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.

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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/

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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.

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Get grokludo in your inbox at grokludo.com, or catch it on the big podcast platforms!

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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.

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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:
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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.

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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:
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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

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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:
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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?

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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:
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**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

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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:
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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

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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:
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youtube.com/@TheJunglist

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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

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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:
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