We preview the upcoming episode of Why? Philosophical Discussions about Everyday Life. The current topic: Gaming ~~~ Nothing spikes nostalgia like a good meal. We explore the Pastime Club & Steakhouse in Marmarth as we share an excerpt from The Great American Folk Show. ~~~ Matt Olien reviews Ferrari, and comments on the recent Golden Globes awards.
Transcript of Interview
What is art? Why do we get so passionate about it? What’s a game? Why do we get so passionate about those? Frank Lantz is a game designer and the author of The Beauty of Games. He’s the featured guest on this month’s Why? Philosophical Discussions about Everyday Life. We preview the episode with host Dr Jack Russell Weinstein.
Ashley Thornberg
I'll start with a question I'm sure you're just going to love. What is art?
Dr. Jack Russell Weinstein
You know, there is a huge debate as to what art is, because of course, as anyone listening will recognize, people make controversial paintings or put something on the internet and other people respond, this isn't art, or my two-year-old child could do this, or what have you. And so part of the nature of art is pushing the boundaries of what art is. With that said, I think we can start with the idea that art is human creativity for its own sake.
And that is the idea that we are using our imagination, we're creative, we're creating things not necessarily to make money and not necessarily to impress anyone, but just to explore the creativity in the way that you're being creative, whether it's using paintbrushes, using language in a novel, or something like that.
Ashley Thornberg
Do we need to set up any definitions or parameters for games and what counts as a game or gaming?
Dr. Jack Russell Weinstein
Well, that is what underlies our entire conversation on Why Radio, because I think the most foundational question I ask in the conversation is, why is a kid's board game like Hungry Hungry Hippos the same thing as an adult video game? And so these two things seem so fundamentally apart from one another, have appeared to have so little in common that my main question was, why are they the same thing? So if we started off with a definition of a game, I think it would hide the exploratory elements of the conversation.
Ashley Thornberg
And then it just wouldn't count as philosophy anymore, would it?
Dr. Jack Russell Weinstein
I think that's right. I talk to my students a lot about what makes a question a philosophical question, and one of the criteria that I always use is that it leads to more conversation rather than less conversation. So if someone comes along and says, is it wrong to murder?
And you say, yes, and there's nothing else to say, then I wouldn't necessarily call that a philosophical conversation, although the philosopher is going to ask why or what about in this instance or what's the difference between murder and manslaughter or things like that. So if you're having a conversation and suddenly everyone shuts up, first of all, you're not that much fun at a party. But second of all, it's not really a philosophical conversation because the beauty of philosophy is that it's perpetual, much like art.
Ashley Thornberg
So there's been some recent news about, I believe it was a 13-year-old boy who is the first known person to beat the game Tetris. And, you know, you're not supposed to ever read the comments. Don't ever read the comments.
But if you read these comments, there is a surprising amount of vitriol of people claiming that they did it. Sure. But then there's also people who just are surprisingly emotional and attached to this other person's performance during this game.
And I know that's not what you and your guest talk about. But why do you think that we can get so emotional? I have yet to play a game of Monopoly that doesn't end in the board being flipped up. What's going on there?
Dr. Jack Russell Weinstein
Well, first of all, one of my favorite old school memes is the phrase, never read the bottom half of the Internet. So I concur that the comments should be avoided at all costs.
Ashley Thornberg
But I mean, there is this comment, it's actually about journalism, but it's most often used in the art world that I hear is that it should afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. So I think there is a little bit of an argument to be made that if people are getting that emotional about games, that that kind of does sway it in the direction of as games are art.
Dr. Jack Russell Weinstein
Sure. There are two different things going on. One, I think, which is less interesting than the other.
The less interesting thing is what does it mean to finish Tetris? What does it mean to end the game? And my understanding is that the code stopped at a certain score.
And so it wasn't that there was some grand revelation or some metaphysical closure. It was just the program was just like, oh, I'm too tired. I can't do this anymore.
Go do something else. And so that's one thing. But then there's there is that that more interesting question that you bring up, which is, you know, why do people identify so much?
Why do people feel so emotionally connected? I often, again, talk to my students about what I call the sports. We were, you know, the the the Vikings win a game and everyone watching it screams.
We won. We won. And I always say you didn't win.
You sat on the couch eating nachos and buffalo wings. These unbelievably talented athletes who've been up since five o'clock in the morning.
Ashley Thornberg
And who train like 18 hours a day.
Dr. Jack Russell Weinstein
Right. They won. So what is it about the human experience and human identity that has us connect with these figures so much?Football is a game. Right. It's a sport, but it's a game.
And there are a lot of people who spend a lot of time on the Internet watching other people play games on Twitch and other services. So there's something just inherent in the process. I don't know that I can identify what it is other than to say, I think the people who have the most appreciation for an individual sport are people who have played that sport and tried to do it well because they know how hard it is.
And I think that people who get connected to this young man who, quote unquote, beat Tetris are people who have spent hours trying to beat Tetris. That the wonder of sport, the wonder of games, the wonder of art is that it is a celebration of human excellence and human expertise in a very, very narrow way. And I think that when we see a human being doing something.
Unbelievably impressive. We can either make it all about ourselves and say, oh, I did this first. No one cares.
Or we can say, oh, my God, this person just expanded the volume of human capability. And I got to see that. And oh, my God, what a remarkable moment.
And I've said this before on various versions of conversations with you. One of my favorite experiences being a teacher is watching students in the process of discovery, especially my intro level students. There's this whole new subject.
There's this whole new area. Philosophy has shed light on this idea. Oh, my God, I don't know what I'm talking about.
Oh, my God, I have this conviction I want to hold on to. I find the process of discovery in other people beautiful in the most literal sense of the term. And I think that there's something going on there with people who watch sports or who watch games or who play games.
That revelation of a new capacity of expanding human capabilities is in itself something worth having an intimate connection to.
Ashley Thornberg
I have to admit that, and I don't know why this happened. But when you said expanding human capability, my first thought was eating contests.
Dr. Jack Russell Weinstein
Yeah. I mean, you know, so. Well, we all have moments of shame.
Thankfully, no one's listening to this and it isn't recorded. You know, eating contest is actually a really philosophically interesting example, because what an eating contest does is bracket the thing that we love the most about food, which is flavor, the experience of eating. It is really about a human capacity.
If Joey Chestnut is going to eat a hundred hot dogs, I'm impressed by that feat. And I wonder how this incredibly skinny guy can do that when, you know, after Thanksgiving dinner, I just want to keel over and die. But that is a game and it's not art, whereas cooking and experience food is an art, not a game.
Because the goal is not to pay attention to the subtle nuances and the developments and the multi layers of flavors and the salty comes first and then the sweet and then the umami and then all these different things. It's just shove it in your mouth. But at the same time, it clearly isn't just shove it in your mouth because there is a strategy and these professional food eaters do it.
And that, again, shows something beautiful about human experience, because we can make anything a game. Right. I mean, we know that when you raise children, you know that if they won't eat, you can make it a game.
When my daughter, Idina, was really young and we would be walking and she'd be so tired, she's like, oh, I don't want to walk anymore.
Ashley Thornberg
But you can skip.
Dr. Jack Russell Weinstein
Yeah, we'd say, OK, let's run. And she'd be like, yay. And then we'd run because you can make anything a game.
And there's something really marvelous about the human capacity to find fun and pleasure and play in something that isn't inherently designed for that.
Ashley Thornberg
I want to get to more the crux of this conversation, because in talking about, you know, the difference between eating a lot and cooking and one is a game and one is an art. Where do you and maybe more specifically the guest give us an example, an illustration of how games can be that combination of the skill, the winning, the playing. But also there is this deep thought.
There's a design process. There's a philosophy. And when does it become art?
Dr. Jack Russell Weinstein
Well, let's think about poker, for example, because poker combines a whole bunch of different things. It combines probability. It combines skill.
It combines acting. It combines empathy. You have to be able to look for people's tells or try to tell when people are bluffing.
You have to bluff well. You have to gauge when you're playing an expert player who is working the odds. And you also have to gauge when you're playing with a novice who is making accidental sort of quote unquote bad moves and, you know, holds when they shouldn't hold.
I guess that's Blackjack, but you know what I'm trying to say. And there is something artful about an expert poker player who can read the entire table. But there's also something really extraordinary about a novice who can pull the rug out from under that expert player.
An expert tennis player will always beat a novice, you know, unless the sun was in their eyes or something. The expert player, the better you get, the easier it is to beat a novice. But an expert poker player can be undermined by sheer buffoonery.
That mixture of luck, of skill, of empathy, of acting, not to mention, as our guest Frank Lance talks about in the show, not to mention the ethos and the sense of, well, there's something a little wrong about playing poker in the first place. There's something a little wrong about gambling and something a little seedy about it.
And even just the idea of being a professional poker player, that's not a goody two-shoes pastime. That's something just a little bit on the dark side. And so in that sense, I think that we're looking at an art rather than a skill because there are these techniques that you develop, but ultimately you're navigating all these different things to make the best judgment you can in a very volatile situation.
Ashley Thornberg
There's an episode of The Smartless Podcast, which has comedians and actors as hosts, Will Arnett, Jason Bateman, and Sean Hayes. And one time they were interviewing Sir Paul McCartney, who is, of course, one of the best lyricists of all time here. And Sean is unapologetically a music theater nerd.
And he asks this question about rhythm and rhyme and meter and counting the beats and knowing all these things. And it's a really long question where he's obviously very skilled in music theory and then asks him, how much do you take into account when you're doing this? And Paul just hilariously says, I don't know.
You know, he just, he feels it. And it's just fascinating that there is this ability to create while you're sort of thinking or processing or intuiting on a very different level. And then there's the people who sort of pick it apart and develop the theory and figure out what's going on.
Do you need both of those to really reach that pinnacle of art, of skill and craft, and to have that cohesion that brings it up to the next level?
Dr. Jack Russell Weinstein
Paul McCartney is a super interesting example because notoriously he can't read or write music. And so one of the things he does is he hires people to be in the room with him as he's fiddling around and transcribe what he's doing and then help him find it again. There are people who have an intuitive sense of structures, of systems.
Paul McCartney is a genius, but he's also a genius that needed another genius, John Lennon, and frankly all four of them, to do his best work. And so you're faced with this idea that we have intuitive senses of theoretical structures, some of us more immediately than others. But in the end, you need all of those aspects in order to have a full opinion.
There's a huge debate on the internet about Ringo Starr. People like to complain that Ringo Starr is a terrible drummer, and you'll hear this often cited joke, Ringo Starr wasn't even the best drummer who was in the Beatles. And that's nonsense.
I have a whole footnote about it in one of my published papers. But that's nonsense because Ringo Starr was one of the greatest drummers who ever played. And one of the reasons that he was one of the greatest drummers was that he could play every single style of music flawlessly without calling attention to himself.
And so he would create an environment for other people to explore. John, Paul, and George clearly excelled in that environment that Ringo cultivated. And so different people have different senses of the theory and the philosophical behind it.
I think in the end, I don't know whether one can say that the product is going to be better because you have a philosophical sense of what you can do. But I think one can say the experience is going to be fuller and perhaps more fulfilling if you have a full sense of what's going on. At least that's been my experience, but I'm a philosopher, so I'm drawn to that particular point.
But look, you have a romantic partner, and the more you know them, assuming they're the right person for you, the more you appreciate them and the more you understand what's going on. And this is also something I talk about a lot. You've been with your spouse for a really long time, and I've been with my spouse for a long time.
And one of the things that we both know is that if we wanted to, we could say one sentence and destroy them.
Ashley Thornberg
And I know exactly what it would be.
Dr. Jack Russell Weinstein
And you know exactly what it is. And that's why couples have to learn how to fight, because you have to learn how to argue without saying those things, even if you get super angry. And that's one of the reasons why interpersonal relationships are an art, because there are constraints that you develop in order to better each other, be intimate with one another, protect yourself, grow.
I think gaming, I think art, I think all of these sort of things are the same process because there are boundaries that you cannot cross or you're violating either the integrity of the game or the game is just over.
Ashley Thornberg
Jack, there is this thing in art where it doesn't maybe matter how talented the artist is if it's just not your style. You just don't like it. How do we apply that to games?
Dr. Jack Russell Weinstein
Well, one of the factors here is that most games, especially video games, are collective the way that a film is collective, right? People write novels largely by themselves, but there are 100 people on a film and there are often 50 to 100 people on a video game. So automatically that sense that this is an artist's vision or this is a creative vision is more complex and compromised.
At the same time, games are largely a commercial vehicle. And so there has to be one that succeeds. At the same time, my best friend Gail, who I've talked about on the show many times, is a very serious gamer.
She plays board games very seriously. She plays video games very seriously. And although we have been best friends now for about 35 years, our taste in games is largely completely different.
And so she'll recommend something that she loves and I'll play it and I'll be like, eh. And I'll play something that I love and she'll be like, eh. And so I think that with games in particular, the experience is what do you enjoy playing with?
What does play do for you? Play in itself is a seriously rich philosophical concept because it brings out our humanness. It brings our sense of fun.
It brings our sense of satisfaction. It tells people who we are as humans, the kind of things that we like to play. And that's why every aspect of human life has play from parenting to boredom to sex.
Everything human beings do, we can incorporate play and it tells us about the individual both how they play and what they like to play.