Ludiphilia

When Alex Boz dug his Commodore 64 out of storage, he was transported instantly back to his childhood, and that set him on the path to rediscover a lost passion and find a community he could call home.

Thank you to everyone who's donated via PayPal or Patreon so far — especially Anuar Lequerica and James Weiner, whose very generous monthly pledges are helping me buy new gear to make a better-sounding show.

Alex Boz runs the Ausretrogamer website and Twitter handle.

Song Credits:

I also used a number of Creative Commons sound effects:

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How brothers Rand and Robyn Miller built worlds from a manhole. This is the story of the beginning of Cyan, the company that went on to develop Myst — the all-time top-selling adventure game and one of the most influential videogames ever made.

Adapted from interviews for my upcoming book The Secret History of Mac Gaming, which is currently crowdfunding on Unbound.

Thank you to everyone who's donated via PayPal or Patreon so far — especially Anuar Lequerica, whose very generous monthly pledge has helped me buy new gear to make a better-sounding show.

Song Credits:

I also used a cassette tape/deck audio sample by FreeSound user magedu.

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I love SimCity. It's a wonderful simulation of the urban machinery around us, and a playground for messing with our cities. But it turns out the original game, at least, doesn't actually work the way it seems.

Music by Three Chain Links, Jesse Spillane, Rolemusic, and Lee Rosevere.

Thank you to everyone who's donated via PayPal or Patreon so far — especially Anuar Lequerica, whose very generous monthly pledge is helping me buy new gear to make a better-sounding show.

Song credits:

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On Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa and the playful freedom of creating as someone else — someone distinct, and unique, but non-existent. (Pessoa wrote under hundreds of names, all of which belonged to people he called "heteronyms," or "non-existent acquaintances." He's an extraordinary example of something actually quite common in literature.)

Music by Chris Zabriskie, Lee Rosevere, Kai Engel, The New Valleys, Richard Moss.

Songlist:

Thanks to my Patreon backers and PayPal donors for supporting the show. Especially Anuar Lequerica, whose very generous monthly pledge will help me buy a professional voice recorder for easier and higher-quality recordings of on-location interviews.

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Sometimes we don't realise that we need saving. Sometimes it's fun to pretend we do. For one woman, pretending made all the difference. This is the story of how one middle-aged woman relearned to play while residing in Second Life, and of the Search and Rescue operation she was enlisted into to help save fellow avatars (who don't actually need saving).

Music by Chris Zabriskie, Kai Engel, Revolution Void, and Richard Moss.

Thanks to my Patreon backers for supporting the show. Especially Anuar Lequerica, whose very generous pledge will soon pay for some portable soundproofing so that I can record voiceover without worrying about noise levels outside my office.

Here's a link to Elif Ayiter's website, if you'd like to see more of her stuff.

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[Audio levels should be fixed now. Sorry about that.]

A devoted wrestling fan hacks and modifies an old Nintendo 64 game called WWF No Mercy to help deal with the pain of his shattered dream, and gets more out of it than he'd bargained for

You can learn more about the No Mercy hacking scene at Old Skool Reunion.

As always, you can follow Ludiphilia on Twitter @ludiphilia and subscribe on iTunes and Patreon.

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For the first episode of Ludiphilia I've gathered two stories about learning by playing systems-driven games. One is about the educational value of Minecraft, and the other is about a guy who studies something he calls play design and who developed two of my favourite bits of playful software in recent memory.

First I talk to Santeri Koivisto, the CEO and co-founder of TeacherGaming — the small company behind (educational repackaging's of Minecraft and Kerbal Space Program) MinecraftEdu and KerbalEdu — about the company's goals, approach to education, background, and more.

Then I move onto Chaim Gingold, a PhD student at the University of California Santa Cruz and researcher at the Communications Design Group. He's writing his thesis on play design. But he's famous for developing the Creature Creator for Maxis' SimEverything game Spore, and more recently he made an iPad app called Earth Primer — a science book for playful people. You can buy Earth Primer from the App Store for AU$12.99/US$9.99/GB£7.99.

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