Why do we play? Not only that – why do we play more than any other animal, and for longer? Well into adulthood, in fact? 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
December 15, 2025
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. Symptoms disappear. In the words of this week's guest, "often when you
December 08, 2025
What can we learn from breaking down game design to its core elements? It's a process every science eventually tackles – 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. But would a
December 01, 2025
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 - and how - publishers should end support for their games. At what point can access to a game you've "bought" be
November 24, 2025
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
November 17, 2025
In 2007, while at E3, the question "are games art?" was one of the hot discussion topics. Interviewing for ABC's Good Game, we asked developers on the show floor what they thought, and one of the most concise and thoughtful answers came from Tracy Fullerton: "
November 10, 2025
Wen You Ge, also known as Bearlike, leads the team working on Mechabellum, which I've routinely called the best autobattler since it hit Early Access years ago. Autobattlers give you no control over the battle. It's all about setting up your troops beforehand with smart positioning
November 03, 2025
Chris Simon is a technologist who's given talks about AI – specifically LLMs, or Large Language Models such as ChatGPT. He's best known for calling it a hype-fueled dumpster fire. Despite the spicy title of his talk above, his views around AI are quite nuanced. After researching
October 27, 2025
If Counter-Strike were made today, would it rise to the same heights? 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
October 20, 2025
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
October 13, 2025
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