Episode 26: Frank Lantz, Game Designer with a focus on exploring emerging technology to create new kinds of gameplay

Frank Lantz is a game designer with a focus on exploring emerging technology to create new kinds of gameplay. His most recent games include Universal Paperclips, Hey Robot, and Babble Royale. He is the Founding Chair of the NYU Game Center, the co-founder of Area/Code Games (acquired by Zynga in 2011), and the co-founder of Everybody House Games. He has taught game design for over 20 years at New York University, Parsons School of Design, and the School of Visual Arts and has created numerous influential talks and writings on the subject of games. Frank started Area/Code in 2005 with Kevin Slavin. Area/Code produced experimental cross-media, location-based, and social network games as well as the popular abstract puzzle game Drop7. Before starting Area/Code, Frank worked on a wide variety of games as the Director of Game Design at Gamelab, Lead Game Designer at This is Pop and Creative Director at R/GA Interactive. Frank helped pioneer the genre of large-scale real-world games, working on projects such as the Big Urban Game, which turned the cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul into the world’s largest boardgame; Sharkrunners, which allowed players to interact with living sharks in a persistent virtual world, PacManhattan, a life-size version of the arcade classic created by the students in his Big Games class at NYU, and many other experiments in pervasive and urban gaming.