Lazarus Lake

Game Designer

Robert S. Duncanson - Landscape in the Smoky Mountains, Tennessee

Lazarus Lake is having a moment. I found out about him a few years ago, when I stumbled onto a documentary about The Barkley Marathons. Then, more recently, I learned about his new project, The Backyard Ultra, and I thought, huh, maybe this guy is one of my favorite game designers. Now he’s on Tyler Cowen’s podcast.

Lake’s projects are idiosyncratic metagames built around the sport of endurance running. They are the kind of games where you take a simple activity - like holding your breath or remembering a list of things - and create an extreme version of it, transmuting the core activity into something strange and new, or perhaps just revealing the strangeness that was always there by inflating and amplifying it. They are infamous, and celebrated, for the outrageous, unreasonable challenges they present. The Barkley is a course so difficult that, over the 37 years of its existence, 1,000 runners have entered and only 17 have ever finished.

Lake is a self-invented persona. The made-up name, the laconic, cryptic manner of speaking, these create a theatrical framing for his games, making their eccentric details feel like intentional gestures that cohere into some larger, elusive meaning. In this regard, he is closer to one of the flamboyant Japanese videogame auteurs - Hideo Kojima, Suda51, Yoko Taro - than to the anonymous user experience engineers who make up most of the game design industry. Well, with some notable exceptions.

Lake’s persona (like Foddy’s) is that of a backwoods Jigsaw, a slightly unhinged, slightly evil genius who enjoys making people suffer in order to teach them some obscure moral lesson. That all of this is true doesn’t make it any less of a deliberately-constructed conceit.

His games demonstrate the power of ritual to draw meaning out of pain, and their surprising, global popularity demonstrates the ubiquitous hunger for this kind of meaning. There is something of the sacred about them, but they don’t feel at all religious, they are too personal, too profane, and too playful. They are clearly the work of an obsessive outsider, made for other obsessive outsiders, people who are skeptical of the rules that govern our world and want to experiment with different ones.

These are the kinds of games that can only come out of a community of shared practice. Lake, a life-long runner, understands the experience of endurance running from the inside, understands what is beautiful and ridiculous about it. The best games are a kind of experimental psychology, but importantly, they are experiments that we run on ourselves. The world is full of games that attempt to manipulate players as psychological subjects, dangling incentives and doling out rewards, constructing carefully-calibrated haunted-house experience machines according to blueprints of desire and fear. Games like that suck. Lake’s games have real ghosts in them, real monsters, you, and him.

When they aren’t trying to manipulate you, most modern games are desperately trying to please you, carefully designed to capture and hold your attention, constantly trying to explain and justify themselves, and sweatily working to amuse and entertain you. When your game is a product every sharp edge is a flaw, a leak, an opportunity for the precious attention you are harvesting to escape back into the ether. Lake’s games are also carefully designed, they are full of closely-considered details that fit together to make a coherent whole, but the problem they are trying to solve is an entirely different one. They are not bowing and scraping to accommodate your needs while secretly plotting to hypnotize you into a state of passive thrall. Their parts fit together like the plants, rocks, and mud of a Tennessee mountain, and, like that mountain, they will happily, indifferently, shrug you off. And yet, somehow, the resulting experience expresses a deep level of respect and compassion. Dark Souls comes to mind as an obvious comparison.

Lazarus Lake’s projects are sui generis, they are rooted in the particularities of his life, the landscape of his home, his friendships, and his specific way of looking at the world. They could not have been made by anyone else, and it appears he was driven to make them by some irrational and unavoidable compulsion. They are here to remind us that, before game design was a profession, it was a condition.

By the way, here’s a picture of Lake alongside pictures of another two of my favorite game designers, Raymond Smullyan, and Michael Brough. Wizards are cool.