grokludo

Junglist
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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.

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

    3D AGO

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

    NOV 3

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

    OCT 27

    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
  4. Creating Counter-Strike, Leaving Valve, & Starting From Zero - Minh Le | grokludo 12

    OCT 20

    Creating Counter-Strike, Leaving Valve, & Starting From Zero - Minh Le | grokludo 12

    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 a chance to talk to Goose, and since we've talked before about tracking the genealogy of game mechanics on this podcast, I also wanted to quiz him on the industry's trend towards static recoil patterns in gunplay, which Counter-Strike popularised. Timecodes: 00:00 - Intro 01:15 - Alpha Response 03:06 - Challenges in retaining players 06:39 - Stop Killing Games 11:31 - Taking inspiration from Left 4 Dead 17:18 - The style of game Gooseman likes to make 19:10 - Playing and watching modern CS 20:50 - FPS moving towards static recoil patterns 25:35 - Leaving Valve, making artistic leaps Alpha Response is in Early Access now on Steam, and you can get it now. Get grokludo in your inbox at grokludo.com, or catch it on the big podcast platforms!

    30 min
  5. Playing God with Galactic Cellular Automata in Stars Reach - Raph Koster | grokludo 11

    OCT 13

    Playing God with Galactic Cellular Automata in Stars Reach - Raph Koster | grokludo 11

    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 anything else. So strap in, we're going pretty deep into game design theory - that's what grokludo is for! - and in the second half, we cover what to expect from Stars Reach. Timecodes: 00:00 - Intro 01:05 - Most games are copies of others 02:58 - What videogame designers can learn from board games 06:18 - Separating mechanics from aesthetics in policymaking 13:00 - Different kinds of randomness 16:05 - Kriegsspiel, Ur, and other early games 25:50 - Do modern games satisfy modern compulsions? 31:20 - Games criticism focusing on aesthetics 34:55 - The art game movement of the early 2000s 39:15 - Using ludo-narrative dissonance as a tool 43:20 - The Pascal's Wager in A Theory of Fun 47:20 - Don't get Junglist started on Dark Souls 50:15 - Do game design lessons line up with cognitive psychology? 56:00 - Studying government styles for MMO design 59:40 - The "designer's dream game" trope 1:05:50 - Stars Reach's cellular automata system 1:13:13 - Sustainability despite player terraforming 1:18:30 - Solving the problems of biology 1:21:50 - Terraforming and PvP 1:24:20 - Scaling the galaxy with adaptable sectors 1:27:45 - The dangers of fire and water A Theory of Fun: https://www.theoryoffun.com/ Stars Reach: https://starsreach.com/ Sign up at grokludo.com to skip the algorithm, or catch it on Apple and Spotify podcasts!

    1h 32m
  6. Owning Game Mechanics? Making Sense of Nintendo's Patents - Kirk Sigmon | grokludo 10

    OCT 6

    Owning Game Mechanics? Making Sense of Nintendo's Patents - Kirk Sigmon | grokludo 10

    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 mounts and the quick-switching of mounts. There are patents about throwing an object to capture a character. And very recently, a new patent was secured that covers the summoning of a character. This is a complicated and niche field, so we first cover some basics of patent law, before getting into the dirty details of what's been called "by far the most aggressive patent enforcement any game maker ever attempted against a rival." 00:00 - Intro 01:42 - What good patent law looks like in games 05:58 - How often do mechanics get patented? 07:50 - Nintendo pursuing patents after Palworld's release 14:00 - Reading patent claims is torture 16:34 - Nintendo curving patents towards litigation 23:22 - Patenting a summoning mechanic 26:35 - Limited resources at the patent office 30:53 - Where has patent law done well, and where poorly? 33:30 - The Inter Partes Review system 37:24 - Why not pursue litigation on the art style instead? 41:48 - Attack on the mod space as "prior art" Subscribe here or on grokludo.com to get episodes in your inbox!

    47 min
  7. Measuring Distress Against Loot Box Spend - Aaron Drummond and Jim Sauer | grokludo 9

    SEP 29

    Measuring Distress Against Loot Box Spend - Aaron Drummond and Jim Sauer | grokludo 9

    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.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.231264 Timecodes: 00:00 - Intro 00:46 - Do loot boxes cause distress? 04:16 - Skinner box systems in games 12:00 - Disposable income and "whales" 18:39 - Why loot box research isn't just a moral panic 26:24 - The limitations of current research 31:47 - Violent games blamed regularly in killings 35:51 - Intrinsic and extrinsic rewards intertwined 38:40 - Final words Thank you for watching and I hope you enjoy! You can support grokludo and get updates in your inbox at grokludo.com!

    42 min
  8. The Loot Box Lab Mapping Policy vs Practice - Leon Xiao | grokludo 8

    SEP 22

    The Loot Box Lab Mapping Policy vs Practice - Leon Xiao | grokludo 8

    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 loot box regulation and compliance. You can find that here: https://osf.io/preprints/thesiscommons/af8ev_v1 The last Loot Box State of Play can be found here - https://www.gamesindustry.biz/loot-box-state-of-play-2024-another-trip-around-the-world-of-regulation Timecodes: 00:00 - Intro 00:48 - Leon Xiao's program 03:47 - Gaming Disorder and older adults 07:30 - What do we know for sure about loot boxes? 11:30 - Loot box movements to be aware of in 2025 18:10 - Low compliance to industry self-regulation 32:43 - Gambling aesthetics vs gambling mechanics 50:26 - "The science isn't in yet" 56:20 - What could researchers do with industry data? 1:04:42 - Comically obtuse disclosure of loot box odds 1:08:32 - Should we all complain to regulators? Thank you all! Make sure to subscribe here and at grokludo.com for updates!

    1h 13m
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About

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.

Information

  • Creator
    Junglist
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2025
  • Episodes
    15
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2025 grokludo
  • Show Website
    grokludo

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