Why do we play? Not only play -- why do we play more than any other animal, and for longer? Well into adulthood? Raph Koster, who's been on the podcast before, brought out A Theory of Fun in 2006, which aimed to put an evolutionary psychology lens over fun. The theory, was that FUN is LEARNING. But back then, it felt more like a theory. After 20 years of new science connecting fun and learning, it's starting to feel more like fact. So I sought out Peter Gray, research professor of p...

**Content Warning** This episode contains discussion of depression and suicidal ideation. For those with autism, gaming can be a great boon. Where others see social barriers, the autistic mind sees the removal of those barriers. The symptoms disappear. In the words of this week's guest, "often when you play the game, you're not autistic." Tony Attwood is an expert in Autism, and an adjunct professor at Griffith University in Queensland. He ran a private practice for decades, speciali...

Jose Zagal is a professor at the University of Utah, teaching game design, and ethics in videogames. In 2005 he put forward the Game Ontology Project, which attempts to break down games to its core elements, categorise them, and study them. It's a process every science eventually comes to -- be it physics, chemistry, various fields of mathematics, philosophy, and language... Eventually you learn more by breaking it down and studying it piece by piece. Although Jose more readily compares thi...

Gaming has an end-of-life problem. While we've made some progress in preserving games as cultural artifacts, new questions have arisen about when it's okay for publishers to end support for their games, and what that means. Paul Kilduff-Taylor is an indie dev and publisher with multiplayer games such as Frozen Synapse under his belt, which I've been playing since 2011. In a subject area that's been sorely lacking in nuance, Paul has been trying to communicate some inconvenient truths about...

Guy Blomberg and Shay Leighton have started a book club. It's called The Game Club, because it's not really about books, it's about games. But it's not really about games, it's about friends. With loneliness on the rise, these two excel at bringing people together. Blomberg has been behind several conventions such as PAX and DreamHack, as well as GIG, the Games Industry Gathering. Leighton is a community organiser who gives talks to unions, activists, and more. Using the standard book club ...

Tracy Fullerton is head of the renowned games lab at the University of Southern California, and is on the Board of Directors for Square Enix, and Games for Change. For years, her book Game Design Workshop has taught pixel pushers that finding the fun is a process, not a vision. And her students include the makers of Journey, Threes!, and Outer Wilds, among others. Her new book is called The Well-Read Game, and she joins grokludo to talk about a deeper way of playing games, building on...

Wen You Ge, also known as Bearlike, leads the team working on Mechabellum, the premier 1v1 autobattler. These games give you NO control over the battle. It's all about setting up your troops beforehand, with smart positioning and synergies, and watching it play out. Autobattlers were catapulted to fame with Autochess, and its variants, such as DOTA Underlords, Teamfight Tactics. These games were compelling, but flawed. An overreliance on randomness meant sometimes you'd face the exact same o...

Chris Simon is a technologist who's given talks about AI, specifically LLMs, or Large Language Models such as ChatGPT. AI is going to be an increasingly big topic in games. From things like art generation, code generation, to chat moderation, to dynamic difficulty systems, and all the way to engineless games that use a neural network to generate images based on user input. And there are many more. So it's a topic we'll probably return to, but one of the biggest ways people are using L...

Minh Le, also known as Gooseman, is best known for creating the world-conquering Counter-Strike. It started out as a small Half-Life mod, and now sells out the largest stadiums around the world as one of the greatest esports of all time. In 2006, Gooseman left Valve to make Tactical Intervention. Since then, he's worked on Rust, Black Desert Online, and now he's got a new game, Alpha Response, marrying his traditional semi-realism with co-op PvE heavily inspired by Left 4 Dead. I never miss...

Raph Koster has helped forward our understanding of game design for decades. He's the author of A Theory of Fun, a must-read for game designers. He was lead designer on the pioneering MMO Ultima Online, and led the creative team on Star Wars Galaxies. Now he's back with a new MMO called Stars Reach, built on 3D cellular automata system that simulates everything in the galaxy. The game's not out yet, and already the stories emerging from this kind of simulation are hard to compare with...

Kirk Sigmon is an attorney at Banner Witcoff , and an expert in patent law. He joins us this week to make sense of the wild, and complicated situation in which Nintendo and The Pokemon Company are posturing towards US litigation against Pocketpair, the maker of Palworld. Litigation in Japan is already underway. In the process, Nintendo has secured patents for game mechanics that look a lot like what we've already been playing for the last 30+ years. There's patent activity relating to moun...

Aaron Drummond and Jim Sauer are associate professors at the University of Tasmania, and recently released a paper looking at loot box spending measured against distress, when normalising for disposable income. The two have studied a range of issues in games, such as the effects of violent games on aggression, and the impacts of gaming on learning. But when they started researching loot boxes, things were very different. Find Aaron and Jim's study here: https://royalsocietypublishing....

Leon Xiao is an Assistant Professor at the City University of Hong Kong. After doing his PhD in loot boxes, he's released papers charting the loot box regulation landscape, and measuring compliance. Coverage of his work has been picked up by mainstream media such as the BBC and the Guardian, and GamesIndustry.biz publishes his yearly loot box state of play report. Today Leon gives us a zoomed out view of loot box research. In the intro I mention Leon's thesis, which comprehensively covers ...

Ejnar Håkonsen has studied the light and dark sides of player manipulation. He’s designed matchmaking and pay-to-win systems himself, and he’s theorycrafted in pay-to-win games with top-ranking whale guilds, to understand the strategies they use. Years ago, he designed a multiplayer system that used manipulative practices for positive ends. It used commendations in kind of a genius way to reduce toxicity by weaponising a player’s ego against them. He recently posted a Reddit thread about it...

Rand Fishkin is an icon in the SEO space who recently started a game studio and is making a new indie game, Snack Bar at the End of the World. Rand’s open-sourced method for indie developers seeking investment is mainly about leveraging your network, whether large or small, to get the funds needed to make a game. It doesn’t matter if you have millionaire circles or just normal friends, school alumni, family, etc – the system aims to be adaptable to your situation. You can find these documen...

Maarten Denoo has been active in the Belgian gaming scene as an academic and journalist for years, releasing papers that cover loot boxes and the progress of policy around gambling in games. This episode covers the recent research around loot boxes, and gets a frontline view of Belgium's loot box ban, as well as uncovering a possible new avenue of attack: Consumer law. You can find out more about the GameAble project here: https://www.gameable.info/ 0:00 - Intro 0:52 - An overview of loot ...

Kotaku AU has closed. To me and many others, it held a special place in Australia's gaming history. So this is part memorial, part group therapy session, part insider discussion for everyone else's understanding, in which I've gathered former editors of the site to talk about its beginning, middle, and end. Mark Serrels and Alex Walker had the longest tenures as editor of Kotaku AU, and David Smith was editor during its final years. Seamus Byrne started as editor of Gizmodo, and later became...

Margaret Anderson became Director of the Australian Classification Board in 2013, a time when it still made opaque decisions and wasn’t prepared for the tidal wave of gaming content that would come in the following years. She talks to grokludo about declassifying the classifications as it were, and dealing with the multiple challenges that games created as a fast-moving technology that vastly outpaces the laws written to regulate it. On the way we cover Australia’s debate over whether or no...

Paul Tozour is saying exactly what the industry needs to hear right now. Backed with data from his 2015 study titled The Game Outcomes Project, he's fictionalised the data in his new book The Four Swords: A Parable of Leadership, Video Games, and Dead Dragons. Tozour goes through his lessons for studios, publishers, managers, and creatives, able to definitively describe what leads to a successful studio and point to the data that proves it. In this moment of post-largesse layoffs, these less...

Malcolm Ryan from Macquarie University speaks about his study that shows how suggestible we can be if a game's morality meter tries to nudge us in a certain direction... provided certain conditions are met beforehand. Even when players think they're ignoring the morality meter, the results say different! Read the study here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/15554120211017040 Play the game, The Great Fire, here: https://moralityplay.itch.io/the-great-fire Ryan et al's paper on...