HEY, ROBOT! (Frank Lantz)

January 8, 2021 | 00:25:49

Today, we’re playing with voice assistants and thinking about the role of voices in gaming with our guest, game designer and NYU professor Frank Lantz. 

Over the past nightmare year of the coronavirus, many of us have been hunkered down, trying to figure out how to pass the time with our families. Board game sales on Amazon were up 4,000% percent in March, when Americans began sheltering in place. And, of course, we’ve also spent way more time interacting with digital technology. These two things have come together in a weird and delightful way in Lantz’s game Hey Robot. 

Created by Lantz’s family-owned company Everybody House Games, Hey Robot is a guessing game you play with a group of friends—including your voice assistant or smart speaker. The premise is simple: Make Google Home or Alexa utter the words written in a deck of cards. The questions it raises are complex: What are these digital entities that many of us interact with daily? How have web searches and voice-based computing changed the way we talk? And what does this reveal about language itself? 

Hey Robot is available in a free online Quarantine Edition that you can play remotely with your friends. The board game edition is available on Amazon.

Today’s show was written and edited by Mack Hagood. 

Fake Cumbia music by Mack Hagood. 

Ambient music clip taken from Hiroshi Yoshimura’s album Green.

 [0:00]

Mack Hagood: Hey, Siri.

[iPhone Beep]

Mack: What’s Phantom Power?

[iPhone Beep]

Siri: Phantom Power, in the context of professional audio equipment, is DC electric power transmitted through microphone cables.

Shall I continue?

Mack: Uh, how about a podcast?

Siri: I don’t see an app for that. You’ll need to download one.

Mack: Oh no. I meant a podcast called Phantom Power.

Hello?

[Sigh]

[00:35]

[Intro Music]

Mack: Okay, Google. What is the Phantom Power Podcast?

Spacey Voice: This…is…Phantom Power

[Intro Music]

Google Assistant: According to Apple Podcasts, on Phantom Power Mack Hagood explores the world of sound in the arts, music, and culture.

Each episode features the sounds and ideas of a contemporary artist, musician, or sound scholar.

Mack: Good job, Google.

Mack: Hey everyone. Welcome back and happy new year. It’s me Mack Hagood. Close enough, Google. Close enough.

Thanks so much for joining me for another episode of Phantom Power. We have a lot of good things in the works for you in 2021. One thing I’m excited about is guest producers.

We have a number of critics and scholars working on Phantom Power episodes, including features on the work of sound artists, Brian Harnetty, Kate Carr and Yoko Ono.

We also have a fascinating piece on voice and disability with influential sound scholar, Jonathan Stern, coming for you this year.

And if you are interested in producing a piece for the show, we want to hear from you.

If you’re a longtime listener, you know we don’t drop episodes that frequently. We’re definitely interested in quality over quantity. But we’d like to up the quantity as well, and one way to do that is to get more people involved.

So, if you know your way around an audio editor and you have an idea for an episode, drop me a line at mhagood (that’s H-A-G-O-O-D) @miamioh.edu.  

But today, we have a fun, new year’s treat for you. We’re playing with voice assistance with my guest, Frank Lantz.

Spacey Voice: Phantom…Power.

[Intro Music Fades]

[2:32]

Mack: Over the past nightmare year of the Corona Virus, many of us have been hunkered down, trying to figure out how to pass the time with our families.

Board game sales on Amazon were up 4,000% in March when Americans began sheltering in place.

And of course, we’ve also spent way more time interacting with our digital technology.

Well, these two things have come together in a weird and delightful way in my house lately.

Abe: Okay, Google. What do you get if you combine the elements, carbon and hydrogen?

Google Assistant: According to EAP Redding, an atom of carbon will combine with two atoms of oxygen to form carbon dioxide, CO2, or two atoms of hydrogen will combine with one atom of oxygen to form water, H2O.

Male Voice: Whaaattt?

Mack: H-Twenty

[Laughing]

Abe: Twenty? H-Twenty?

Mack: It’s supposed to be H2O. The O is for oxygen, it’s not a numeral zero.

Abe: I didn’t even say oxygen and it was all about oxygen.

Mack: That’s true, you didn’t. That was a good strategy, Abe, I think you were robbed by a device that’s not even smart enough to say H2O.

[Giggling]

That’s me and my sons, Abe and Theo, and the digital entity known as Google Assistant, all playing a game called Hey Robot, together.  

The game is the brain child of my guest and his family.

Frank Lantz: My name is Frank Lantz, and I’m a game designer and I’m the director of the NYU Game Center.

Mack: Frank is also a pretty big deal on Twitter, with some 62,000 followers.

Frank: Most of whom are bots. Presumably

Mack: He made his name in part by designing games that blurred the lines between digital and physical space.

Frank: I had a game studio with a guy called Kevin Slaven, and it was called Area Code and it was all about exploring the overlap between these different things. The world of information and software and kind of virtual stuff, and the physical world around us of bodies and people and objects and things.

Mack: For example, in 2007, CBS commissioned his company, Area Code, to conceive and develop an alternate reality game for an episode of their TV show, Numbers.

[Robotic Game Voice]

Chain Factor represented a new way of blending storytelling gameplay. The game itself was a narrative artifact, a fully interactive piece of the fictional world of the show.

[Marching Band Plays]

Mack: Frank also did these massively wacky projects, like The Big Urban Game, which turned the twin cities into the world’s largest board game with teams of movers carrying 25-foot tall inflatable game pieces through the streets.

[Voices Chattering]

Mack: Or Pack Manhattan, another large-scale game that utilized the streets of New York City to recreate the 1980s video games sensation, Pac-Man.

Male Voice: Hey, you guys see someone dressed like Pac-Man running by?

Male Voice: Pac-Man?

Male Voice: Yellow shirt?

Male Voice: I’m going to go check.

Mack: I actually met Frank in Manhattan back in February of 2020. I was invited to NYU to talk about new trends in digital media.

I was talking about my book on noise canceling headphones and audio apps alongside MIT games study scholar, T.L. Taylor, who was talking about her book on Twitch and game streaming.

Frank was the moderator for the evening, which was the perfect choice because not only is he a games expert, but he’s also a huge music fan.

I mean, listen to him nerd out on Japanese ambient music.

[Ambient Music]

Frank: Harumi Hosono, (Music) Interior, Hiroshi Yoshimaru, Yamaland, Takashi Kokubo

Mack: It was a great conversation and then a great night on the town in Greenwich village, talking to all these amazing media and games scholars.

And while there were worries about the new virus in China, I had no idea that this would be my last work trip.

My last visit to a bar.

My last, you get it.

I asked Frank for an interview that night, but by the time we spoke over Skype in late March, everything had changed.

New York City had been completely overwhelmed by the virus. Frank was sheltering in place upstate.

Frank: It’s like the chill-pocalypse for most people accept, you know, those who are on the front lines.

Everyone else is just kind hunker down and in this weird zone, feeling the strange looming cloud of anxiety.

Mack: What would this new, I mean, for a designer who loves street-based game?

Mack [To Frank]: So now in this Corona Virus moment of social isolation, or at least physical isolation, do you have any thoughts on the role of games?

Frank: I have so many thoughts, thank you for asking.

Now, I have a little company with my wife and our son and our daughter-in-law, which is called Everybody House Games.

It’s just a little side project that we put together so that we could collaborate on projects. And we did a Kickstarter for a board game called Hey, Robot, which is like a party game where you try to get Alexa or Google Home to say a word.

You ask it a question. You can’t say the word in the question. You try to get the speaker to say the word in its answer.

It was a Kickstarter and we did that and now it’s in the process of being published and we’re shipping it out to the Kickstarter backers.

And we’re thinking about also the, the retail version of it.

And at the same time, friends of ours who have been playing Hey, Robot, are telling us, “Oh, we’re playing it over zoom with our families. We’re playing it with the group chat.”

And we’re seeing people on Twitter doing this. And then we got contacted by Jimmy Fallon’s people at The Tonight Show and they were like, “Hey, could we play this game? Jimmy Fallon wants to play this game on The Tonight Show.”

We were like, “Absolutely.”

And so, a couple of weeks ago, he played it with John Mulaney on the show.

[9:36]

[The Roots Singing, “Hey, Robot]

Jimmy Fallon: Now, this is based on the real board game called Hey, Robot that you can play at home. It’s like the classic game Password, but you play with a smart speaker.

So first you pick a card with a word on it. Then you have to ask a question to get the smart speaker to say that word somewhere in its answer.

If it does you get a point, if it doesn’t, then the other person has a chance to steal.

We’ll go back and forth until someone gets it.

You good for this?

John Mulaney: Yeah, but it sounds hard.

Jimmy Fallon: No, here we go.. I will go first.

Okay, here we go. It might be hard. All right. My word is Ostrich.

All right, Alexa, what bird puts its head in the sand.

Alexa: Here’s something I found on the web. According to trust.org, the ostrich is said…

[Dinging]

Jimmy Fallon: Yes!

[Cheering]

Jimmy Fallon: Alexa, stop. This is a fun game already.

John Mulaney: Trust.org? She said the word, but her sources, I don’t know.

[10:45]

Frank: And then earlier this week, they played it again. And this time with the kind of remote version of The Tonight Show that they’re doing, where everyone’s in their home and they’re using video chat.

And they played it like that with Tina Fey and at the same time my wife is looking on Instagram and noticing people who are trying to figure out how to play multiplayer games with their friends.

And they’re trying to play like Quiplash and these other Jackbox games, but in order to do it, they have to cobble together a solution.

They’re like, “Oh, I’m going to point my laptop at the screen and then you call me and then I’ll zoom you and then we’ll try.”

And the thing is, it’s actually very hard to just play games with your friends. Online, using the internet, in a way that’s like social and easy.

And so, we have this thing that we’ve been thinking of just the past few days, which is this kind of missing piece, basically it’s online multiplayer games for normies, you know what I mean?

 There’s like a huge industry of online multiplayer games. But it’s still kind of for this hardcore niche kind of audience of hobbyists.

I think that the thing is that it has its roots in single player video games. And in single-payer video games, when you add multiplayer as a feature, you think of it as a thing that you need to then supply people to.

 Like, “Oh, I want to be able to play this against people.”

So, you have this standard model of internet multiplayer games which is people are anonymous. They’re like a commodity. Other players is like a resource that always needs to be there for the game to work, you know?

And so, you have this strange kind of anonymous, social quality of online, of traditional mainstream, online multiplayer games.

And what people are wanting in this moment is to play games with their friends, the way that they play a board game or a card game we’re sitting around and playing a party. And that’s kind of missing.

So anyway, that’s where we’re kind of thinking of that. And we’re kind of throwing together a kind of quick down and dirty version of Hey, Robot. Kind of a quarantine addition, that people can play in this way, using whatever video chat they have, we’re just going to put it out there for people to play.

But we also think that this is kind of a new direction that I think is a promising new channel for games. People who want to play games with particular people, right? It’s not that I just want a flow of opponents.

Mack: Right.

Frank: It’s like, I want to play a game with my aunt and my nephew.

Mack: And this might seem a little bit far afield for this podcast about sound, but I mean, I’m really so glad that you brought up Hey, Robot, because one of the things that I really love about it is it brings out the sort of sonic and vocal quality of gaming, right?

That I do think has been missing from a lot of online gaming experiences, with the exception of Discord that my son uses to communicate with all of his friends.

Frank: Yeah. Hey, Robot is a game that is entirely about voice computing, right?

Voice-based computers, which again it’s like, “What can you do with that?”

And like what kinds of experiences can you build on top?

There’s also something really important about the sound of the people that you’re playing with, the voices of the people that you’re playing with that’s missing from a lot of online multiplayer.

There’s the headsets and the mics and the voice, but even if you look at Twitch. When people on Twitch want to play a game together, they have to kind of jury rig it.

Like two streamers are like, “Oh, let’s play this game together.” They either have to figure out, “Are we taking turns playing this game against other people? Or are we going to try to set up some kind of shared room or something?”

But I do think we’re all experiencing this hunger for presence and something about voice, which is really powerful, that you don’t get from written chat.

There was a nice article recently about the phone call having a moment, you know, people are saying that they’re after seeming, you know, like it’s kinda dying away. The phone call, like most millennials wouldn’t dream of having a phone call.

All of a sudden now people are rediscovering the power of just open-ended conversation over the wires, you know?

Mack: Yeah, yeah, that’s interesting. Are there any specific questions that you think, Hey, Robot sort of opens up about voice assistance and this sort of sonic form of computing?

Frank: Well, the origin of it is really about search as a skill, like what does it mean to be good at finding things on the internet.

And the linguistic skill because when you search, you’re using words to poke at data, and to try to find something in a big multi-dimensional data space using keywords as intersecting vectors that are going to then try to find a location in that big space of ideas and information.

And it’s weird. Once you start trying to get good at it, once you understand that it’s a skill and you try to get good at it, then it’s really interesting.

You realize, “Oh, this is like a protocol. Like I’m developing this new kind of query. This new skill that’s about querying information space using keywords.”

And then you realize, “Oh, I guess that’s kind of with all languages,” right?

So, it’s like a special, weird case that maybe demonstrates the underlying logic of language in general.

Mack: So, in a way, is this about the way that the search bar has trained us to think?

Sort of a skill that we don’t even realize we have? A particular way of dealing in language.

Frank: Yeah. I mean, I think it’s the result. I don’t think that search is training us.

I think searches is the, you know, the best solution to a particular problem, and then it becomes a thing in the world that is itself a problem that you can try to get good at, right?

And so, yeah, we are adapting to our tools in the same way that we’ve adapted to books and we’ve adapted to keyboards and screens.

We’re adapting to search as a way of interacting with information, and I think voice search is kind of in its early stages. But I think that will be just become part of the landscape that we are co-evolving with.

So, I mean, I tend to have a much less, maybe a more optimistic view of how this stuff can work out.

And I know a lot of people are very paranoid about these devices, the idea that they’re a kind of commercial probe that is in your space. That they’re listening and responding to the things you say in ways that aren’t always for your benefit and I think those are legitimate concerns.

And so that’s one of the ingredients in Hey, Robot is like that weird that we relationship we have. Kind of a love, hate relationship with these smart speakers and with technology in general, you know?

Mack: Does Hey, Robot make you feel like Siri is actually at the party with you playing the game with you?

Frank: Yeah. I mean I think a big part of the weirdness is that you just, you realize. Like you already have a very simple synthetic personality that lives in your house, if you have one of these devices, right?

Alexa or Google Home, you already have this weird AI.

Sorry, I just triggered Alexa. Sorry, Alexa, nevermind.

So, you have this thing, but you have a weird relationship to it because you’re just barking orders at it, you’re telling it to time something, or you’re giving an instruction, asking it about the weather.

There’s very kind of weird utilitarian relationship you have with this thing that you treat just like a servant basically or something.

And then, when you play a game with it’s just weird.

You start to realize, “Oh, it kind of has a personality and its personality is really dorky,” right?

It’s this super over-educated creature with very, with no common sense, right?

So, it’s completely pedantic and officious and, you know, an incredibly well-informed person, but with no common sense. No naturalness. Just very, very awkward and kind of, and ridiculous, but in a way that’s kind of charming.

So, we feel like it is sort of like inviting these things that are already living in your house to take a seat at the table for half an hour and join the party.

Mack: I’m really glad to hear you keep calling Siri “it” or Alexa “it”.

I feel very, I don’t know, unsettled by how common it is for people to say her or she.

And to me, what I think is interesting about this I always got a sense that I’m just sort of talking into this informational void, and then like, there’s these words coming back at me.

Like, it seems like a very disembodied, almost creepy supernatural experience to talk to these voice assistants.

And I don’t feel any kind of need to humanize them necessarily, but I wouldn’t mind having a better relationship with them that accepts them for what they are.

Frank: So, the thing about Hey, Robot is that it doesn’t make the Alexa or Google Home feel more like a person. It just the opposite.

Like to play the game well it means really understanding the logic of how these things work and they are quick.

So, people, for example, often make the mistake of sort of adding more information.

“Oh, what’s the name of the detective with the deer horn hat and the pipe and there was a, there were a bunch of novels and it was by Arthur, Arthur Conan Doyle,” right?

And there’s a way of stacking up details because that’s the way human think, right?

We think associatively by stacking up details.

Like, “what’s the name?” You know what I mean? Like you’re just, it’s this and that. You throw in a few extra details and it’s helping me get closer and closer to the thing, but that’s not how these algorithms work.

You’re trying to trigger a precise response and you actually need to be quite simple. and just like, “Who is Arthur Conan Doyle?”  And you’re trying to get it in this very kind of precise way, extra little flurries of details don’t help because they’re just actually kind of noise for this thing.

The thing is that there is a kind of empathy that you, that you experienced because the nature of the game is you’re both trying to get it right.

Like, Alexa wants to answer your question correctly and you want them to get the answer right. And so, it’s an interesting kind of guessing game. It’s not like a typical guessing game where it’s like a riddle and someone’s trying to hold something back. It’s like, you’re both really trying to get to the same place.

And there’s something nice about.

Mack: That’s fantastic. Ah, it’s amazing. I just love the entire idea of this game. It’s really great.

Frank: Uh, thanks. Yeah, we’re super excited about it and it will be available soon for purchase, hopefully.

Mack: Well, we’ll put a link in the show notes for sure.

All right, Frank. Thank you so much.

Frank: Thank you. Mack, it was a pleasure

[24:04]

[Cumbia Transition Music]

Mack: And that’s it for this short and sweet episode of Phantom Power.

Thank you to Frank Lantz and just to update you on all things Hey, Robot, since we spoke, Everybody House Games has released a free quarantine edition that you can play online with your friends, as well as the physical board game available on Amazon.

Links to both of those as well as transcripts and all of our other episodes are available at phantompod.org, where you can also subscribe to the show.

We’d love it if you’d rate and review us on Apple Podcasts and tell your friends about us.

Give us a shout on social media at Facebook or Twitter @phantompod

Today’s show was edited by me, Mack Hagood. The fake Cumbia music that you’re hearing was also by yours truly, but the authentic Japanese ambient music that we heard was from Hiroshi Yoshimura album, Green. Classic new age.

Finally, we’re looking for a new intern to handle our web and socials. If you’re interested in interning for Phantom Power, hit me up at mhagood@miamioh.edu.

Phantom Power is made possible through the generosity of the Miami University Humanity Center. The Robert H and Nancy J Blaney endowment and The National Endowment for the Humanities.

[Cumbia Music Fades Out]