The premise of the video game Q-UP seems ridiculously simple and simply ridiculous: an esport where every match is decided by a coin flip. “Whenever someone sees Q-UP for the first time,” said James Lantz, one of its designers, “they’re like, ‘This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.’”
But hiding under the binary surface is demented complexity. That includes its stance on competitive games like League of Legends or Overwatch 2 that are the targets of its satire. It is equally a savage critique and a loving appreciation of esports culture.
Another of the game’s designers, Frank Lantz, the founder of New York University’s Game Center and James’s father, has made a career of transforming maligned game genres into profound experiences. His cult-hit game Universal Paperclips (2017) appears at first to be a primitive idle game, akin to Cookie Clicker, but eventually reveals its terrifying vision of an artificial intelligence that takes instruction far too literally. Q-UP, Frank Lantz said, is that game’s “spiritual successor.”
James Lantz grew up immersed in esports games like StarCraft, saying they helped him learn how to get good at things. But he also took note of the community’s sometimes illogical frustrations.
“People get really mad all the time about randomness, about their teammates, about matchmaking,” he said.
The inspiration for Q-UP emerged from a simple provocation. What if you made a game that was actually the coin flip that disgruntled players claim their matches already are?
That is just the first joke. Soon, in-game messages introduce a comic metanarrative, the tensions between the fictional game corporation that created Q-UP and a bleeding-edge computing start-up it has hired at great expense to ensure “pure quantum randomness” for the pivotal coin.
The next thing you know, your focus has shifted from the coin flip — which the Lantzes insist is truly random — to the increasingly convoluted metagame of raising your ranking as a competitive Q-UP player, akin to the Elo score in competitive chess. As one player put it in a review on Steam, “You can’t affect the outcome, but you can affect the outcome of the outcome.”
A shop sells preposterous items that can help optimize the coin flip. “Honor duels” introduce a form of combat. Most important, players unlock dozens of skills and arrange them on a geometric grid where they trigger one another in intricate patterns that can increase the payout from each flip.
The mindless idle game gradually transforms into something closer to a brainy puzzle systems of an elaborate management simulator like Factorio. Atop it all is a dazzling surface inspired by 1990s rave culture, complete with a killer drum-and-bass soundtrack.
That complexity feels true to the experience of playing big modern multiplayer games, encrusted as they are with layer after layer of tweakable options, purchasable cosmetics and often mystifying stats. Brendon Bigley, host of the gaming podcast “Into the Aether,” traces this tendency back to Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007).
“That game was novel for introducing this meta progression level on top of the thing you’re actually there to do, which is to shoot people with your friends,” he said. “But most of your time is spent building your class out and min-maxing your performance outside of the actual game.” Eventually, the military battles fade into the background and the metagame becomes everything.
Essential to the success of Q-UP is its ultimate joke: It is genuinely fun. “I think it’s really easy to look at it as a cynical work,” Bigley said. “But my actual experience playing Q-UP was mainly in a group of friends on a Discord call, every night for like two weeks. And it was a great time.”
For all its mockery of esports, Q-UP turns out to be a tribute to the genre’s positive side. “The central conceit is so silly that there’s almost no way for pessimism to find its way in,” Bigley said.
From that basic coin flip, Q-UP manages to spin out dozens of ideas. Frank Lantz is most interested in the game’s headiest concepts, such as Bell’s inequality in quantum mechanics. James Lantz is fascinated by the way that “true randomness feels rigged.”
As you observe your own reaction to each coin flip, Q-UP reveals something that Frank Lantz has spent his career exploring: how video games work as “psychology experiments that we conduct on ourselves,” an idea at the core of his book “The Beauty of Games.”
By stripping esports down to their purest form and then building them back up to their most preposterously byzantine iteration, Q-UP exposes both the absurdity and the depth of virtual competition.
“We also made a highly addictive gambling game,” Frank Lantz admitted. “But because we have this meta commentary about random addictive gambling games, players are allowing us to do that.”
The post A Competitive Coin Flip League’s Satisfying Payoff appeared first on New York Times.
