grokludo

Junglist

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VIDEO GAMES
UPDATED BIWEEKLY

grokludo is about understanding games. It's a snappy way to hear the latest research on game design, cognitive psychology, business in gaming, and policy & regulation.We'll speak to everyone at the intersection of all those fields -- developers, academics, policymakers, and community enthusiasts -- anyone with a story or an idea that can deepen our understanding of play.

12/15/2025

The Evolution of Play as Our Learning Superpower - Peter Gray | grokludo 20

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 psychology and neuroscience at Boston College. He's the author of the incredibly well-researched Free to Learn, as well as his Substack, Play Makes Us Human. Peter has spent decades on the question of why we play, and how a playful state of mind is kind of a learning superpower. He joins grokludo now to talk about our evolutionary drive to play, as well as how these ideas weren't taken seriously for almost a century, and how we can use that info in designing our lives. Find the book Free to Learn here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15843125-free-to-learn Peter Gray writes on Substack here: https://petergray.substack.com/ Timecodes: 00:00 - Intro 01:35 - Is fun just learning? 08:37 - Mammals have the most to learn 11:28 - From Karl Groos to modern times 19:10 - Hunter gather play vs agricultural groups 29:35 - The Bartle Matrix and competition 39:48 - The kids are alright 44:33 - Does social media change things? 47:15 - Should we design games for more modern compulsions? --------------------------------------------------------------------- Get grokludo in your inbox at grokludo.com, or catch it on the big podcast platforms! I always write a bit more on the grokludo website: https://grokludo.com/ YouTube: youtube.com/@TheJunglist YouTube Playlist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3cxb6pzUE9Z7PXjIVbmr5qiohoq5wTdo Follow on X: https://x.com/TheJunglist Follow on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/thejunglist.bsky.social Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/6GMbpa2aTZi8dBa0VVbsU1 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/grokludo/id1736667050

57 min
12/08/2025

The Joy and Stress of Gaming With Autism - Tony Attwood | grokludo 19

**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, specialising in Level 1 autism, formerly known as Asperger's Syndrome. Among other books, Attwood is the author of The Complete Guide to Asperger's Syndrome. This week, Attwood joins us to talk about how those with autism experience games, the positives as well as the dangers, and how we can better design habits and games around it. Timecodes: 00:00 - Intro 01:04 - Asperger's rolled into Autism 06:00 - The "lost generation" 07:35 - Girls and women harder to diagnose 09:38 - Media representations of autism 11:45 - Evolutionary advantages 15:00 - Emotion suppression 17:40 - Status, fame, and bullying 23:00 - Being manipulated by criminals 25:25 - Emotion regulation 28:30 - Gaming disorder 30:45 - Designing games to help people with autism 35:30 - Moderation & healthy habits 42:35 - Designing for high stress 45:25 - What Tony wished people knew --------------------------------------------------------------------- Get grokludo in your inbox at grokludo.com, or catch it on the big podcast platforms! I always write a bit more on the grokludo website: https://grokludo.com/ YouTube: youtube.com/@TheJunglist YouTube Playlist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3cxb6pzUE9Z7PXjIVbmr5qiohoq5wTdo Follow on X: https://x.com/TheJunglist Follow on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/thejunglist.bsky.social

51 min
12/01/2025

What the Core Elements of Game Design Teach Us - José Zagal | grokludo 18

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 this project to the psych ontology from computer science. Today, Jose joins us to talk about the Game Ontology Project, and the more recent research it has led to, around goals in games, and ludo narrative dissonance, which occurs when there is a conflict between gameplay and its narrative. Timecodes 00:00 - Intro 01:25 - History of the Game Ontology Project 11:05 - What does the ontology give us? 17:00 - Representational elements 23:48 - Game design is a bottomless pit 26:10 - Applying the ontology 30:45 - The GFI Framework and ludonarrative dissonance 46:45 - Solving the main example of ludonarrative dissonance 48:00 - The Nintendo Virtual Boy The Game Ontology Project: https://gameontology.com/index.php/Main_Page The MDA framework: https://users.cs.northwestern.edu/~hunicke/MDA.pdf The GFI framework: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/346426218_GFI_A_Formal_Approach_to_Narrative_Design_and_Game_Research Find the new book on the Nintendo Virtual Boy here: https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5781/Seeing-RedNintendo-s-Virtual-Boy --------------------------------------------------------------------- Get grokludo in your inbox at grokludo.com, or catch it on the big podcast platforms! I always write a bit more on the grokludo website: https://grokludo.com/ YouTube: youtube.com/@TheJunglist YouTube Playlist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3cxb6pzUE9Z7PXjIVbmr5qiohoq5wTdo Follow on X: https://x.com/TheJunglist Follow on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/thejunglist.bsky.social Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/6GMbpa2aTZi8dBa0VVbsU1 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/grokludo/id1736667050

49 min
11/24/2025

The Inconvenient Truths of 'Stop Killing Games' - Paul Kilduff-Taylor | grokludo 17

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 the complexities of end-of-life support. You can find Paul's recent blog post on Stop Killing Games here: https://modecollapse.substack.com/p/stop-killing-games-will-become-an Timecodes: 00:00 - Intro 01:28 - Remembering Frozen Synapse 05:35 - Stop Killing Games 10:44 - Govt regulation vs industry self-regulation 28:26 - How liable should publishers be 32:50 - Middleware solutions 41:00 - Can any legal language capture everything we need? 44:15 - Regulators in Australia 48:37 - Paul's hilarious press releases --------------------------------------------------------------------- Get grokludo in your inbox at grokludo.com, or catch it on the big podcast platforms! I always write a bit more on the grokludo website: https://grokludo.com/ YouTube: youtube.com/@TheJunglist YouTube Playlist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3cxb6pzUE9Z7PXjIVbmr5qiohoq5wTdo Follow on X: https://x.com/TheJunglist Follow on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/thejunglist.bsky.social Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/6GMbpa2aTZi8dBa0VVbsU1 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/grokludo/id1736667050

58 min
11/17/2025

The Game Club's Cheat Code for Community - Guy Blomberg and Shay P Leighton | grokludo 16

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 model, The Game Club sends members an interesting game every month with prompts, for people to meet up and discuss. So far, so normal, but behind it all is extensive research into loneliness and community building, and I had a few discussion prompts of my own, about how a hobby with automatic guild invites and elo matchmaking can ditch the mantra of "alone together", and simply be together. Timecodes: 00:00 - Intro 01:33 - Why don't we play together anymore? 03:52 - Our cognitive limits for friendships 09:35 - How important is it to meet in person? 11:30 - The health benefits of friendship 16:09 - What makes the friendships high quality 18:25 - We don't play the same games anymore 21:48 - The technical limitations of a game club 27:26 - The quiet part 30:15 - Articulating why you hate something 31:30 - Having tough conversations 37:09 - How male friendships differ 40:00 - How do we replace missing institutions? 44:22 - Size limits on chapters 45:56 - The AI companion space 50:30 - The next business venture 51:09 - Joining The Game Club

53 min
11/10/2025

How to Experience Games as Art - Tracy Fullerton | grokludo 15

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 things like reader-response theory, and arguing that it can not only be adapted to games, but in some ways, games are even more of a natural fit for a reading, than a book. Timecodes: 00:00 - Intro 01:07 - Why well "read"? 05:45 - The importance of journaling 09:36 - Games as art 18:12 - A new way of playing games 28:00 - What games are best for readings? 36:14 - What games have a variety of readings? 40:53 - Leaving out info to encourage interpretation 49:40 - Creating a suitable space to talk about games 58:21 - Advice for creating book clubs for games You can find The Well Read Game here: https://www.thewellreadgame.com/ —--------------------------------------------------------------------- Get grokludo in your inbox at grokludo.com, or catch it on the big podcast platforms! I always write a bit more on the grokludo website: https://grokludo.com/ YouTube: youtube.com/@TheJunglist YouTube Playlist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3cxb6pzUE9Z7PXjIVbmr5qiohoq5wTdo Follow on X: https://x.com/TheJunglist Follow on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/thejunglist.bsky.social Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/6GMbpa2aTZi8dBa0VVbsU1 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/grokludo/id1736667050

1h 2m
11/03/2025

Mechabellum Evolved Autobattlers, but One Problem Remains Unsolved – Wen You Ge | grokludo 14

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 opponent multiple times, with the exact same boards, but with different winners, due to the roll of a die. Mechabellum takes autobattlers in a more deterministic direction. It's balanced, skill-based, and competition-worthy. But that type of thing doesn't just happen. So today Bearlike talks about the interesting design problems they had to solve to move the genre forward, and one big problem they haven't solved. 00:00 - Intro 01:22 - Mahjong, Poker influences 08:30 - RnG in autobattlers 15:57 - Positional play vs numerical modifiers 17:10 - Add a ball 19:45 - The moment when it all came together 23:45 - Agency vs randomness 31:04 - How unit techs solved multiple problems 36:00 - Mechabellum's unsolved problem 42:30 - The purpose of buildings in Mechabellum 47:40 - How different elo levels respond to changes 50:09 - Battle Aces' big bet on micro 56:03 - Bearlike's music review —--------------------------------------------------------------------- Get grokludo in your inbox at grokludo.com, or catch it on the big podcast platforms! Grokludo website: https://grokludo.com/ YouTube: youtube.com/@TheJunglist YouTube Playlist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3cxb6pzUE9Z7PXjIVbmr5qiohoq5wTdo Follow on X: https://x.com/TheJunglist Follow on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/thejunglist.bsky.social Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/6GMbpa2aTZi8dBa0VVbsU1 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/grokludo/id1736667050 —--------------------------------------------------------------------- #gaming #mechabellum #bearlike

57 min
10/27/2025

LLMs in Games - Infinite Stories, or Infinite Hype? - Chris Simon | grokludo 13

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 LLMs is in story generation and dialogue. The idea here is that one could chat to an NPC indefinitely, or let a robotic Dungeon Master do all the work. Chris Simon says it's not so simple. And I'm kind of glad he's the first person on grokludo to talk about AI. Because just as many games and NPCs will use the enterprise models as a foundation, all our future AI chats will use this interview as a foundation, about the hidden costs of AI in games. Timecodes: 00:00 - Intro 01:45 - Epistemological statements 06:12 - Can LLMs tell infinite stories? 16:42 - Are locally hosted LLMs ethical? 18:00 - Harmful human reinforcement training 21:30 - Inherent biases in LLMs 24:45 - Jailbreaking - intentional and otherwise 30:00 - The Sycophancy Problem 33:10 - How biases could seep into games 39:40 - The silly and the tragic ways to break LLMs 42:00 - Human brains vs neural networks 48:48 - Who wants a regression to the mean? Follow Chris Simon: https://chrissimon.au/ https://bsky.app/profile/chrissimon.au https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrissimon-au/ grokludo website: https://grokludo.com/ YouTube: youtube.com/@TheJunglist YouTube Playlist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3cxb6pzUE9Z7PXjIVbmr5qiohoq5wTdo Follow on X: https://x.com/TheJunglist Follow on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/thejunglist.bsky.social

54 min

grokludo is about understanding games. It's a snappy way to hear the latest research on game design, cognitive psychology, business in gaming, and policy & regulation.We'll speak to everyone at the intersection of all those fields -- developers, academics, policymakers, and community enthusiasts -- anyone with a story or an idea that can deepen our understanding of play.

Creator

Junglist
Years Active

2024 - 2025
Episodes

20
Rating

Explicit
Copyright

© 2025 grokludo
Show Website

grokludo