grokludo

Bastiaan Olij leads XR development at the Godot engine, and is a member of the Godot foundation, which guides and works with its community of open source developers. In this episode we talk about Godot's governance and how it charts a path forward with its community, how it's dealing with the challenges of AI pull requests, and the bad-faith decompilers which are scaring devs away from sharing their games publicly. Timecodes: 00:00 - Intro 01:53 - Bastiaan's start on Godot 14:30 - Godot governance 19:40 - Terrain systems 21:20 - Guiding self-governance 23:00 - Godot affecting the market 29:10 - Asset store challenges 32:30 - Why GDScript? 34:45 - Technically impressive projects in Godot 36:35 - Steam's sloppy Next Fest 40:00 - Pull request slop 1:01:05 - Decompilers and scrapers 1:22:30 - VR challenges --------------------------------------------------------------------- Godot: https://godotengine.org/ Godot's VR Gamejam games: https://godotengine.org/article/godot-xr-update-oct2026/ Sydney Games Festival: https://sydneygamesfestival.org/ Every Game Talk Possible: https://everygametalkpossible.org/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 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

Show me five gamers, and I'll show you five different definitions of the word "mechanic." Benjamin Horn from the University of Hong Kong released a paper with four other academics, investigating the usefulness of a term with no agreed-upon meaning, and they point out that even the original MDA framework gives two vague definitions that are perhaps even contradictory. We discuss how we got to this place, in which all sides of the industry rely so heavily on a word that means nothing, and whether the word can be salvaged, or whether it's time to abandon it altogether. Timecodes: 00:00 - Intro 02:00 - What is a mechanic? 08:30 - The MDA framework 09:50 - Categorical terms 15:55 - Banning terms 18:00 - Talking about games is hard 26:00 - Abandon "mechanics"? 28:10 - The worst use of "mechanics" Ben's seen 30:50 - "Mechanics" in the esports realm 33:40 - FPS games as a study case 35:20 - The Witcher 3's mechanics 36:20 - Passion can interfere with game studies 38:20 - Games criticism and toxic positivity 45:25 - Ben's paper on Baldur's Gate 3 --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Unbearable Vacuity of Game Mechanics: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3815598.3815641 The MDA framework: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228884866_MDA_A_Formal_Approach_to_Game_Design_and_Game_Research Benjamin's paper on Baldur's Gate 3 and Goblins: https://gamescriticism.org/2025/12/03/horn-6-1/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 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

Seán Dagher is one of the main singers of sea shanties in games like Assassin's Creed: Black Flag, the indie hit Windrose, and more -- and is partly responsible for the wider modern resurgence in sea shanties. After curating and recording classic songs in some of the biggest pirate games, more recently he's composed original material for Black Flag Resynced, and started touring internationally, leading crowds in North America and Europe. Escapism, irreverence towards authority, seeking community... These are things that the gaming community and sea shanty lovers already had in common. But once games with sailing like Assassin's Creed: Black Flag or Windrose started including shanties, developers discovered a great way to fill the time sailing from point A to point B -- and many gamers found themselves listening to the music outside the game as well. Songs in this episode are used with Seán Dagher's permission. Timecodes: 00:00 - Intro 01:24 - Blow the Man Down by Seán Dagher 02:00 - Seán's history with sea shanties 13:29 - Bully in the Ally by Seán Dagher 14:50 - Working with Ubisoft and the shanty resurgence 23:55 - The Wellerman by Seán Dagher 24:33 - Working with the Windrose team 29:45 - Singing imperfectly on purpose 34:10 - Composing modern sea chanties 37:28 - Shallow Brown by Seán Dagher 38:22 - Curating and recreating old material 44:18 - Rolling Down to Old Maui by Seán Dagher 45:05 - A quiz on shanty terms --------------------------------------------------------------------- Follow Seán Dagher: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6uSR4KU19MLE_dpoZusPBQ Trobairitz: Poems of Women Troubadours: https://open.spotify.com/album/16lfH2He1pIByL88idXtIo --------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 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

Titanium Court is an intentionally bizarre, unique, and hard to describe game. It's best to go in not knowing anything -- but AP Thomson is here to talk about some of its themes, philosophy, and behind-the-scenes stories without getting into spoilers. Timecodes: 00:00 - Intro 02:00 - Describing Titanium Court 10:00 - okay 12:20 - Deciding what to explain 19:03 - The Reverse Punchline 23:17 - Is the day you run out of creativity the day you die? 23:43 - Fan theories 24:17 - Indirect storytelling and the desire to know 28:12 - The Potion of Liking Baseball 29:30 - Sports and War --------------------------------------------------------------------- Books talked about in this episode: Hour of the Star by Clarise Lispector 2666 by Roberto Bolaño Frankenstein by Mary Shelley The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef Selected Short Stories by Maxim Gorky --------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 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

Over 20 years ago, CCP Games released EVE Online, a massively multiplayer space game, promising huge fleet battles, and an open, player-controlled economy. But within months, that economy was headed for disaster. This week's guest is Ramin Shokrizade, who later wrote about recommending an economic intervention that saved EVE Online. That story was later picked up by evangelists for Georgist economic theory, these are the writings of Henry George, who mainly talked about land tax, and held up as an example of proof that Georgist theory is correct. This has become almost a piece of internet lore, where certain communities quote Ramin's recommendations as a success for Georgism. What I had never seen before, is Ramin's take on that. We'll get that take today, and talk the open economies games used to have, before they were controlled by publishers. Ramin has also written about the benefits of oxytocin, and dangers of excessive dopamine targetting, and I've actually been looking for someone to speak on this, especially because of some recent research which we'll get into later. Enjoy!

What do we talk about when we talk about 4X? We think about abstract systems, resource management, efficiency, growth... But what about all the invisible things that go along with eXploitation, and eXtermination? Mary Flanagan is a game designer, and academic, and the author of Playing Oppression: The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games. The book looks at the history of board games and how they encoded the values of the time and place they were in. From ancient games, through to the explosion of complex strategy systems and 4X. For those unfamiliar, 4X is a subgenre that typically involves large colonial empires. The 4 Xs are Explore, Expand, Exploit, and Exterminate. In the fantasy of the game, we play the decider, not just moving resources around for efficiency, but also deciding the fate of those crushed under the boot of empire. To better understand the other side of the story part of Mary's research involved sitting down and playing these games with descendants of the people who've been exploited and exterminated. 4X games are fun, I love them, they scratch that efficiency and optimisation part of my brain. This isn't about saying they're bad, or that players are incapable of separating games from life. It's just good to take a step back sometimes and analyse the underlying assumptions of things. And, a large part of our Western civilisation, and indeed its values, are built on the flawed concepts of terra nullius, might makes right, and always being ashamed of the last colonial project, while denying the current one. Mary joins us to talk about how these values are encoded in our games. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Find Mary's book, Playing Oppression, here: https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5547/Playing-OppressionThe-Legacy-of-Conquest-and Find Mary's games, including Monarch, here: https://resonym.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 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

Ross Scott is the face of the Stop Killing Games movement, which seeks to ensure games don't completely die when a developer or publisher ends support, but rather, there's an end of life plan in place that makes it reasonably playable -- after which, a compliant gamemaker has no more liability. Following a massive petition campaign in the EU, Ross recently spoke at an EU parliament hearing, in which many in the room were positive about the movement. It's possible that policy around not killing games will be included in the EU's upcoming Digital Fairness Act, expected to be formally proposed later this year. After that point, the EU parliament and Council can make amendments, and there's sure to be some industry lobbying. Ross Scott joins us this week to talk about the strategies of navigating EU politics, the discourse around the movement, and some of the more technical concerns, such as games that rely on middleware and 3rd party services, each with their own distribution licences. --------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 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

There's no doubt that the modern world is very different to the one we evolved to thrive in. But that mismatch might be more pronounced for the neurodivergent mind. Dr Clinton White has an upcoming book, Fast Mind, Slow World, which expands on the theory that at the group level, it was evolutionarily advantageous to have a small proportion of the group as neurodivergent. Whether that be ADHD, level 1 autistic, or whatever. But modern life has different demands. How do those with abnormal attention fare in the attention economy? That includes games and loot boxes, but also social media, and everything else. Clinton joins us today to talk about the ADHD brain, dopamine seeking, and more. --------------------------------------------------------------------- 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

Nikita Mikros is an indie developer that decided to focus on arcade games. And I don't mean arcade-style games on PC and console -- I mean physical arcade cabinets. His most famous game is undoubtedly Killer Queen, a 5-on-5 arcade cabinet with retro pixel art graphics, in which your bees have three win conditions to defeat the other team's bees. Killer Queen is a sensation, and it's been called the revival of arcade... It's only two dollars for all ten people to play at once, which has built a strong culture of people bringing in others. It's easy to shout a whole group. And it's spawned a dedicated esports scene as well. Nikita joins grokludo to talk about Killer Queen, game design in general, and some of the new projects he's working on.

Jon Peterson is the author of Playing at the World, a deep dive into tabletop gaming leading up to Dungeons & Dragons, which just released its 2nd edition. Jon is a fantastic source of knowledge on all things tabletop, and has personally traveled to several museums to see and translate wargaming publications dating as far back as the 1600s. I took the opportunity to quiz him about Kriegsspiel -- a wargame that Prussian officers used as a training tool in the 1800s. As Jon illustrates, it's more than just interesting history; Kriegsspiel is a giant whose shoulders support many modern gaming staples. --------------------------------------------------------------------- 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

Nick Ballou researches gaming habits and their effects on quality of life. He recently released a study with an unprecedented amount of data collected about gamers' play habits, and in addition to showing us his findings, the database is now open for anyone to use. Some of the main early lessons include a confirmation that time spent gaming has no bearing on quality of life -- nor does it affect quality of sleep. In terms of study participants, there was a high representation of gamers identifying as ADHD/Autistic -- echoing the estimate of of our previous guest, Tony Attwood, who speculated that the gaming community would have a higher representation than the general public. Timecodes: 00:00 - Intro 01:30 - Does time spent matter? 08:12 - Neurodivergence higher than expected 10:30 - Building trust with publishers 16:50 - Self-determination theory and games 20:20 - BANG (Basic Needs in Games) 30:00 - Gaming habits and demographics 32:20 - Cultural differences in datasets 35:00 - Gaming habits and sleep 41:20 - Future research, open data Find the Open Play study here: https://nballou.github.io/open-play-demographics/index-typst.pdf Nick's website: https://nickballou.com/ Nick's study on BANG: https://zenodo.org/records/18370608 --------------------------------------------------------------------- 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

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

**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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!