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PODCAST

grokludo

grokludo is about understanding games. It"s a snappy way to hear the latest research on game design, cognitive psychology, business in gaming, and policy & regulation.We"ll speak to everyone at the intersection of all those fields -- developers, academics, policymakers, and community enthusiasts -- anyone with a story or an idea that can deepen our understanding of play.

leisure video games

All Episodes

57:16

Mechabellum Evolved Autobattlers, but One Problem...

grokludo ·

2025/11/03

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

en-us

53:59

LLMs in Games - Infinite Stories, or Infinite Hype? -...

grokludo ·

2025/10/27

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

en-us

29:52

Creating Counter-Strike, Leaving Valve, & Starting...

grokludo ·

2025/10/20

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

en-us

91:55

Playing God with Galactic Cellular Automata in Stars...

grokludo ·

2025/10/13

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

en-us

47:26

Owning Game Mechanics? Making Sense of Nintendo's...

grokludo ·

2025/10/06

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

en-us

41:45

Measuring Distress Against Loot Box Spend - Aaron...

grokludo ·

2025/09/29

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....

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72:49

The Loot Box Lab Mapping Policy vs Practice - Leon...

grokludo ·

2025/09/22

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 ...

en-us

64:55

Manipulating Players for Good? - Ejnar Hakonsen |...

grokludo ·

2025/08/19

Ejnar Håkonsen has studied the light and dark sides of player manipulation. He’s designed matchmaking and pay-to-win systems himself, and he’s theorycrafted in pay-to-win games with top-ranking whale guilds, to understand the strategies they use. Years ago, he designed a multiplayer system that used manipulative practices for positive ends. It used commendations in kind of a genius way to reduce toxicity by weaponising a player’s ego against them. He recently posted a Reddit thread about it...

en-us

42:40

An Open-Sourced Funding Model for Indies - Rand...

grokludo ·

2025/04/10

Rand Fishkin is an icon in the SEO space who recently started a game studio and is making a new indie game, Snack Bar at the End of the World. Rand’s open-sourced method for indie developers seeking investment is mainly about leveraging your network, whether large or small, to get the funds needed to make a game. It doesn’t matter if you have millionaire circles or just normal friends, school alumni, family, etc – the system aims to be adaptable to your situation. You can find these documen...

en-us

34:23

Loot Boxes vs Consumer Law - Maarten Denoo | grokludo 5

grokludo ·

2024/10/30

Maarten Denoo has been active in the Belgian gaming scene as an academic and journalist for years, releasing papers that cover loot boxes and the progress of policy around gambling in games.This episode covers the recent research around loot boxes, and gets a frontline view of Belgium's loot box ban, as well as uncovering a possible new avenue of attack: Consumer law.You can find out more about the GameAble project here: https://www.gameable.info/0:00 - Intro0:52 - An overview of loot box res...

en-us

77:07

Remembering Kotaku AU - Seamus Byrne, Mark Serrels,...

grokludo ·

2024/09/23

Kotaku AU has closed. To me and many others, it held a special place in Australia's gaming history. So this is part memorial, part group therapy session, part insider discussion for everyone else's understanding, in which I've gathered former editors of the site to talk about its beginning, middle, and end.Mark Serrels and Alex Walker had the longest tenures as editor of Kotaku AU, and David Smith was editor during its final years. Seamus Byrne started as editor of Gizmodo, and later became p...

en-us

73:13

Games Are Outpacing Classification Systems - Margaret...

grokludo ·

2024/07/18

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...

en-us

69:12

Where Studios Go Wrong - Paul Tozour | grokludo 2

grokludo ·

2024/04/15

en-us

25:21

How Morality Bars Influence Your Choices - Malcolm Ryan

grokludo ·

2024/03/19

en-us

14 results

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