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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I always write a bit more on the grokludo website:
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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/

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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:
youtube.com/@TheJunglist

YouTube Playlist:
youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3cxb6pzUE9Z7PXjIVbmr5qiohoq5wTdo

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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

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Grokludo website:
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youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3cxb6pzUE9Z7PXjIVbmr5qiohoq5wTdo

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https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/grokludo/id1736667050

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#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/
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grokludo website:
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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!

Raph Koster has helped forward our understanding of game design for decades. 

He's the author of A Theory of Fun, a must-read for game designers. He was lead designer on the pioneering MMO Ultima Online, and led the creative team on Star Wars Galaxies.

Now he's back with a new MMO called Stars Reach, built on 3D cellular automata system that simulates everything in the galaxy. The game's not out yet, and already the stories emerging from this kind of simulation are hard to compare with anything else.

So strap in, we're going pretty deep into game design theory - that's what grokludo is for! - and in the second half, we cover what to expect from Stars Reach.

Timecodes:
00:00 - Intro
01:05 - Most games are copies of others
02:58 - What videogame designers can learn from board games
06:18 - Separating mechanics from aesthetics in policymaking
13:00 - Different kinds of randomness
16:05 - Kriegsspiel, Ur, and other early games
25:50 - Do modern games satisfy modern compulsions?
31:20 - Games criticism focusing on aesthetics
34:55 - The art game movement of the early 2000s
39:15 - Using ludo-narrative dissonance as a tool
43:20 - The Pascal's Wager in A Theory of Fun
47:20 - Don't get Junglist started on Dark Souls
50:15 - Do game design lessons line up with cognitive psychology?
56:00 - Studying government styles for MMO design
59:40 - The "designer's dream game" trope
1:05:50 - Stars Reach's cellular automata system
1:13:13 - Sustainability despite player terraforming
1:18:30 - Solving the problems of biology
1:21:50 - Terraforming and PvP
1:24:20 - Scaling the galaxy with adaptable sectors
1:27:45 - The dangers of fire and water

A Theory of Fun:
https://www.theoryoffun.com/

Stars Reach:
https://starsreach.com/

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Kirk Sigmon is an attorney at Banner Witcoff , and an expert in patent law.

He joins us this week to make sense of the wild, and complicated situation in which Nintendo and The Pokemon Company are posturing towards US litigation against Pocketpair, the maker of Palworld. Litigation in Japan is already underway.

In the process, Nintendo has secured patents for game mechanics that look a lot like what we've already been playing for the last 30+ years.

There's patent activity relating to mounts and the quick-switching of mounts. There are patents about throwing an object to capture a character. And very recently, a new patent was secured that covers the summoning of a character.

This is a complicated and niche field, so we first cover some basics of patent law, before getting into the dirty details of what's been called "by far the most aggressive patent enforcement any game maker ever attempted against a rival."

00:00 - Intro
01:42 - What good patent law looks like in games
05:58 - How often do mechanics get patented?
07:50 - Nintendo pursuing patents after Palworld's release
14:00 - Reading patent claims is torture
16:34 - Nintendo curving patents towards litigation
23:22 - Patenting a summoning mechanic
26:35 - Limited resources at the patent office
30:53 - Where has patent law done well, and where poorly?
33:30 - The Inter Partes Review system
37:24 - Why not pursue litigation on the art style instead?
41:48 - Attack on the mod space as "prior art"

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Aaron Drummond and Jim Sauer are associate professors at the University of Tasmania, and recently released a paper looking at loot box spending measured against distress, when normalising for disposable income. 

The two have studied a range of issues in games, such as the effects of violent games on aggression, and the impacts of gaming on learning. But when they started researching loot boxes, things were very different.

Find Aaron and Jim's study here: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.231264

Timecodes:
00:00 - Intro
00:46 - Do loot boxes cause distress?
04:16 - Skinner box systems in games
12:00 - Disposable income and "whales"
18:39 - Why loot box research isn't just a moral panic
26:24 - The limitations of current research
31:47 - Violent games blamed regularly in killings
35:51 - Intrinsic and extrinsic rewards intertwined
38:40 - Final words

Thank you for watching and I hope you enjoy!

You can support grokludo and get updates in your inbox at grokludo.com!

Leon Xiao is an Assistant Professor at the City University of Hong Kong. After doing his PhD in loot boxes, he's released papers charting the loot box regulation landscape, and measuring compliance.

Coverage of his work has been picked up by mainstream media such as the BBC and the Guardian, and GamesIndustry.biz publishes his yearly loot box state of play report.

Today Leon gives us a zoomed out view of loot box research.

In the intro I mention Leon's thesis, which comprehensively covers loot box regulation and compliance. You can find that here: https://osf.io/preprints/thesiscommons/af8ev_v1

The last Loot Box State of Play can be found here - https://www.gamesindustry.biz/loot-box-state-of-play-2024-another-trip-around-the-world-of-regulation

Timecodes:
00:00 - Intro
00:48 - Leon Xiao's program
03:47 - Gaming Disorder and older adults
07:30 - What do we know for sure about loot boxes?
11:30 - Loot box movements to be aware of in 2025
18:10 - Low compliance to industry self-regulation
32:43 - Gambling aesthetics vs gambling mechanics
50:26 - "The science isn't in yet"
56:20 - What could researchers do with industry data?
1:04:42 - Comically obtuse disclosure of loot box odds
1:08:32 - Should we all complain to regulators?

Thank you all!

Make sure to subscribe here and at grokludo.com for updates!