(upbeat music) (gentle music) - [Lara] Enter the glowing universe of Michael Lattanzio, Maurice Suckling reveals the unique storytelling potential of video games and catch a performance from Canella.

It's all ahead on this episode of AHA, A House for Arts.

- [Commercial Reporter] Funding for AHA has been provided by your contribution and by contributions to the WMHT venture fund.

Contributors include the Leo Cox Beach Philanthropic Foundation, Chet and Karen Opalka, Robert and Doris Fischer Malesardi, The Alexander and Marjorie Hover Foundation and The Robison Family Foundation.

- At M&T Bank we understand that the vitality of our communities is crucial to our continued success.

That's why we take an active role in our community.

M&T Bank is pleased to support WMHT programming that highlights the arts, and we invite you to do the same.

(gentle music) - Hi, I'm Lara Ayad and this is AHA, A House for Arts, a place for all things creative.

Here's Matt Rogowicz with today's field segment.

(instrumental music) - Graphite powder paintings, LED architectural sculptures and jewelry.

Michael Lattanzio does it all.

And I'm here at a studio in Cohoes, New York to get a look at the magic behind his work, let's go.

(gentle music) - I do many different things.

I call myself a creator.

I have had the love of art all my life, and I'm finally at a point in my life where I'm getting to mold my art with other passions that I've learned and had throughout my lifetime.

When I start a painting, I usually start in the upper left-hand corner and I keep everything covered because I'm right-handed so that as I work, the working area is always covered.

Reason being I did a painting one time I was halfway through it, and I got into it, there was a fingerprint right in the middle of it, but in the trash.

(gentle music) My first real job was working for a car dealer.

And I started sweeping floors, worked my way up to shop manager, kind of thing, line mechanic, and I've always had a love of automobiles.

From there, I went to the graphic arts industry.

I got involved with a company printing T-shirts that started at 25 years or so career in the graphic arts world.

I was in my studio one time and I was playing around some, I've always loved airbrush and I've done some airbrush work.

And I had started playing around with some of these geometric images.

And I thought, well, I want this hard metallic metal kind of look to it.

And I thought, well, airbrush is the way to go, but I just couldn't get the look I was looking for.

And I remember one night sitting down, I took a pencil and just rubbed it on a piece of paper.

And then took my finger and started smearing it around.

I was like, "Wow, there's something here."

You know, then from that, it evolved into picking up a brush and a blending tool and this and that.

Finally, I found the powder graphite.

That gave me the ability to create soft hues and soft interpretations yet they still have that metallic mechanical type of look to them.

Finished the first painting in 97.

And my technique, my ability has improved tenfold.

The graphite paintings can run anywhere from a hundred to 150 hours worth of work.

(gentle music) I have a tray that I put the powder graphite in, and I have brushes like any normal fine artist would have, you know, different shapes, different thicknesses, different points, that kind of thing.

And I dip into the powder graphite like an artist and other artists would dip into an oil or acrylic watercolor, same time thing.

I'll flick it off and then it's just, a very light touch sometimes, a lot of what you see, especially the dark areas, it's layer upon layer upon layer, upon layer of graphite.

That's why it takes a lot because it's not like you put down a color with a paint brush and it's there.

This, you start light, go to dark.

I get tired, I get bored.

You know, it's like, I'm working on a painting and it's like, "Ugh, I've had enough, I gotta get my hands into something else."

(gentle music) At something new, COVID turned out to be a blessing.

I'd like to have a year where I'd had nothing else to do.

I didn't have to work.

I had the resources just to go into the studio and see what would happen.

COVID provided that.

I've always had a love of two things, neon and architecture.

And this is a blending and a way to be able to blend the two without actually using neon.

These are LED lights, which are great.

They're very low energy consumption.

They generate no heat.

You can change your color palette.

You can set a mood in a room with these things.

The first piece I did was a triangle.

I cut the sides out and put some paper in there and I put a light inside of it and it's like, "Wow, this is cool."

You know?

And that was the kind of the beginning.

And I was like, what else can I do with this?

What else can I light?

What else can I add this to?

The Mayan pyramids, the regular pyramids in Egypt, that kind of thing.

And then getting into regular architecture.

By using plexiglass, I use the clear only for the edges, the edges light up, the rest of the clear doesn't light up as you'll see in some of the pieces.

But I also use frosted plexiglass, which gives off a soft glow.

It's a very diffused light.

It's not as pinpoint kind of light, even though the lights themselves are pinpoints.

I've learned how to diffuse the light in certain images.

One of the things I just did was a sign for myself, using clear plexiglass, I cut a mask on the backside, painted it, pulled the mask, back lit it, then put a diffuser panel in there which evens the light out, which gives it that neon look.

"Unbelievable, holy cow, I've never seen anything like it."

"Unbelievable," those are just some of the comments.

And I guess that's one of my goals is to bring to the people, something they've never seen before, from my signature to my graphite patterns, to these sculptures, to the jewelry, whatever, I love bringing stuff into this three dimensional world that's never been here before.

(gentle music) Getting into that space of creating it becomes a very blissful experience.

All of this construct we live in disappears.

It matters not.

Time almost stops.

It becomes irrelevant because all that matters is what you're focused on right at that very moment.

To me, that's blissful.

To me, I would love to live in that space all the time.

(gentle music) - Maurice Suckling is an assistant professor in the Games and Simulation Arts and Sciences program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with a PhD in creative writing and a master's degree in global history.

Maurice's interest lies in the powerful storytelling potential of digital board games.

What can this multi-billion dollar industry tell us about society?

I spoke with Maurice to find out.

Maurice, welcome to A House for Arts.

It's such a pleasure to have you on the show.

- Thank you for inviting me.

- You know, humans have been playing games, including board games for thousands and thousands of years.

I know they've done excavations in what's now Iran and Jordan, and they found games that are about 8,000, 9,000 years old.

And you know, when you think about like, kind of like modern classics today, like monopoly or Chutes and Ladders, what is it that board games still do for us today?

Why have we been playing these for so long?

- In terms of those classic games you mentioned things like Chutes and Ladders and Monopoly, they're quite good introductory ways into the hobby.

They get us accustomed to the idea of sitting at a table together, playing games, introducing some of the basic mechanisms that we're accustomed to seeing in some board games.

So in some ways they are a reroute in to the hobby, but I mean, those games are obviously old, you know, Chutes and Ladders is possibly well over 2000 years old in its earliest form and Monopoly over a hundred years and its earliest form-- - I had no clue that Chutes and Ladders was so old, but I guess that just kind of demonstrates the point that like the same kinds of like the idea of sitting together and playing something together and engrossed at a table is something that we've been doing for so long.

- Yeah, you know, we're social animals for the most part, we like the interactivity of working with people.

But you know, there are also games that are all about playing the game on your own.

They tend to be narrative driven.

We like story too.

We also like touching things.

We like tangible, tactile things.

And so board games give us that.

- You know, I understand that you have a background in writing and in history.

So I'm curious to know what kind of role does storytelling play in the development of, you know, a board game or a video game of some kind.

- It would depend on the type of games.

So if you're making something like Tetris, you don't really need storytelling there, but-- - Just a game of strategy, right?

You make the different pieces fit into certain gaps.

And then you eliminate-- - From a development perspective, that's asking you to do different things.

It's calling on different kinds of design skills.

It's not really asking for storytelling, but we have a lot of games now, both in board games and digital games that are heavily narrative driven.

We have people playing games for the story to spend time with characters.

It's obviously a massive marketing concern too, that you can understand how to integrate story with other design elements.

And that's, you know, not necessarily straightforward if you have a game like Assassin's Creed, for example, a digital game, that's using history in some ways you might have a writing team of over 20 people on that.

- Oh wow.

- And that's not just the-- - And you have writing credits, right on famous games like Fortnite.

And so this is kind of interesting because I think when people think of game development, if they're from the outside, at least somebody like myself, I'm not thinking about the writing storytelling aspect like getting a writing credit on that.

So describe that a little bit for us.

Like what does it take then in this team of say 20 writers to write a game?

- What I would say generally is, what I think is becoming more clearly understood by writers and game developers and players and I think now scholars as well, is that when you take a story into the form of a game, you're potentially changing the nature of what the story is.

So when we shift between mediums, that's not just a jump to different platforms.

You're not just experiencing the same thing, but on a different sized screen.

- Right, so different mediums would be an example, be like a physical analog board game versus a digital one or-- - So I was thinking more in terms of, so if you take a story and you have it in a TV format or we have it on in a movie, it's not just that you say, okay, well let me just take that movie and then just chop up that story and put it in a game on a different size screen.

It's more that when you take a story and put it into a game, you're potentially changing the fundamental nature of what a story is.

So because players have agency they're able to do stuff, they are in some considerable ways, potentially making the story.

So that's not really storytelling at all anymore.

That's story making.

- Got it.

So the players are now story makers.

- Potentially, yes.

So instead of conceiving of a writer as being someone who tells the audience precisely what is happening and precisely the sequence within which that should happen, you can now think of it in the context of games, as a writer being someone who invests a world with story potential and then unleashes a player to construct or reconstruct a story out of that story potential.

- I'd imagine that when people think of a board game, they think, well, the video game industry is this huge, you know, I think it's like $167 billion industry or something like that, it's huge.

And I could imagine some people would think, well now video games are overshadowing board games and board games are, you know, waving goodbye and that's it that we're not gonna see them anymore.

Do you agree with that kind of stance or do you see it from a different perspective?

- Short answer is I disagree.

The longer answer is the board game industry is probably worth about 3 billion annually right now.

So clearly there's a massive disparity, right?

But those figures on their own, don't tell us, there's lots that they don't tell us.

They don't tell us how time works.

So if you buy a $70 board game and you play with four other friends who didn't spend any money on that game and you all play for 150 hours each that's not showing up in those figures.

Also a board game industry is growing by about 15 to 20% each year, which is substantially more than probably what the video game industry-- - So the growth rate is at a much faster pace for board games.

Why do you think that is?

- I think it's connected in some ways to the very fact that board games and video games are not opposing poles.

They're connected.

The rise, the resurgence in board games, there was a time in which board games absolutely looked that way that board games were going to become obsolete in the sort of late eighties, early nineties, people started to feel that's what was happening.

But I think the resurgence of board games is in part, a large part down to the ubiquity of digital technology, people want to escape from their screens-- - Think we especially feel that way right now with COVID and everyone working from home, I can just imagine.

- Well, here's the thing though, that digital technology is also facilitating people to play board games remotely.

- [Lara] Interesting.

- So these things are not, they're not opposed.

You know, there's plenty of people who play, could play both.

I suspect most people who play games absolutely do play both.

And we also have these hybrid games, which are blending digital technology with analog technology, which is a recent trend.

- When I think of like some very typical video games.

And even there are a lot of board games that deal with the theme of war.

When you think of like Call of Duty, for instance, is a great example.

You know, I can't help, but think of that in relation to the recent events that have unfolded in Afghanistan.

And I wonder from your perspective, Maurice, do you think that that sometimes video games or analog board games or whatever format may risk trivializing, the suffering and death that often comes with real war?

- Yeah, for sure.

I mean board board games, video games can and frequently do trivialize war, but then I think movies and TV and fiction frequently does too.

That doesn't mean they necessarily have to, it just depends on what your approach is.

So, you know, we have in movies, we have "Apocalypse."

Now we have "Band of Brothers" on TV.

We have Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" in fiction, or, you know, swap those out for other examples that you prefer.

But in video games we have Spec Ops: The Line.

We have games that actually don't just trivialize where they come at a different way.

And if we don't think about games as purely being driven by Twitch game, play by dexterity testing our ability to run and jump and shoot them and duck and so on, then we can think about games that look at broader aspects of war, things like strategy or politics or economy or survival.

- Or even diplomacy possibly.

- Yep, absolutely diplomacy and board games in particular I would say, although not exclusively, generally do a better job of that than video games.

There's a whole sector of the board games industry that looks at those kinds of aspects.

If you want to understand Afghanistan or the war on terror, you're gonna do much better by looking at something like Labyrinth or Distant Plain by Volko Ruhnke, former CIA analyst, you're gonna get much closer looking at those kinds of analog games than you are by looking at a host of other video games that essentially about shooting.

- Right, so we can actually learn how to think about things, in more nuanced and bigger picture ways, including like issues like war by playing some of these games, which is fantastic.

- Absolutely yeah.

It's that experiential quality changes the nature of what a story is and your nature of your, the depth of your understanding are altered by the fact that you experience it.

- That's amazing.

I wanna go and check out all these new games and new ideas that you've shared with us Maurice, thank you so much for being on AHA.

It was such a pleasure to have you.

- You're welcome, thank you.

- Please welcome Canella.

- Hello everyone.

My name is Canella and I'm gonna be singing "Quiet Love," and you can find this song and music video on YouTube, Spotify and all streaming platforms.

(soft guitar music) ♪ I've been better ♪ ♪ How have you been ♪ ♪ Can you remember ♪ ♪ The last two weeks ♪ ♪ Around the same time ♪ ♪ My mind wasn't here ♪ ♪ I looked at the mirror ♪ ♪ To see nothing there ♪ ♪ In a blink I find myself ♪ ♪ Without a home to call my own ♪ ♪ In the middle of the night I close my eyes ♪ ♪ And hope I'm not between our quiet love ♪ ♪ Love ♪ ♪ Hide my first cry ♪ ♪ Cause I haven't seen the sun ♪ ♪ And I meant to cause no trouble ♪ ♪ And I meant to cause no harm ♪ ♪ In a blink I find myself ♪ ♪ Without a home to call my own ♪ ♪ In the middle of the night ♪ ♪ I close my eyes ♪ ♪ And hope I'm not between our quiet love ♪ ♪ Love ♪ ♪ How I miss the times before ♪ ♪ I was knocked right out the door ♪ ♪ How I miss the times before ♪ (soft guitar music) Thank you This song is called "Gold."

I hope you enjoy it.

(soft guitar music) ♪ Spinning circles in my head ♪ ♪ Lie on the ground and look golden ♪ ♪ It smells like the seasons ♪ ♪ That make me sad ♪ ♪ The freezing around you ♪ ♪ It's like being in bed ♪ ♪ Oh where you go ♪ ♪ Don't fall ♪ ♪ Falling behind you is like being alone ♪ ♪ Don't go ♪ ♪ Stay home ♪ ♪ Crying beside you ♪ ♪ Is discovering gold ♪ ♪ Lying beside you ♪ ♪ Is discovering gold ♪ (soft guitar music) ♪ You taught me to think less about myself ♪ ♪ And when I'm around you ♪ ♪ I feel okay ♪ ♪ Oh thank God I'd see you ♪ ♪ Through all of the shade ♪ ♪ The darkness of night ♪ ♪ Is my favorite day ♪ ♪ Oh where you go ♪ ♪ Don't fall ♪ ♪ Falling behind you ♪ ♪ Is like being alone ♪ ♪ Don't go ♪ ♪ Stay low ♪ ♪ Lying beside you is discovering gold ♪ ♪ Oh no stay low ♪ ♪ Making our drawings from stars that we saw ♪ ♪ Hold on ♪ ♪ Hold on ♪ ♪ Lying beside you is discovering gold ♪ ♪ Lying beside you is discovering gold ♪ (soft guitar music) Thank you.

- Thanks for joining us.

For more arts visit wmht.org/aha and be sure to connect with WMHT on social.

I'm Lara Lara Ayad.

Thanks for watching.

(gentle music) - [Commercial Reporter] Funding for AHA has been provided by your contribution and by contributions to the WMHT venture fund.

Contributors include the Leo Cox Beach Philanthropic Foundation, Chet and Karen Opalka, Robert and Doris Fischer Malesardi, The Alexander and Marjorie Hover Foundation and The Robison Family Foundation.

- At M&T Bank we understand that the vitality of our communities is crucial to our continued success.

That's why we take an active role in our community.

M&T Bank is pleased to support WMHT programming that highlights the arts, and we invite you to do the same.