Fun Games with Serious People Colleen Macklin

We play Hey Robot!, a game where you try to get your smart speaker to say a specific word. Which, as you might imagine, is much more difficult (and hilarious) than you might think. My guests are two of Hey Robot’s creators, Frank and Hilary Lantz, and Brooklyn-based programmer and artist Nicole He. Oh, and Alexa. The question we ask and try to answer in this episode is: “Alexa: what is intelligence?” Listen to find out what Alexa (and Nicole and Frank and Hilary) think. (filmed and recorded April 2020)

 

Listen to the full episode:























Additional Content

Unedited footage from our Hey Robot! play session:











































Guests













Nicole He

Nicole He is a programmer and artist based in Brooklyn, New York, currently making videogames, including the acclaimed Enhance.Computer and an upcoming sci-fi voice-controlled game with the National Film Board of Canada. She has worked as a creative technologist at Google Creative Lab, an outreach lead at Kickstarter, and an adjunct faculty member at ITP at NYU, where she received her Master’s degree. Nicole’s work has been featured in places such as Wired, BBC, The Outline, and The New York Times.











Frank Lantz

Frank Lantz is the Director of the NYU Game Center. He is a game designer and the co-founder of Area/Code Games. He’s 1/4 of the family game company Everybody House Games, best known for Hey Robot! and a class="notion-link-token notion-enable-hover" href="https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-token-index="9" data-reactroot...

As we were wrapping up this season, I reached out to some of my earliest guests to record some extra bits for their episodes – and one of those people was Laine Nooney, from the episode: Is Untitled Goose Game Queer? While I meant to talk with Laine about some topics that came up during the Untitled Goose Game Episode, we tumbled into a really interesting conversation about Animal Crossing – the game that defines the quarantine experience for so many people. While everyone was confined to their apartments and homes, in Animal Crossing, we could visit each others’ islands. I visited Laine via Zoom to talk about how Animal Crossing fits into game history and this specific moment. (filmed and recorded April 2020)

 

Listen to the full episode:

 





















































Guest













Laine Nooney

   Laine Nooney  is an Assistant Professor of Media Industries at New York University, specializing in historical, cultural, and economic analysis of the video game and computer industries. Her research has been featured in popular venues such as The Atlantic,Flash Forward Podcast,The Internet History Podcast, andNPR, as well as academic journals such asGame Studies,The American Journal of Play, and Journal of Visual Culture .

In this episode of Fun Games with Serious People, I play the charmingly ridiculous game Alfonso’s Bowling Challenge  with writer, comedian and entrepreneur Rob Dubbin. We discuss Rob’s writing days for the Steven Colbert Show and his recent entrepreneurial turn with his company Scripto . There’s also a great story about a goat in New York City. Tune in as we try to answer the question: “how does funny work?” (filmed and recorded February 2020)

 

Listen to the full episode:

 























Additional Content

 

Unedited footage from our play session:











































Guest













Rob Dubbin

Rob Dubbin is CEO and co-founder with Stephen Colbert of Scripto, where they make software for TV shows. Previously Rob wrote for TV on The Colbert Report and The Late Show. He has contributed to Botnik Studios, a comedic hive mind of humans and machines, and has written articles for the New Yorker, GQ, and more. In his spare time, he works on games and bots. He recently wrote a very funny tweet about the Dolly Parton classic Jolene.































Show Notes

Alfonso’s Bowling Challenge is by kittenm4ster

Colleen Macklin is the host of Fun Games with Serious People

Colin Howarth is our Editor and Producer

Yiqin Ma, is our Videographer

Our theme is “Rainbow” by Chad Crouch

Fun Games with Serious People is made possible through a grant from The New Schooland Parsons School of Design. 

Thanks for listening!

We play Untitled Goose Game, a game where you play… a goose! But the question I have is for my special guests, media theorist Bonnie Ruberg and historian Laine Nooney is, is Untitled Goose Game Queer? Listen to find out! (filmed and recorded October 2019)

 

Listen to the full episode:

 





















Additional Content

Unedited footage from our Untitled Goose Game play session:









*Special Follow up interview with Bonnie Ruberg*

A few months after recording this episode, Bonnie and I had a chance to catch up and discuss new thoughts in queerness and games, as well as the role of videogames in a post-pandemic era. 



























































Guests









 









Bonnie Ruberg

Bonnie (Bo) Ruberg , Ph.D. is an assistant professor of digital games and interactive media in the Department of Informaticsat the University of California, Irvine. They are also core faculty in the UC IrvineProgram in Visual Studies. Bo’s research explores sexuality and gender in digital media and digital cultures, with a focus on LGBTQ issues and video games. They are the author of The Queer Games Avant-Garde,Video Games Have Always Been Queer, the co-editor of Queer Game Studies, and the co-founder and co-organizer of the annual Queerness and Games Conference.











Laine Nooney

Laine Nooney is an Assistant Professor of Media Industries at New York University, specializing in historical, cultural, and economic analysis of the video game and computer industries. Her research has been featured in popular venues such as The Atlantic, Flash Forward Podcast, The Internet History Podcast, and a href="https://www.marketplace.org/2013/03/06/tech/who-tech/roberta-williams-mother-computer-vide...

Did you know that Monopoly had its origins in anti-monopolism? It’s called “The Landlord’s Game”, and activist game designer Elizabeth Magie created it in 1904 to teach the economic philosophies of Henry George. In this episode, we’ll explore the secret history of Monopoly with Mary Pilon, a journalist who started writing what she thought would be a simple story, but instead found a forgotten socialist movement, a feminist game designer, a lefty professor, and some punk rock quakers. And, most importantly, we’ll play The Landlord’s Game with special guests Finn Brunton and Alexander King! (filmed and recorded December, 2019)

 

Listen to the full episode:

 























Additional Content

 

Unedited footage from our Landlord’s Game play session:











































Guests













Mary Pilon

Mary Pilon is the author of The Monopolists, a New York Times bestseller about the history of the board game Monopoly and The Kevin Show. She is also co-author of the audio series “Twisted: The Story of Larry Nassar and the Women Who Took Him Down.” Her work, chiefly about sports, business, and politics, regularly appears in the New Yorker, Esquire, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Vice, New York, and The New York Times, among other publications. She also appears on a variety of TV and radio programs and worked as a producer for NBC Sports at the 2016 Rio Olympics. Her latest book is Losers: Dispatches from the Other Side of the Scoreboard.











Finn Brunton

Finn Brunton is an Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU and the author of Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Technologists, and Utopians Who Created Cryptocurrency, Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet, and co-author of Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest with Helen Nissenbaum, and Communication with Mercedes Bunz and Paula Bialski, along with numerous articles and papers.











Alexander King

Alexander King is a game designer, analyst and consultant. His work centers on data-driven design and simulation, and his work has been featured in festivals like ALT.CTRL.GDC and IndieCade. Before working in games, Alexander was an analytics consultant working in finance and ecommerce, but the economies he models now are largely fictional ones. He has a BA in Economic History from the University of Pennsylvania and an MFA in Game Design from the NYU Game Center.





























Show Notes

We played with a replica of The Landlord’s Game by Thomas Forsyth

Welcome to Fun Games with Serious People: A podcast where we play fun games and talk about serious stuff, like economics, or artificial intelligence, or queer theory. I’m your host, Colleen Macklin, and I’m a game designer and professor at Parsons School of Design in NYC. I’m interested in how we learn to navigate the systems underlying games, and what we can learn about the world and each other through gameplay. In each episode we play a game and chat while playing, trying to unlock secrets of the universe, or answer more mundane questions like, ” what is intelligence? ” or ” how do jokes work? ” Most of the episodes have videos of gameplay, which you can check out here on the site. I hope you enjoy this little series! –Colleen

Listen to the season intro:

 

























































Colleen Macklin

Colleen Macklin is a game designer, an Associate Professor in the school of Art, Media and Technology at Parsons School of Design and founder and co-director of PETLab (Prototyping Education and Technology Lab), a research lab that develops games for experimental learning and social engagement. She is a member of the game design collective Local No. 12, known for Dear Reader and The Metagame. She is co-author (with John Sharp) of the books Games, Design and Play: A detailed look at iterative game design and Iterate: Ten Lessons in Design and Failure











Colin Howarth

Colin Howarth is a media producer, currently working for Harvard Business Review and WaitWhat, the creator of podcast hits such as Masters of Scale and Meditative Story. Colin oversees the scheduling, reviewing, and publishing for Harvard Business Review’s “HBR Presents podcast network”, which he helped launch in 2019.











Yiqin Ma

Yiqin Ma is a videographer and user experience designer. She recently obtained her masters degree in Design and Technology at Parsons School of Design. 





























Show Notes

Fun Games with Serious People was recorded in late 2019 and early 2020 (pre and post-pandemic). 

Colleen Macklin is the host of Fun Games with Serious People

Colin Howarth is our Editor and Producer

Yiqin Ma, is our Videographer

Our theme is “Rainbow” by Chad Crouch

Our logo is by Renee Zalles

Fun Games with Serious People is made possible through a grant from The New Schooland Parsons School of Design. 

Thanks for listening!