Hidden agenda — understand what people are up to is key to understanding.
Frank Lantz (NY) - recently moved to bay area, interested in engaging. Bay area is an exciting place, weird status as tech capital/AI center. Lighthaven has a rationality-adjacent status.
How do games fit into “where we’re going together”, with tech/AI
Theorycrafting
What you do away from the table, brewing a deck. Very speculative. Not a strong central thesis
What are games?
Games (and everything) is hard to define
“Bring me back the game” cricket ball vs globe. Or sims vs microsoft word
“art” can be confusing — eg mona lisa, glass, solemn observation, in a tomb.
But key: intrinsic value, non-utilitarian, pleasure & meaning, aesthetic judgments
like pop culture art. they’re like tv, albums. (comfortable to put into a rectangle), sports
trap: “we need games with emotion and high fidelity artwork”
tetris vs last of us — less self conscious about masterpieces in video games, more awkward struggle to capture film/theater qualities
trap: theater/film/painting are high status, vs games.
michaelango is grounded in institutions of high status, prestigious. hunting after status — a lot of complicated dynamics as to why “gutter culture”
Why?
kids, developmental; as an industry — toys (boy toys), computer.
the way we make/consume those.
effort to play game is squandered — real problems are unsolved
[ac] games are more fun. art is virtue signaling?
games are newer
Anyways, avoid status auction
So: special status, outside of ordinary life.
Like fiction, painting, music, art. Not embedded in life
[ac] beauty of Manifold/Manifest is that it’s a game
Learning, status competitions, rituals, simulations, self-control
Don’t expect them to justify themselves
Central paradox of games:
Chess is pure rationality, an exercise in problem solving
“given rules, does white win?” global exercise in search
But also: absurd. Can’t explain why we’re doing it
Games, here and now (2025 in Lighthaven, Berkeley)
Games are the artform of…
artform of systems
artform of computation
What kinds of problems are solvable?
artform of software
artform of thinking and doing
Music is the artform of sound
painting is the artform of looking and vision
[ac] how about entrepreneurship? maybe less art
artform of agency
artform of problem-solving
creating problems for their own sake
artform of optimization
what is the best move for white? create universe where best answer exists
artform of precisely-articularted objective criteria
Case studies
invention of probability theory. giralamo cardano, was a gamer
invention of game theory, john van neumann (played poker)
in econ, politics. but also bio
zero-determinant strategies
axerlod tournament ⇒ tit for tat
but zero-determinant — can unilaterally decide what payoff for partner over time. Can pick a number to make that happen
Exploitative strategy within IPD for strategies that are adjusting responses which is what ZD
evolutionary strategies need theory of mind, recognize they’re against exploitative, and refuse to play
games invented computers
mechinacal turk
alan turing wrote turochamp, chess playing program
gpu ⇒ AI
not total coincidence. key ingredient: capacity of GPU to make pretend castle
games back to real world
alphago slack move — seem much weaker than alternatives
eventually: slack for scoremaxxing, but alphago is winmaxxing
humans: want to scorched earth, konan
Adversial policies vs KataGo
Katago thinks an area is dead, when not
Pulled major go engines for maintenance, not that easie
Larger issue: AlphaGo isn’t playing go. It’s a go strategist.
What it means to play Go: know that you’re losing. the KataGo team is
World model: that KataGo is playing against 7yo and it’s losing
AlphaGo + something that knows what it’s playing. But then…
No escape — it keeps escalating
Illustrates limits of systems
No matter how far you zoom in, things remain interesting
Glen Weyl RadicalxChange
New social mechanisms: quadratic voting, partial common ownership
“If Marx were a bit smarter” — feuded with Rob Wiblin.
Why aren’t people more interested in eg voting
Beauty of balance in judicial vs executive
Only way out! We didn’t figure out voting, leading to bad outcome, have a different outcome
Richard Garfield (MTG) is a big fan
Relationship between gamer mind/optimization/ and hacker mentality. Both about seeing through the world
Fighting games are about winning — need to do whatever you do..
Security mindset. No such thing as levels
Nakatomi space — bruce willis moves through the plaza, ignores doorways, goes to where he needs to be
Virtue: aratei (living up to one’s promise). Sport, games are an exercise in pursuit of virtue
Chinese had 4 arts, including go
Basketball — James made it as a christian, to make something that roughnecks could play indoors, wasn’t just executing, had to think, collective, share the ball
Vice
vs: enhanced drug games, or SBF playing games while on the phone
unaware of larger vision, or set back
vs Elon Musk — misunderstanding, being obsessed with performance. Skill of surviving social media to get to the stars
Games are so capacious, so absorbent; can absorb all attention & problem solving. Disappear, forget to come out
Magnus Carlsen — kind of bored, choses to play or not!
More ambition and responsibility among game players
Play and design are synonymous; want more of a sense of not just self-soothing, entertainment, industry
Don’t aim for status of pietta, but its capacity to be sacred, that matters, that is important
Patio11 on Isekai Game
Playtesting/pressuretesting with LLMs
[ac] applies to testing other things too
Business of video games?
AI Dungeon?
You can cheat on token cost; most are spent beforehand
A few spent on character sheet/image
Ask a cheap LLM to rewrite success text in the voice of Brendan P Mulligan. What about I wanted me, who is trying to play to
Biz models:
New content is now super cheap
(not true of past models)
Season pass is to generate new stories
“let the people who love you pay you money”
[ac] hm
[zhd] Free text write in, then cache and reuse for others
Started with caching
We’re creative, but not that creative, so cache the few and let long tail. Didn’t ship but maybe space
Here’s max/min result; run an automated boundaries, plus flavor
ChatGPT is too nice as a DM
give examples, have a curve
amplitude of success/failure should escalate
also when signposted that the choice are important
loot: bring in a common item
Agents are easy
stimulus, tool call, put into next stimulus
(concatenate, or not)
Surprising:
Cried 3 times (fatherhood)
Laughed many times
You can bring in many things
I once wrote 27k words on this, read that, make them feel slapped in the face about this
Aside: Manifest is the ur-conference. Now split out as LessOnline, Metagame, Slutcon, The Curve.