Show me five gamers, and I'll show you five different definitions of the word "mechanic." The term sounds precise, but isn't – which may cause problems as it finds its way into classrooms, courtrooms, and policy discussions. Everyone thinks they have a good handle on it, until they zoom in and discover we've had different meanings all along. I've had the pleasure of seeing this phenomenon play out multiple times in the lead-up to this episode. Mentioning a discussion of "mechanics" invites definitions from friends. One explicitly allows for it to mean "resources." Another explicitly rejects that. In the wild, we see it used for anything from rules, to systems, to narrative elements, to genres, and more. 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 if it's time to abandon it altogether. After his conference on "mechanics" as a term, Benjamin Horn had the exact same experience as I've had in the last couple of days. People approach and say "But _of course_ mechanics means X," where X is the polar opposite of the last definition you heard. Even among those who try to stick to the MDA framework's original meaning, it's remarkable how much we differ, and how much we lean on the term despite that. This could be a fun experiment to run yourself. Ask your gamer friends, your developer friends, your academic friends, your industry friends... How many definitions can you uncover? Can you catch 'em all? More importantly, what do we do with a word that is shown to be too vague for precise communication? The Most Misunderstood Term in Gaming - Benjamin Horn | grokludo 30Podcast Episode · grokludo · September 8 · 48mApple Podcasts

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, he was asked to compose original material for Black Flag Resynced. He also started touring internationally, leading crowds in North America and Europe who find a sense of community in these generations-old work songs. 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 looking forward to the downtime in their action game, and loading up the music in the real world. In this episode, Seán talks about the life of a Shanty Man, singing in pubs to welcoming and not-so-welcoming crowds, and how teaming up with the Assassin's Creed franchise made gaming the most effective discovery vector for sea shanties. Having not played Black Flag, I first heard Seán's work in Windrose, a pirate game which allows the player to press a button to start the crew singing. It's fantastic for pacing – after a period of questing, there's some downtime to just enjoy the music. Sea of Thieves had its own solution to this - let the players play instruments together - but Windrose often demands that you pay careful attention at the helm, threading a delicate path through the vision ranges of high level enemy ships. In Windrose, it's best to just let Seán handle the music. A circle of friends I play with had made a makeshift version of this in Valheim, a Viking-themed precursor to Windrose. Crucially, Valheim doesn't allow you to use portals while carrying valuable metals – one of many aspects that makes it more brutal than similar games. When you venture out for iron, you load it up on your ship and sail it back, hoping a sea monster doesn't ruin your day. We'd load some Youtube sea shanties in Discord and listen together. Perhaps I had heard Seán Dagher's music earlier than I thought? Songs in this episode are used with Seán Dagher's permission. Enjoy!

Titanium Court is an intentionally bizarre, unique, and hard to describe game. It's best to go in not knowing anything – but creator AP Thomson joins grokludo to talk about some of its themes, philosophy, and behind-the-scenes stories without getting into spoilers. It's a hard game to talk about, and not just due to its eccentricity. Before release, Thomson and the game's publisher Fellow Traveller found that players enjoyed the game more if they weren't even told what genre it was in. Fair warning: While we avoid spoilers in this episode (and in this post), we do talk about the themes and thought processes behind Titanium Court. "When I pitched it to them, the elevator pitch or one-sentence pitch that I gave was that it was match-three tower defence for people who like to read," says Thomson. "We eventually determined that it's the type of game that if you just go in without knowing a single thing about it, it kind of enhances the experience." When I first played it, I bounced off it after a five hour session, thinking it was fun and excessively bizarre, a collection of seemingly disparate elements with no clear through-line. The type of thing only an individual can create, and a _particular_ one at that, because who else would jam together match three, beach rock, cat wailing, tower defence, sports motifs, Shakespeare, and visual novels? Only a lived life contains puzzle pieces so random, yet so precise. A phrase came to mind, heard from another indie developer: "It's indie AF." Titanium Court is certainly indie AF, and after two decades of reviewing dudebro shooters, one comes to appreciate the avant-garde. But would I recommend it to others? To those who hadn't had every genre wear out its welcome in a conga line of FIFAs and CoDs, until the only oasis of new ideas was the indie space? Life happened for a few days, and I (thankfully) found time to return to the faerie court. I passed a certain cusp, and walked away recommending it to all my friends, fully converted. It answered a question for me. The hype around this game isn't _just_ about its weirdness, despite Thomson and Fellow Traveller embracing that angle. That doesn't mean it'll be everyone's cup of tea. But is there a method to the madness? Yes. I hope you enjoy the episode!

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 on GameDeveloper – back when it was still Gamasutra – about recommending some economic interventions that would save EVE Online. His story was later picked up by evangelists for Georgist economic theory – the writings of Henry George, who mainly talked about land tax – and held up as a proof that Georgist theory is correct. I've watched this nugget of history grow into a piece of internet lore in certain communities. Rationalists, Georgists, and those at the intersection of game design and economics, building a narrative of the game economist who independently arrived at the perfect Georgist solution in a massive virtual world. And what's more, it worked! One thing was missing from all this: Ramin's take on it. We'll get that take today, and talk about the open economies games used to have, before they were dominated by big players like Goldman Sachs, and later the game publishers themselves. Ramin has also written about the benefits of oxytocin, and the dangers of excessive dopamine targeting. We dive into why he believes the attention economy arms race will end poorly for any business model depending wholly on dopamine. The way out? Target oxytocin instead. It's possible this need for oxytocin contributes to the recent rise in "cozy" games, but there are plenty of potential contributors. With so much evil stuff happening in real life, the desire to fill one's media with people being kind to each other is understandable. There's also been some especially interesting research on dopamine and oxytocin in recent years, and oxytocin targeting is probably a topic we'll return to. For now, I hope you enjoy, and have a great week!

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 attached to 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 their time and place – 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 four 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 imperial boot. To better understand the other side of that 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 systems we engage with. 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. It can be a bit of a "what is water?" moment, when we examine the assumptions we've built our belief systems on. But if you look for it, you'll notice it everywhere – how the abstractions of modern life conceal dehumanisation. Maybe it can't be any other way? Maybe when trying to understand complex systems like an economy, our simplified abstractions are still cognitively challenging despite the tiny insights they carry, and adding a morality element makes it unworkably hard. In such situations, I think it's okay to examine these systems and acknowledge what they are while making use of them – though as Mary shows in her book, examples in the board game space range from _amoral_ to _immoral_. A striking aspect of the history of these board games is how utterly similar they were for hundreds of years. The Goose Game involved a track full of different squares, and players would roll a die to see where they landed – not unlike today's Monopoly. This format was repurposed countless times with different themes and narratives. With my game designer's hat on, and an intoxicating dose of hindsight, it's astounding to me how long it took for games to innovate past the "track game" format. But that was what a "board game" was back then. What is water? So what's our version of that? Never mind what we'll evolve into, what about what we're evolving out of – our water? I think Mary captures a piece of that in her book, and she talks about the difficult tasks of not just changing aesthetics, but inventing new mechanics and systems. It's easy to see how territorial domination maps out neatly onto the design of a board game or 4X. The play space is simply a shrunken version of changing borders in real life. The systems are simplified resource exchanges and combats. But we can also look to real life for different systems that can be modelled, and given the game design treatment. Ideas like the commons, which Mary incorporated into her game Monarch – and to be fair, board games experiment more often with these competitive/cooperative hybrids than digital games. I hope you enjoy this episode, and thank you for supporting grokludo!

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, enters an end-of-life plan 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 third-party services, each with their own distribution licences. Our last episode discussing Stop Killing Games featured Paul Kilduff-Taylor, who voiced concerns about large-scale regulation that might inadvertently, and disproportionately, hurt indies. He was also skeptical of anyone's ability to craft a legalese that could encompass the myriad architectures of modern games without ultimately harming good-faith developers who just want their games to be played. Such legislative language must be both broad and precise – at once a sledgehammer and a scalpel that targets negligent or bad-faith gamemakers that promise the world in the marketing phase, and hit the escape button once it's clear they won't be the next big hero shooter. There are more and more of these games. The Concords, the Anthems, the Highguards. The Lawbreakers, The Crews, the Supervives, and the Skull and Bones'. Some of them offer refunds to early buyers, some don't. I put these concerns to Ross, and he was kind enough to stay for a while so we could go quite in-depth. Many existing games are already compliant, and others will take some figuring out – but crucially, the movement isn't hoping to apply the legislation retroactively. In terms of a cutoff date, we're potentially looking at 2030 or beyond, which gives us plenty of time to implement new best practices. Ross also outlined the multiple paths to victory that the Stop Killing Games movement currently has, and the picture he paints is positive. Perhaps one day I'll fulfill my dream of hosting a local Battlerite server. A guy can dream. I hope you all enjoy this episode, and thank you for subscribing to grokludo!

We didn't evolve for all of this. The modern world is very different to the one we evolved to compete and 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. "We haven't had nearly enough generations to adapt to the modern world," he says. 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. This week. Clinton and I talk about evolutionary advantages and disadvantages of neurodivergence, the misunderstood role of dopamine, variable reward schedules and the appeal of randomness, and how those with ADHD can be more vulnerable to gambling-like systems in games. I hope you enjoy, and have a great week!

Imagine approaching an arcade venue with the following pitch. You've got a machine that takes up the space of seven arcade cabinets. It's five vs five – and that's the newer, scaled-down version – with retro pixel art graphics, and there's a moderate learning curve. "How much to play?" the proprietor asks. You say it'll be the cheapest machine in the room. Nikita Mikros and Josh DeBonis made that pitch every time they sold a Killer Queen cabinet, and while it seems like something owners might balk at, the game has been a sensation in the US. Some have even called it an arcade revival. When I tried it in San Francisco, I was warned – "People are _obsessed_ with this game." But after returning to Sydney, I had to admire its success from afar. One of the downsides to arcade games is some markets are hard to get a foothold in. Here in Australia, what passes for an "arcade" these days is row after row of gacha machines and rigged carnival games, with a couple of token 90s beat-em-ups in the corner. Mikros says this is par for the course, and those games are just for the dads – the industry calls them "the dad games." This is why Killer Queen's success actually springs out of adult venues like pubs, bowling alleys, and axe throwing joints selling alcohol – the arcade games just need to bring people in, and money is made on drinks. Odd, isn't it, that pubs there have _less_ gambling than the "family friendly" spots? Bringing people in is something Killer Queen proved to be very good at. It's an eye-catcher, this mammoth machine with crowds around it, and people want to poke their head in to see what the fuss is about. At $2 per game (the _whole_ game, not each player) it's easy to try. Friends are made. Communities are established. There's even a dedicated competitive scene. All of a sudden, this success story doesn't seem counterintuitive. It seems brilliant. Nikita Mikros joins grokludo to talk about making arcade-only games in a world that just wants us doomscrolling, as well as the challenges Killer Queen had when Covid hit, and he also gives us a sneak peek at the new games he's working on. I hope you enjoy it, and thank you all so much for supporting grokludo!

Jon Peterson is the author of Playing at the World, a deep dive into historical tabletop games leading up to Dungeons & Dragons, which just released its 2nd Edition. Jon is a fantastic source of knowledge on all things tabletop, and has travelled to several European museums to 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. Translating as "war game," Kriegsspiel has had many versions over the centuries, as it evolved out of Chess and slowly took on more realistic, simulation-like properties. Families would concoct their own rules, bit by bit edging closer to the D&Ds, Warhammers, and XCOMs we'd recognise today. As Jon illustrates, it's more than just interesting history; Kriegsspiel is a giant whose shoulders support many modern gaming staples. And not only did the Prussians enjoy it recreationally, its mandate to be used in training seems to coincide with a period of Prussian dominance on the battlefield, leading other military powers to develop their own kriegsspiels. Today, of course, every modern military runs simulations and wargames. It's not only a way to manage risk and learn, but also to increase cohesion with allies. But the notion of combining random outcomes with empirically derived statistical tables goes back to one particular version of Kriegsspiel, and is perhaps the most important leap in the genre. I hope you enjoy this episode, and thank you for supporting grokludo!

Nick Ballou researches gaming habits and their effects on quality of life. He recently released a study with an unprecedented amount of data collected on gamers' play habits, and in addition to showing us his findings, the database is now open for anyone to use. Crucially, this study used on-device software to measure gaming habits. This differs from most studies in this field, which rely on self-reporting from participants (and all the human/memory biases that come with that). As Ballou mentions, this new data shouldn't be thought of as a pure source of truth. It has its own biases – but the discrepancies between what was recorded and what was self-reported is a story in itself. 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**. Another emerging story is that of neurodivergence within the gaming community. The main study included 2,000 participants, out of which 362 identified as autistic and 501 as having ADHD. That's a high representation, while it's possible there's some unintentional selection (Do neurodivergent people frequent the online places where participants were recruited? Are neurodivergent people more willing to participate in a study like this?) I'm inclined to believe this echoes the thoughts of Dr Tony Attwood in a previous episode. Attwood said the representation of autistic people in the general population is around 1 in 36, but speculated that within the gaming community it was much higher. This study, while not confirmation, suggests that proportion could be as high as 6.5 in 36. There will be a steady release of findings from this study over the year, and Ballou is hoping other people will join in. Academics, data scientists, citizen journalists, or anyone simply curious, can use the data freely. I hope you enjoy, and here's to the year ahead full of great grokludo chats!

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 over fun. The theory (spoiler!) 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 blog, 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 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. Reading Gray's book, and in this conversation, I was introduced to German philosopher Karl Groos, who published a lot of these ideas at the start of the 20th century. His evolutionary ideas around animal play were embraced, while the same ideas around humans were dismissed – largely forgotten until the field of evolutionary psychology flourished a century later. "[Groos'] book was actually panned when it first came out," says Gray. "They had this idea you had to explain things in terms of causal mechanisms, you can't explain behaviour in terms of its effect. "Well of course, the whole Darwinian approach is to explain the evolution of behaviour in terms of its effect, these came about because of the effects they have. But that way of thinking was totally foreign, and was thought of as unscientific." Later in the episode I show Gray the Bartle Matrix and get his take on the overlap of player types and evolutionary drives. Stick around till the end for the best possible argument a kid can give their parent for playing fast-paced action games. That's also our last episode of the year! I hope you've enjoyed it – expect grokludo to be back in February, and there are already some great guests lined up. In the meantime, look out for a mid-break post in which I'm planning to ask for feedback. The hope is to generate an online form so anyone can give feedback anonymously. I've already got some ideas for improvements in 2026, but I want your ideas too! Have a great break!

**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 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 of gaming as well as the dangers, and how we can better design habits and games around it. There's some good value here for: * Parents who want to better understand the gaming habits of their autistic child * Anyone autistic or borderline who wants to understand themselves better * Game makers who want to learn about designing for those with autism, as well as improving general accessibility * Schoolteachers, friends, and anyone else with someone autistic in their lives While the official prevalence for people with autism in the general population is 1 in 36, Attwood estimates it's higher within the gaming sphere. "There's something about autism and computer gaming that go really well together," says Attwood. Along with insights into how people with autism experience games, this interview also has some advice for managing the hobby. While there are some enormous benefits, there are also things to watch out for, such as emotion regulation. "Your mind is so focused on the game, it basically suppresses your anxiety or depression," Attwood says. "Now the problem is, for a while, you are detached from your emotional state. But when you switch off the game, pew! It's been suppressed, but not resolved... "How am I going to cope with my deluge of anxiety which now floods my mind?" I hope you enjoy this episode, and have a great week!

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 "periodic table of game design" be feasible? Would it be ever-changing, as newer forms of interaction are discovered? 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. Rather than some of the "hard" sciences listed above, Jose more readily compares this project to the psych ontology found in computer science. The amount of formal reasoning you can do with it doesn't match that of, say, prime numbers – but Zagal says it has helped designers think about games in a new way, as well as building a common vocabulary in teams that otherwise might be talking past each other. Some of the biggest benefits have been found in external fields that can learn from game design – architecture for example, or motivation in business (without using tacky gamification). That, too, resembles some of the hard sciences. The benefits aren't always known. The study of non-Euclidean geometry would unexpectedly support Einstein much later, just as breaking down symmetries would support future particle physics. Sometimes it's impossible to predict the practical applications. Today, Zagal joins us to talk about the Game Ontology Project, and the more recent research it has led to around goals in games, and ludonarrative dissonance, which occurs when there is a conflict between gameplay and its narrative. He has some interesting points about situations when the game's supported goals don't line up with the player's interpretation of the goals, which can be a fun game design space to play in. Sometimes this is intentional (as in Undertale), and sometimes not. When intentional, it can be a great moment when the player discovers there's actually a different, perhaps hidden, way to play the game. "I think that's a really interesting area of game design, which is players discovering goals which are supported by the game," says Zagal. Though I wonder, especially in the era of social media, if this might require restraint. Running a marketing campaign without spoiling entire ways of playing a game is its own challenge. Excluding those gameplay styles from marketing material is one thing, but how does one prevent previewers from spoiling that "Aha" moment, in the same way they would avoid a story or puzzle spoiler? As usual, I hope you enjoy the episode, and thanks for supporting grokludo!

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 revoked? The Stop Killing Games movement aims to answer this by imposing legal liability on publishers, and though the details are vague, it's starting to be taken seriously by the UK and the EU. Much like the loot box issue, the engagement from publishers and industry bodies has been minimal – barely acknowledging it exists, and characterising any sort of action as too expensive, too impractical, and altogether too hard. Also much like the loot box issue, these failures could likely result in a cross-nation patchwork of sledgehammer regulatory schemes, devoid of technical nuance. A far worse outcome than if they had lifted their heads from the sand to consult with consumers, indie devs, and policymakers. This week's guest, Paul Kilduff-Taylor, is concerned that this process will hit indie devs the hardest. He's written about the complex middleware and third-party services in many modern games, each one a barrier to end-of-life solutions, and contends it's impossible to cover the myriad technical architectures of modern gaming in any one piece of legislation. Would any legal code that tries to encompass all of modern gaming be necessarily too vague to have teeth? Could such a thing be enforced? Would it hit small businesses hardest, and/or result in studios eschewing regions simply because of the increased admin? Paul believes so, and I find his arguments compelling. I consider myself supportive of Stop Killing Games, but I think Paul has coaxed me towards his position somewhat, even if I have much less faith in industry self-regulation. There's a special bit towards the end this week, where I get Paul to read out some of his absurd press releases from 2011 onward. I hope you enjoy!

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 organizer who gives talks to unions, activists, and more. Aussie locals will recognize the two as half of the entrepreneurial team behind Australia's first videogame bar, the Mana Bar. 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. I've known Guy and Shay for many years, and it's somewhat serendipitous that they're starting a "book club for games" at exactly the same time I dove into Tracy Fullerton's book, The Well-Read Game. The book emphasizes, as did Tracy on the podcast, the importance of journaling your experiences, sharing them with others, and comparing the differences in perspectives. It specifically mentions the "book club" format as a healthy way to share some of those growth moments that are perhaps unsuitable for social media. It's clear Shay P Leighton has done his research on combating the "friendship recession," and his last book club project, the Tough Guy Book Club, is already a success. He makes some great points in the episode about the removal of civic life, and how we've replaced our missing institutions with... nothing. I imagine each Game Club chapter will be different, and the idea of a designer-focused game club has piqued my interest. Is that feasible in Sydney? I shall find out. Worst case, I'll end up playing the monthly game on Twitch and fostering discussion there, which isn't so bad – though Guy and Shay feel strongly that in-person meetups is the right way to do this. In the meantime, if you feel like joining, make sure to use the code "grokludo" to get 50% off the first three months. This is an affiliate link and directly supports the podcast. As usual, thank you for supporting grokludo and I hope you enjoy the ep!

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: "If someone could define art for me, then I could give you an answer to that. But seriously, to me, videogames are an expressive medium, that's more an important question to me than whether they are an art form or not. I mean art carries with it a number of connotations culturally, whether we respect it or not, how legitimate it is, but for me whether games are an expressive medium or not is the core question, and its a resounding yes, in my opinion." Of course, the debate is now considered settled. Games are art, and we've had many examples of it as such. Now, Fullerton is back with a handbook – not for _making_ games as art, but for _experiencing_ them as art. Art requires us to bring ourselves fully to the experience, to reflect, and to share with others. It requires work from the beholder. Fortunately, there's a long history of art interpretation for us to build on. The Well-Read Game builds on fields like reader-response theory in literature, and pulls from work by John Dewey, Louise Rosenblatt, and James Paul Gee, to provide a model for doing a "reading" of a game. There's a process here – some of it new, and some of which has already been practiced in literature classes for decades. Keeping a reading journal, for example, is common in literature. Taking games seriously as art involves implementing these practices too. It's doing the work. Crucially, a game ripe for reading can hit us very differently at different stages in our lives. Somewhat like the quote about a person never stepping in the same river twice, every time we revisit a game, we are different – as will be our reading. Journals help us compare these readings with less biases interfering with our memory. It's definitely a different way to play – goodness knows, with my background in esports, and my years in criticism focusing on the mechanics, dynamics, and systems in games, this was well out of my comfort zone. It felt like I had been missing out on a dimension of play all these years. In the above episode, Fullerton explains a little about how to take an "aesthetic stance" towards games, which is a sort of phenomenological practice, though I recommend reading the full book – especially if you're participating in Guy Blomberg's The Game Club. Book clubs for games seem tailor-made for "readings" of games. I hope you enjoy the episode, and thank you for supporting grokludo!

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 and synergies, and watching it play out. This style of game was catapulted to fame with Autochess and its variants, such as Valve's DOTA Underlords and Riot's Teamfight Tactics. Mechabellum is known for evolving autobattlers from a Poker-esque genre that requires multiple rounds against multiple opponents to determine a winner, towards a more deterministic, competitive 1v1 experience. Along the way, it had many design problems to solve. It's been a long, iterative journey from Mechabellum's original version, heavily inspired by Mahjong, to what it is today. Bearlike talks about a Poker version of Mechabellum, as well as solving problems like how far units should be able to move, and how unit techs solved the "deathball" problem. "We tried all kinds of different solutions. Making each piece unmovable is actually a very extreme solution. So that's the last solution we tried," says Bearlike. With each change, Mechabellum moved further from the established autobattlers and became its own entity. But there's one problem it hasn't solved yet. "We still haven't figured out how to add content to the game," says Bearlike. "You can't keep adding new pieces to your chessboard. And Mechabellum is hitting the point where adding even more new units doesn't really make much sense." This is at odds with the nature of a live service game, in which players expect endless new content. After a certain amount of time without an update, Bearlike says, player numbers start to drop. There are a few tricks up Bearlike's sleeve, including the addition of rotating layouts of buildings being the game's version of "maps." But there's a tension between adding content to keep things fresh, and keeping things simple for new players, which would be the Holy Grail for Bearlike to solve. Once you've got a successful live service game, how do you transition into something timeless? Does the content treadmill have an offramp? Bearlike talks about these problems and more in this week's ep, including the ill-fated RTS Battle Aces, hidden vs open information, and the simplest solution for positional play you've ever heard: "Add a ball." Thank you as always for supporting grokludo with your subscription, and I hope you enjoy!

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 the "LLM supply chain", including the process for how these models are trained and reinforced, he made an ethical decision to not engage with them at all – but he's still aware of the potential upsides, and charts a likely path forward after the hype bubble has died down. "Sometimes people point out that every hype bubble we've had in the past has left behind an infrastructure layer that's served the future in a way that was not predictable," says Simon. As such, it's possible that smaller, highly specialized models that run on your GPU are "a very probably outcome of this whole phase." AI is going to be an increasingly big topic in games. From things like art and 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 potential uses. 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 lore work. Chris Simon says it's not so simple, and it's easier to see the problem when you analyze LLM outputs at scale. Referencing a conference organizer who saw thousands of speaking submissions, Simon says "The creativity is not actually there. Because if you ask 2,000 people, you get 2,000 submissions. You ask the LLM 2,000 times, you get about five submissions with minor variations." Simon goes into the many inherent biases that the larger models have, as a result of scooping up all the text on the internet (including its rough edges), as well as all of literature before the civil rights movement. While it's possible that the EAs, Activisions, and Ubisofts of the world could train specific models without these biases, it's more than a coding problem. It's about server farms, GPUs, and the hyper-competitive market for AI engineers. I believe it's more likely these companies will reach out to incumbent enterprise services – meaning those inherent biases will make their way into games. As if on cue, EA just signed a deal with Stability. While I can see grokludo returning to this topic, given its vast scope, I'm glad Chris Simon is the first person on grokludo to talk about AI. Because just as many games and NPCs will use the enterprise LLMs as a foundation, all our future AI chats will use _this interview_ as a foundation, about the hidden costs of AI in games. Thank you all for supporting grokludo!

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 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. In this chat, Goose opens up about the challenges of starting from zero, which he's had to do more than once in his career. I've always known him to be candid and humble - in fact, it's downright challenging to get him to take credit for Counter-Strike - and here, he talks openly about how hard it is to retain players when there's just so much to play. If even the creator of Counter-Strike has trouble rising above the noise of modern gaming, what hope have we mortals? Counter-Strike, Tactical Intervention, Alpha Response – there seems to be a type of game he's been chasing all these years. It invariably involves Deagles, GIGNs, and of course, vehicles. But modern warfare is more asymmetrical than the John Woo movies inspiring Gooseman, so he's leveraging these new gadgets to ensure Alpha Response can't be cheesed by campers. 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 I hope you enjoy this ep, and as usual, thank you all for supporting grokludo!