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 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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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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YouTube:
youtube.com/@TheJunglist

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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:
https://grokludo.com/

YouTube:
youtube.com/@TheJunglist

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

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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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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!

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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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#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/
https://bsky.app/profile/chrissimon.au
https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrissimon-au/

grokludo website:
https://grokludo.com/

YouTube:
youtube.com/@TheJunglist

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

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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!