Hello everyone and welcome to the Minescape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll and I'm of the opinion that we don't talk about

Games enough at least we don't talk about games enough in an intellectual sense in a sort of the theory of games

What are games? Why do we do them clearly? There's a whole bunch of people playing games

I just looked up the numbers online and we spend over twice as much on video games these days as we do on movies

Despite the fact there's a lot more coverage of movies in TV and magazines two-thirds of American households play video games

Or at least have someone in there playing video games for more than three hours per week

So video games pervade our lives as do games more generally right chess go card games etc

But what is a game? What's the definition of it and why are we so attracted them? Why do they fascinate us so?

I think that my cats aerial and caliban in some sense play games aerial at least plays fetch

But we human beings go to great lengths to invent completely arbitrary rules

Play by them and then invest enormous amounts of emotion into whether we win or lose or how we do playing this game

So today we have on one of the world's leading people who does think about these issues in detail

Frank Lance is a very active game designer. He's designed a number of video games

gear heads drop seven which is a famous iPhone mobile phone game

CSI crime city as well as various real world games where people are out there in the streets actually playing by certain rules

But he's also the director of the game center at NYU

So his part of his job is to take the bigger picture to really ask what games are where they're going

So this is a very fun conversation

I do have to admit that it was in an extremely unusual setting that we had the conversation

This was a live recording at the Santa Fe Institute's Interplanetary Festival in Santa Fe

Which is a very fun event

But to be honest the recording was in a big space and a big tent with lots of other things going on

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