in games

expand their emotional range or or by people like David cage when he talks about emotion and meaning or by scholars like Miguel's seek art who wants us to focus less on on rules and on the procedural logics of game systems and pay more attention to the creative power of players one of the I think most eloquent articulations of this way framing games comes from the composer and musician and thinker David Kanaga who has written a lot of really interesting stuff about these ideas here's a quote from David here's the mass of tension games are both playful irrational things and highly structural things and integrating the reality of these apparently contradictory tendencies is maybe the most important baffling work there is to do in design theory and play right now the rational aspect of games is way over represented I agree with David that this is important work and this is basically the work that I want to try to do here today

but I don't agree with the general approach that separates these different aspects into two categories two different kinds of ingredients the rational and the emotional and talked about having less of one and more of the other my approach to integrating these forces is totally different and it starts with a close examination of what it feels like to play this game co-op this is a game created by Bennett Fadi a friend of mine and colleague who teaches with me at the NYU Game Center so what's it like to play co-op well to begin with here's this thing that we take for granted walking we do it with a fluid grace natural instinctual behavior and we're and we're used to doing it in video games in in the same way naturally gracefully fluidly so what happens when we make it deliberate conscious well it's a nightmare but it's also hilarious and it's also strangely beautiful in playing a game

like this you become aware of awareness what are my fingers doing it's like I'm aware of them for the first time I feel the strands of energy connecting my mind to my fingers oh oh this is what it feels like to do something it's it's so ubiquitous I'd forgotten what it feels like I feel the contours of this complicated interactive system this tiny stylized slice of the world I struggle to develop explicit theories about it I poke at it with trial and error and then slowly painfully I bill and understanding and then slowly it starts to become fluid again I rebuild a new kind of intuition and eventually I'm walking a little bit so here we have nothing but instrumental play just a goal constrained by rules that we are attempting to master through deliberate effort but plain QWOP doesn't feel like

a celebration of the cold Apollonian power of deliberate and rational thought it feels like a parody of rational thought it feels Dionysian atavistic like some primal ritual that takes place in the boiler room of our brain crop is like a microscope that magnifies the hidden operations of our mind as it struggles to think and do all of the thoughts and emotions that are normally invisible to us because they are the very stuff that we are made out of it is thought made visible to itself and this quality of games their ability to give us a window into how our minds operate is something I think you will find over and over again if you pay close attention to what it actually feels like to play a game and this quality is central to my understanding of what games are all games from the most competitive rule-bound systems to the most anarchic freeform play spaces you

can feel the same quality of thought made visible to itself when you start solving Sudoku puzzles or really any kind of puzzle first you develop explicit low-level theories which you consciously apply like a child mouthing the shapes of letters in order to figure out the words then eventually you internalize these low-level rules they become second nature you you apply them naturally effortlessly and you start developing new higher-level methods which again you apply deliberately and consciously and then those two become internalized become automatic unconscious natural and you start developing even even higher-level methods strategies and heuristics and so on up the ladder of expertise and there's a beauty in pseudo GU beyond the satisfaction of effort and reward beyond the pleasure of starting with a few threads of data and weaving them into a blanket of knowledge beyond the comfort of repetitious deliberate mechanical thinking the real beauty is in getting an opportunity to glimpse

this process of our own minds climbing the ladder of what it feels like to learn something it's like squirting dye into the water in order to see the complex currents that flow through it it is thought made visible to itself you can feel it when you play a racing game when you start out you're pushing the buttons deliberately consciously thumping and scraping around the track seeing the corner come up you're telling yourself oh here comes that corner get ready to turn you go around the track bumping shuttering pressing buttons your eyes mouthing the shapes of the upcoming turns out loud so that your thumbs can respond around and around and with each lap something amazing happens incrementally bit by bit your mind creates new passageways between your eyes and your thumbs your eyes dig the grooves of the track deeper and deeper into your memory banks like a song that starts out as notes on a graph plucking them out deliberately instrumentally and then becomes a habit second nature

automatic and then become something more a part of you this thing that was out there in the world is now just a part of you that you can do things with and you can feel it you can feel it this thing that happens all the time now it's happening right in front of your eyes and you can feel it taking shape in your hands things that used to be decisions become actions things that used to be actions become nothing just you flying around the track empty-headed lighter-than-air hovering just you and the Chemical Brothers consider the worst thing that can happen to a baseball pitcher any athlete really which is to choke to choke means to become consciously aware of a complex action that should be natural fluid effortless all of a sudden you're trying to deliberately move your body in the correct way instead of the effortless glide through the moist night-air under the stars instead of that you have the

the proofs in figures of your arms and legs and their ranged in columns before you and you're trying to add divide and measure them and you're stuck in the beginner's mind too aware of the basic step by step methods behind the action that you're trying to execute or consider the worst thing that can happen to a poker player which is to go on tilt tilting is sort of the opposite of choking in a way when you tilt your emotions get the better of you you become unable to apply simple principles in a conscious deliberate way you lose the ability to slow down and think through the basics that you learned when you were a beginner your instincts overwhelm you and they prevent you from applying the careful step by step methods that would prevent disaster so in a very important way in addition to being a game about reading the mind of your opponent the poker is a game about reading your own mind now I'm not saying that every game always provides this experience thought made visible to itself the ability to become aware of

the operation of one's own mind as it interacts with the world but I am saying that it is the potential of every game every game is a chance to have this experience and this isn't meant to describe some kind of elevated super intellectual experience this quality is present even in silly games in stupid especially in stupid games the the games that we play to blunt the edges of our mind to silence its incessant chatter or to get in touch with our primal instincts these two are a way of our mind spinning around trying to get a look at itself this quality is present even in the most self-destructive manipulative addictive games how often have you found yourself dragging the hook of some potentially addictive game across the surface of your brain seeing if it will catch this - is a way of mapping out the contours of our minds all games abstract or story based physical or digital rule bound and competitive or open-ended and improvisational are about thinking and doing there's what we mean by

interactivity whether it's Sid Meier's interesting choices or Kanaga is improvisational free play games are the realm of thinking and doing thought and action the mind the will engaging with the world thinking and doing is to games what looking is to painting what listening is to music in our normal lives thinking of doing our ubiquitous pervasive and therefore invisible to us when we decide to get out of bed when we walk across the room to open the door when we choose the words that we want to say to a friend when we get dressed and go to work we are thinking doing choosing acting judging deciding exploring learning but when we do these things in a game we're doing them for their own sake and that's what makes games an aesthetic form when we look at a painting we surrender to the experience of looking we immerse

ourselves in it we're also consciously aware of looking this thing that we do all the time without thinking about it we become aware of our own perception of light and colored shape and texture and when we play a game we surrender ourselves to the experience of thinking and doing we immerse ourselves in it we're also consciously aware of thinking and doing this thing that is normally invisible we become aware of the shape and texture of the operation of our own mind this is a kind of a double movement for plunging forward and immersing ourselves in an experience while also leading back to frame it to become aware of it conscious of it this is what if aesthetic experiences allow us and games are the aesthetic form of thinking and doing interactivity thought and action decoupled from actual purpose and experienced for its own sake so that we can indulge ourselves in it understand it reflect on its myriad different forms looking for a meaning in beauty and

really when we talk about thinking and doing we're basically talking about instrumental reason not in the negative sense of cold logic and mechanical execution but in the simple sense that any thinking doing mind is making plans and acting on them observing the world forming hypotheses making and updating models learning pursuing goals solving problems interacting with the world it when we play games we do these things for their own sake as a kind of delirious ritual games are the aesthetic form of instrumental reason games are interactivity as an art form they are about choices and consequences actions and outcomes about using our minds to learn understand and do things an art form whose raw material its instrumental reason the thing that defines us as humans the creatures who occupy the cognitive niche this quality that is invisible to us because it's it's the stuff that we're made out of

now this doesn't mean that games are merely a celebration of instrumental reason it's far from it what they are is an opportunity to reflect on instrumental reason to contemplate it investigate it yes in games we often indulge our capacity for instrumental reason we we take it off the leash and allow it to run wild just as we sometimes smother it or invert it the main idea is that games are where we think and do for its own sake just to do it in games we build roofs that don't keep out the rain we search for treasure that can't be spent we fight enemies that can't harm us we rescue children that aren't in danger we solve problems that don't exist we do these things in pursuit of meaning and beauty because that's what aesthetic forms are and here's the crux of the matter because games are an aesthetic form that means they are utterly completely on the right side of the dotted line that we drew earlier the essential property of aesthetics is that

it's not the domain of the logical and the rational it is the domain of the subjective the realm of the irreducible games can be beautiful or ugly sublime or ridiculous entertaining or boring we can never ever produce evidence that proves definitively which of these things any particular game is the realm of the aesthetic is the realm of judgment taste pleasure and pain sensation and experience you can't prove something as beautiful with logic or facts you can only appeal to share and subjective experience to try to forge connections of common feeling and established communities agreement were useful debate and that's the job of aesthetics to be the domain beyond the practical beyond the logical to be immeasurable inexplicable but at the same time allowed this process by which we weave our individual experiences together into something shared shared values and shared humanity

but look at what kind of aesthetic form they are they are the aesthetic form of instrumental reason and this makes them different this makes them a very different kind of aesthetic form because despite being an aesthetic form games have objective truth in them and because of this they belong in a sense on the left side of the dotted line along with science and logic and evidence and rationality so what do I mean by saying games have objective truth in them well take chess for example you look at a position in chess some moves or winning moves and some moves are losing moves and this is simply an objective fact about this position and in fact the beauty of chess is in searching for and discovering and debating about this truth this search for truth this process of asking questions what happens when you do this instead of this or is this possible or does this work there are versions of this across all games games

are conversations between players designers and the world the world the empirical world the positivist world the old-fashioned naturalistic material world with its stubborn inert truth that world is a participant in the conversation now don't get me wrong I'm not saying that this is the same conversation that science is I'm not trying to reduce games to science or math because remember games are an aesthetic form this conversation that's happening is about beauty and meaning pleasure and disgust direct experience leading to shared values the words of this conversation might include explanation evidence logic proof but the conversation itself is irreducible inexplicable mysterious for example in chess each individual game of chess each

position can be broken down and analyzed with logic but the act of playing chess devoting your life to this ridiculous thing developing the the the self-control needed to master this discipline waking up early every day to study books and and to drill yourself on this arcane skill going to tournaments these elaborate rituals where you test yourself against other people this is logical it's it's bonkers I mean there may be objective truth in games but the truths that emerge from games their ultimate meaning is the other kind of truth in ode on a Grecian urn the poet John Keats says beauty is truth truth beauty and nowhere is this more true I believe than in games this is what puts games in such an interesting position

relative to the two cultures a CP snow called them when we make and play games we are actively straddling these two realms these two domains and not by picking and choosing between them but by being wholly absorbed in both simultaneously by drilling down to the point where they are the same and ascending to the point where you can't tell them apart not by using rational thought and technology to deliver beauty and pleasure and meaning and not by having pretty pictures and compelling stories side by side with or on top of or instead of systems of choices and actions and outcomes but by being the aesthetic form of choices and actions and outcomes in games we pursue thinking and doing for its own sake which makes them both a violent plunge into the heart of instrumental reason but also means that they are outside of instrumental reason a kind of escape that goes not around but through

look I know that it's wrong to say that games are one thing or another thing games or whatever we want I know that so I guess really what I'm saying is that this is what games are for me this is how I see them in my vision games are about discovering the beauty and pleasure in instrumental reason games are laboratories for thought and action there a way for thought to become visible to itself opportunities to investigate the relationship between the deliberate the rational and the intuitive the instinctual the subconscious so often what players are doing is actually a kind of science a version of the scientific process as play you see it obviously in any game with fury crafting where players devote themselves to reverse engineering the game systems using instrumental reason to discover objective facts about the

world of the game or when they're just goofing off think load the jump program ignoring the ostensible goals of the game and just toying with the physics of the world this is also an activity that's looked playful and scientific can you get the word hog to the top of the cliff I don't know can you let's find out [Music] [Music] [Music] everybody what the hell only a precise hit will set up a chain reaction the shaft is ray-shielded so you'll have to use proton torpedoes

that's impossible even for a computer it's not impossible I used to bullseye womp rats in my t16 back home they're not much bigger than teen years I mean this is someone ignoring the rules of the game right this is someone appropriating the game to do something that's totally orthogonal to what you're supposed to do and yet it's like a like a pure form of instrumental reason run wild another example of play science that I love is when players are taking a game super seriously trying to discover what it would mean to pursue the goal of the game as hard as you can as as they do in speedrunning when the things I love so much about half-life speedruns is that the game of half-life is is a

game on its surface which is about scientists discovering hidden truths about physics and using that knowledge to work space and time when players speedrun half-life they are actual scientists discovering actual hidden truths about the actual world of half-life and using that knowledge to actually warp space and time this is so beautiful about that it it happens in Zelda 2 it's real magic in the Zelda when you see someone use a chicken to like open up a gate under you know to mean through space-time under a well it's real magic that's what magic actually is and you see play science in any deep competitive game obviously right the fighting game community in particular is defined by this intense communal ongoing process of analyzing and reverse engineering theory building and experimentation when they discover a new move or a new corner in the games combination space

they call it new tech high-level competitive gamers are a strange mix of athlete scientist and artist you also see it in the least serious least competitive games for example in the simple trial and error of an Angry Birds player and I think that this spirit is present even in the most anti system anti goal anti problem solving twine games of the Zeen stir underground yes these games are often about expressing a personal story do you know what else they're about they're about encoding your personal story as software and they're also about insisting that we break down the division between player and creator about insisting absolutely correctly on the importance of players becoming creators learning how to navigate the logic gates and symbolic operations of twine in which unlike poems or paintings your story can simply

work or not work can be broken in a way that is simply objectively beautifully true I think this is one of the main reasons that making games is so difficult making games combines everything that's hard about building a bridge and everything that's hard about composing an opera games are basically operas made out of bridges games can be broken in ways that are simply objectively true and and not just at the level of code but at the level of design you can say oh this choice here is dominated by this one it's never useful never make sense it's a it's a weird way to design but we recognize this sensation right this strange form of design that has a lot of engineering in it not just at the level of technique but in its deepest most creative dimensions or maybe it's not so strange maybe it's just something that we forgot a long time ago and we're only now remembering maybe what strange is

treating bridge building and opera composing like they're totally separate specializations that shouldn't overlap but you know this mix of the objective and the subjective and games is hard to navigate and it leads to a lot of strange detours like academic white papers that seem to miss the fact that games are culture and instead treat them as some kind of special technology a certain type of simulated environment so here's a quote from this paper for example video games provide virtual environments in which opportunities for action are manifold the growth of participation in these environments suggests that they can be highly motivating the little empirical research has explained this phenomenon or accounted for why some games are more popular than others oh good luck with that guys good luck explaining frog fractions with that framework or flappy bird right or explaining the subtle difference between dishonored and BioShock Infinite game studies and an odyssey even game design discourse is really filled with overly systematic attempts to model player experience in

order to make definitive empirical claims about how pleasure works which to me drastically misrepresents the endlessly subtle and slippery and elusive qualities of aesthetics the qualities that say distinguish super mario world from braids you will never see these things under a microscope games are things you can put under a microscope games are microscopes games have microscopes in them here's another place where we see the struggle between bridge building and opera composing the dilemma of quantitative data driven game design so many of us have probably struggled with this tension directly many of us are probably struggling right now so what's wrong with this stuff like why isn't this just an extension of player centric playtesting centric humanist game design I think so here's an analogy that I like to tell about this tension um imagine that you have a friend who's a guy and he has trouble meeting women and forming relationships with women and he tells

you I don't know what I'm doing wrong I go on a date and I bring a thermometer so that I can measure their skin temperature I bring calipers so I can measure their pupil to see when it's expanding and contracting and I pay close attention to their reactions to the things I say but somehow it just just never seems to work out it the point is that it it doesn't even matter if these are the correct things to measure if you were trying to predict someone's sexual arousal if you bring a thermometer and calipers with you on a date you're not going to be having sex so all of these things I think point to a kind of a central dilemma about rationality itself that it must have an outside because there's really only one important question worth asking which is what does the life well-lived how should we live our lives and that's a question that can't be answered not by me probably not by

anyone ever but one thing we can say with a lot of certainty that a life well-lived is not going to be a life in which every moment is scrutinized to see whether or not it's being well lived you know this is a central dilemma this is an important weird hard non-trivial problem that's related maybe in some ways to like gajillion incompleteness we also need to acknowledge I think as a field as an entire field that we have a kind of style problem right I mean games are an aesthetic form but we have so much less of all those qualities on the right side of the chart than we would like to have we are less subtle and sensitive we are less suave and charismatic we tend to be blunt and awkward we are less charming and smooth and this is a way of describing a general lack with our games but it also describes a general characteristic of a

lot of us as people a lot of game creators and a lot of game players and I think we need to address this honestly I mean to two things I want to say about this first I think we need to embrace cognitive diversity there are different personality types and we need to recognize that being an art form for the awkward for the obsessive for folks on the spectrum as they say it's nothing to be ashamed of I mean this is the personality type of scientists mathematicians engineers and and many philosophers and also like so often suave sophistication and charm and charisma is camouflage for manipulation that let's be proud of the fact that we are bringing more logic and precision into the world that we care more about equations than haircuts that's something to celebrate and yet

let's be honest and this is the second thing let's be honest that we do care about haircuts but we are embarrassed by our lack of style and charm and grace we're embarrassed that our art form is still very dorky and awkward let's just admit it and work on it let's say that we want both we want equations and haircuts and we really do and it's right to want both that's just acknowledging this fact the fact that what we are doing is about beauty even when it is the beauty of logic and math among other things and that we recognize the importance of all those qualities on the right side of the slide and we want more of them this is a picture of mew2king who's one of the best Smash Brothers players in the world and this is a shot from the documentary the smash brothers which you should see if you haven't seen it it's on YouTube maybe one of the best films about a game ever made the smash

brothers on YouTube so one more example of the 10 between bridge building and opera composing the story of progress that we tell ourselves about video games that they are evolving kind of the way technology evolves or the way science evolves now I'm guilty of telling this story myself what are the unsolved problems of game design what experiments should we run what new knowledge can we gain to move us incremental e forward this is a picture of David Hilbert the mathematician who in 1900 introduced this list of unsolved problems that really set the course of mathematical research in the 20th century and he's a romantic figure for me I would love to be able to stand up here and say you know here's my vision for the 23 most important unsolved problems in game design and obviously there there's a lot of value in this approach of problems and progress but there's also a sense in which this way of framing games again misses the elusive and messy and chaotic

way that aesthetics operates sure there are some aspects of art forms that develop over time techniques that are discovered and perfected and adopted but there are many more ways in which art forms don't develop that way cave paintings can still move us kate's can look at a vase from 2000 years ago from 2000 years before he was born and find beauty and meaning in it in some ways we are inheriting the legacy of 20th century modernism which was itself I think kind of bedazzled by science the science that it saw so successfully transforming the world around it what an a piece of that and so I think it framed aesthetics in scientific terms experiments breakthroughs discoveries and unsolved problems and this is approach is even more seductive for us because of how much science and engineering there is in games both in their creation and in their play but I think we need to be

careful at this approach art is not a series of engineering problems and neither is games the destiny of games is not to evolve the way that technology evolves but to evolve alongside technology as a counterpoint a partner a kind of dark companion this is how games are in a position to overcome the two cultures problem the gap between Whitman people and Fineman people this isn't just a conflict between the sciences and the humanities we don't just work in an industry that is defined by this tension we live in a world that is defined by this tension we live in a world that has been utterly transformed by instrumental reason the Enlightenment the Industrial Revolution science these things have taken us into new territory the power of rational thought is undeniable but so are its costs our our world is shot through with the trade-offs we make in order to

access this power not just the obvious ones like the looming danger of nuclear or environmental apocalypse but the psychic trade-offs of living in a world where in many gain in many ways the rug has been pulled out from under us we used to live lives that were grounded in a deep organic intuitive emotional sense of connection to nature to tradition to society it wasn't necessarily good in fact it was often horrific but it had a lot of good things about it and a lot of those things are missing we no longer feel like we're a part of the natural world we feel like we're outside of it studying it inspecting it manipulating it we don't want to feel like we're in a well defined and comfortable position within a social hierarchy we also feel like we're in a tumultuous and up ended and constantly changing a social environment as well and all of the comfort and security that comes from

relying on the deep knowledge of tradition and instinct unquestioned all of that has been replaced by a tumultuous upheaval in which everything is up for grabs all that is solid melts into air as marks put it everything is subject to doubt fineman's doubt the doubt of fineman's father the doubt of the scientist nothing is sacred nothing is off-limits safe from being scrutinized by instrumental reason explain disenchanted dismantled reassembled into something new and strange that doesn't even feel like it quite belongs to us but it does belong to us this struggle to harness the power of instrumental reason to understand its power and limits to guide it this is our struggle we aren't going to be able to go around it we have to go through it every big problem in the world today is a mixture

of on the one hand the empirical the factual the logistical and on the other values every important problem is a blend of engineering problems math problems and values problems instrumental reason is really good at solving engineering problems but it can't help us with values problems the scientific method doesn't tell us why the world is decomposable into coherent units subject to consistent laws it just tells us that if we act as if it were that way then we can fly through the air like birds and walk around on the moon and save little babies from dying it doesn't tell us how we should use this power where we should go with it or honestly whether we should use it at all it's this is a higher-order problem and it's a very important problem especially if like me you see the Enlightenment project as something profound and

worthwhile an important positive direction for Humanity something that is still under way and something whose success is not a foregone conclusion a project that could fail in all kinds of terrible ways and therefore a project worth understanding critiquing and getting right after all whatever your opinion is about flying through the air like a bird or walking around on the moon it's hard to argue with preventing babies from dying I mean that's a pretty strong trump card art is a window in to these kinds of problems problems where we have to communally bootstrap ourselves into shared values and games are the art form with the most to tell about this particular problem games are the art form of instrumental reason games are where we put down our slide rules for a moment where we put down our computers and hammers and rocket ships are amazing math and our glorious opposable thumbs in order to examine

them reflect on them enjoy them for their own sake wonder about them argue about them ask what about them is beautiful and what about them is ugly as game designers it's our responsibility to think about this stuff we should be proud of this responsibility and a little scared about it our out for art form could lead to new ways of thinking through the central dilemmas of the modern world this doesn't tell us what kind of games to make but it does remind us to avoid simplifications and respect the complexity of the challenge we are a new kind of scientists who are also athletes and artists and we should think about how what we do fits into this bigger picture of a possible world where something like that makes sense

for the power of instrumental reason unfolds in harmony with the beauty of shared values yeah I know it's a romantic picture but romantic pictures have a place before Bennet fadi joined me at NYU he was at Oxford down the hall from this guy the great contemporary philosopher Derek perfect perfect project is to build a system of morality outside the context of metaphysics one that doesn't rely on transcendental religious ideas this is in its bigger more serious way a kind of coop of the human soul in a world where we no longer have the certainty of big religious truths where all we have is our doubts our intuitions trial and error thought and action the modest workaday tools of boring empiricism can we rebuild a new understanding of where we are going and how to get there can we relearn how to walk and if you read perfect it really is like watching some one play co-op it's a series of

tentative steps slow awkward swaying back and forth deliberate self-conscious taking nothing for granted but slowly finding a rhythm moving forward step by ridiculous step and I can't think of a more important project in the world Thanks thank you Thanks I think we have thank you thanks I think there's time for some questions if there are any is there any questions I would love to converse I believe in dialogue I just stood up here and gave a long speech so I would love nothing more than to answer any questions if there

are any they don't have to be questions but they're always questions right where does the life I lived yes please sure I hit the mic awesome talk thank you that was great thanks um I just I wanted to know what your opinion is on I'm new to gaming and a lot of what I've encountered is this idea of very difficult individuals demanding to be left alone inside their medium it's like I'm a gamer this is a thing I do Asperger's all kinds of things and barriers that we put up and I think that limits the conversation with yeah with the rest I mean I think without a doubt one of the main problems with games is that it is weirdly isolated from the rest of the world in a way sometimes it's cut off in its own little hermetic environment its own little nation with its own customs and and I think it's an important project to try to find points

of connection with the rest of the world ways of resonating with the rest of the world with other kinds of art and design and culture with important themes and issues that were fit you know political issues or big ideas that we're struggling with I think I think that's that's important and and it's something that I yeah a big fan of so yeah yes a wonderful talk thank you frankly just completely worth it even for that that simple story about the the dating you know that that's just about that many times one of the things though that hit me that I'm curious about your opinion about is the the dichotomy that you see one of the areas where that a you brought into relief how I feel about serious games sometimes because a game

that was meant for pure play and in in in the sense you describe that is suddenly applied as like a brain training game sometimes it can be suck all the fun out of it but conversely sometimes a game that I feel guilty about playing because I know there's nothing more to explore I'm not really getting that bad joy but it keeps me busy while I'm on the exercise bike and I feel good that it's helping me with a physical you know a problem it seems like there's some some interesting extra layer that comes on when you consider serious games that that's very fundamental I mean that so I I think that my approach so this this framework for thinking about games is the aesthetics of is romelo reason sort of explains why I am uncomfortable with serious games it's another way of getting at that problem of serious games because to me serious games are they're like a they're like a double there's like a double abstraction right because

in games we you know we sort of experience tool use right for its own sake so we take the pliers and we just like swing the pliers around and we or we figure out like how how many nuts could I possibly you know attach in one minute exactly and then because of that we like invent new kinds of pliers just maybe but we're not like if you then are doing that in order to build a ship then it's you're missing like like that just doesn't work right because the essence of what you're doing is that it's it's a kind of you're taking something that actually has a function in use right the ability to think and solve problems and do things and you're kind of like carving out a little space where you do it for its own sake which is just kind of a it's kind of madness is ridiculous then you can't then try to apply that itself as a as a deliberate tool i think that's i think that's part of the

problem i think that you have to just go into that that crazy and realm and then you come out of it and hopefully you've you become like you your life has been enriched in some ways whether you become a better ship builder or whatever like you but you can't yeah I don't I don't think you can I think you drain out everything that's important if you if you try to take the you know the the plier game and and build an actual ship with it to put it in in specific terms then if someone were simply playing civilization and as part of that process learned something about the process of history that's the the proper way if you go to a class and they they try and teach it through civilization and kind of suck all of the enjoyment and abstraction out of the game and and throw into relief all the game-like things of Abraham Lincoln living for 4,000 years yeah yeah yeah exactly and there's no question that you

can use games like that just in the same way that you can use music to memorize the alphabet we all do it there's nothing wrong with it but it's not the main thing that we like about music right yeah thank you so much for such a transcendent one Frank so I kind of noticed this year at GDC some kind of theme emerging around sort of embodied play and sort of performance and I loved all of your great examples they seem to focus quite a lot on more highly structured play do you have any thoughts about particular avenues of interest for maybe less structured more open kinds of play that would come of things yeah I mean I guess in in some ways this whole thing is my attempt to to celebrate this this this other form of play and explain what's what I find profound and meaningful about it but

it's in no way meant to exclude other kinds of play I in some ways this is a response to people like David Kanaga and Miguel si card Doug Wilson and these other people who I think are putting are putting forward a really articulate and powerful celebration of a kind of critique of this this other kind of more structured play and I just want both right I don't I don't want and I think that most of most of the time those people are are open-minded and they're saying oh listen that stuff is good too but secretly I don't think they think it's good I think they think it's bad I think the tale of tales people are one of the things I love about them so much is how honest they are about like no that's especially bad you know it's like bad and I guess what I'm saying is that it's not and I'm but it's it's forcing me to try to figure out why it's not bad and and this is one answer and not only

is it is it not bad but it's like not bad in a way that I want to share with that I want them I want to convince them it's not enough for me to say oh will you play your games and I'll play mine I want to be playing games with them and I want to play their games and I but I also want them to understand that that there is a there's something that there's there there's a shared values that you know what I mean I want to reinforce the things that I think that we where we could agree about these these other kinds of games and kind of maybe you know rescue them from from that critique yeah exactly thank you yep yes let me good this way yeah so um I was really interested by um your talk but I'm same time it sort of reminds me of a lot of experiences I've had I've done serious games and also um sort of been an observer of sort of the trends in sort of you know sort artistic games and things exploring the sort

aesthetic space you're describing there and one thing I see is sort of attention I guess between these attempts to push more of sort of an aesthetic sort of sensibilities into games is that you end up with both under the the developer side and the player side sort of people that fall into two camps people that sort of hear things like what you're saying and either fully embrace them they really like it so they end up sort of going in a direction where they try to make games that either maybe convert people who don't normally play games into playing games or make something that's unconventional that wall is admirable in its pursuit maybe doesn't quite fly with you know traditional gamers and then on the other side you have people that totally reject it that think oh this is just all platitudes and just highfalutin talk and just sort of just sort of reject it and just go back to making you know just mindless shooters and stuff and I feel like I'm for me I think it would be I feel like there's a lot more we need a lot more effort to try to

blend those more to try to find it some add more substance to our traditional games and add more no this is this is in no way meant to be like an admonition to make certain kinds of games or not make other kinds of games I think people should make the game that they want to make make the game they want to play and so yeah it's more just maybe an attempt to kind of like hint at what's going on here and and what what we could like look for you know as as part of the the purpose and meaning or the in a larger sense behind what but whatever both of these kinds of games that are being made all of these different kinds of games I think we have time for one more one more question one more question all right a very inspiring talk thank you thank you but with gaming I feel becoming more ubiquitous now with the advent of mobile gaming being very accessible you're seeing game development schools popping

up you know the rise of eSports and similar avenues of popularizing games and just how we feel like a lot of the stuff really speaks to us within these halls you know we're all game developers but do you feel that this is almost we're starting to see a sort of a renaissance where gaming czar gaming is becoming accepted as an art form and that this kind of a talk would resonate with people outside of you know ourselves yes I hope so that would be my hope I would love for to reach a broader audience and have this larger conversation about what's going on with games and and why there's more happening there than then maybe it looks and and how this could you know I don't know maybe I would love for there to be for us as game developers to own this thing that we're doing we're changing the world and step our step up our game be like become public intellectuals I think there's you know what I mean like have an opportunity like to bring this idea that

living with games making them and playing them should make us smart good interesting people and lets you know exhibit that in the way that we that we talk to the rest of the world and carry ourselves in the rest of the world and and this is kind of my battle cry to do that right to have a kind of seriousness with which we say no this is what the way filmmakers do right they understand the seriousness of what film film is that the kind of global aid of the the the 20th century right it is this it's the shared imagination of the entire world and they take it seriously what is it that we're doing and that's the question I want to ask and I want to just take that seriously I want us all to take that seriously yeah thanks