Fun Games with Serious People

We play Hey Robot!, a game where you try to get your smart speaker to say a specific word. Which, as you might imagine, is much more difficult (and hilarious) than you might think. My guests are two of Hey Robot’s creators, Frank and Hilary Lantz, and Brooklyn-based programmer and artist Nicole He. Oh, and […]

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As we were wrapping up this season, I reached out to some of my earliest guests to record some extra bits for their episodes – and one of those people was Laine Nooney, from the episode: Is Untitled Goose Game Queer? While I meant to talk with Laine about some topics that came up during […]

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In this episode of Fun Games with Serious People, I play the charmingly ridiculous game Alfonso’s Bowling Challenge  with writer, comedian and entrepreneur Rob Dubbin. We discuss Rob’s writing days for the Steven Colbert Show and his recent entrepreneurial turn with his company Scripto . There’s also a great story about a goat in New […]

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

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Did you know that Monopoly had its origins in anti-monopolism? It’s called “The Landlord’s Game”, and activist game designer Elizabeth Magie created it in 1904 to teach the economic philosophies of Henry George. In this episode, we’ll explore the secret history of Monopoly with Mary Pilon, a journalist who started writing what she thought would […]

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Welcome to Fun Games with Serious People: A podcast where we play fun games and talk about serious stuff, like economics, or artificial intelligence, or queer theory. I’m your host, Colleen Macklin, and I’m a game designer and professor at Parsons School of Design in NYC. I’m interested in how we learn to navigate the […]

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