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
October 06, 2025
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,
September 29, 2025
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
September 22, 2025
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
August 20, 2025
Sometimes our worlds collide in unexpected ways. Like many folks from the games industry, I've had to pivot away from games work to pay the bills – and since 2016, one of those new upskilling directions has been search engine optimisation (SEO). One of the most influential figures in
April 11, 2025
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
October 30, 2024
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
September 23, 2024
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
July 18, 2024
Paul Tozour is saying exactly what the industry needs to hear right now. After a 2023 that saw both revenue growth and record layoffs – not to mention an unusual number of critically acclaimed games – we're left wondering how we can simultaneously have the best and worst year for
April 15, 2024
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
March 17, 2024
This is grokludo, a brand new podcast by me, Jeremy Ray, that's just getting started. Grokludo is about anything that helps us understand games. It'll primarily interview academics about the latest research coming out, but will also cover design ideas with developers, business disruption, and even
March 17, 2024