grokludo

Margaret Anderson became Director of the Australian Classification Board in 2013, a time when it still made opaque decisions and wasn’t prepared for the tidal wave of gaming content that would come in the following years.

She talks to grokludo about declassifying the classifications as it were, and dealing with the multiple challenges that games created as a fast-moving technology that vastly outpaces the laws written to regulate it.

On the way we cover Australia’s debate over whether or not to have an R18+ rating for games, the quagmire of loot boxes and gambling content in games, and some fun stories about what it was like at the Board in these big moments.

Chapters:
00:00 - Intro
01:00 - How games are rated differently
12:00 - The R18 Rating Debate in Aus
14:58 - What Margaret wishes people knew
20:37 - How classifying games works
25:08 - Publishers changing games after classification
28:47 - Diversity is the Board’s strength
34:30 - Watching disturbing content
38:40 - Funniest thing the Board was blamed for
41:08 - Margaret hates the C word
43:45 - Defending anime to the Aus Senate
46:43 - How do we get meaningful change on loot boxes?
56:31 - What responsibility do industry bodies have around loot boxes?
1:00:20 - An idea for ratings based on types of fun
1:05:08 - What Margaret misses about the board
1:08:03 - Today’s Classification Board
1:09:08 - Prisoner’s Aid NSW

The latest Digital Australia report by Jeff Brand:
https://igea.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/DA22-Report-FINAL-19-10-21.pdf

Prisoners Aid links:
prisonersaidnsw.org
matesonthemove.org

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Paul Tozour is saying exactly what the industry needs to hear right now. Backed with data from his 2015 study titled The Game Outcomes Project, he's fictionalised the data in his new book The Four Swords: A Parable of Leadership, Video Games, and Dead Dragons.

Tozour goes through his lessons for studios, publishers, managers, and creatives, able to definitively describe what leads to a successful studio and point to the data that proves it. In this moment of post-largesse layoffs, these lessons are even more important.

And there are plenty of wacky stories from his time in gamedev to boot!

The Game Outcomes Project Part 1: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/the-game-outcomes-project-part-1-the-best-and-the-rest
The Game Outcomes Project Part 2: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/the-game-outcomes-project-part-2-building-effective-teams
The Game Outcomes Project Part 3: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/the-game-outcomes-project-part-3-game-development-factors
The Game Outcomes Project Part 4: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/the-game-outcomes-project-part-4-crunch-makes-games-worse
The Game Outcomes Project Part 5: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/the-game-outcomes-project-part-5-what-great-teams-do

Paul's series on decision modeling:
https://intelligenceengine.blogspot.com/2013/07/decision-modeling-and-optimization-in.html

The Four Swords: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/195019998-the-four-swords

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Malcolm Ryan from Macquarie University speaks about his study that shows how suggestible we can be if a game's morality meter tries to nudge us in a certain direction... provided certain conditions are met beforehand.

Even when players think they're ignoring the morality meter, the results say different!

Read the study here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/15554120211017040

Play the game, The Great Fire, here: https://moralityplay.itch.io/the-great-fire

Ryan et al's paper on the four-component model of moral psychology can be found here: https://press.etc.cmu.edu/file/download/924/b557cd42-6151-4ecf-a8f8-d2c18bdfd27c

Follow Malcolm Ryan's work at Morality Play:
https://moralityplay.org/

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twitter.com/thejunglist

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