Why do we play? Not only that – why do we play more than any other animal, and for longer? Well into adulthood, in fact? 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 (spoiler!) 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 blog, 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 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. Reading Gray's book, and in this conversation, I was introduced to German philosopher Karl Groos, who published a lot of these ideas at the start of the 20th century. His evolutionary ideas around animal play were embraced, while the same ideas around humans were dismissed – largely forgotten until the field of evolutionary psychology flourished a century later. "[Groos'] book was actually panned when it first came out," says Gray. "They had this idea you had to explain things in terms of causal mechanisms, you can't explain behaviour in terms of its effect. "Well of course, the whole Darwinian approach is to explain the evolution of behaviour in terms of its effect, these came about because of the effects they have. But that way of thinking was totally foreign, and was thought of as unscientific." Later in the episode I show Gray the Bartle Matrix and get his take on the overlap of player types and evolutionary drives. Stick around till the end for the best possible argument a kid can give their parent for playing fast-paced action games. That's also our last episode of the year! I hope you've enjoyed it – expect grokludo to be back in February, and there are already some great guests lined up. In the meantime, look out for a mid-break post in which I'm planning to ask for feedback. The hope is to generate an online form so anyone can give feedback anonymously. I've already got some ideas for improvements in 2026, but I want your ideas too! Have a great break!

**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. 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 of gaming as well as the dangers, and how we can better design habits and games around it. There's some good value here for: * Parents who want to better understand the gaming habits of their autistic child * Anyone autistic or borderline who wants to understand themselves better * Game makers who want to learn about designing for those with autism, as well as improving general accessibility * Schoolteachers, friends, and anyone else with someone autistic in their lives While the official prevalence for people with autism in the general population is 1 in 36, Attwood estimates it's higher within the gaming sphere. "There's something about autism and computer gaming that go really well together," says Attwood. Along with insights into how people with autism experience games, this interview also has some advice for managing the hobby. While there are some enormous benefits, there are also things to watch out for, such as emotion regulation. "Your mind is so focused on the game, it basically suppresses your anxiety or depression," Attwood says. "Now the problem is, for a while, you are detached from your emotional state. But when you switch off the game, pew! It's been suppressed, but not resolved... "How am I going to cope with my deluge of anxiety which now floods my mind?" I hope you enjoy this episode, and have a great week!

What can we learn from breaking down game design to its core elements? It's a process every science eventually tackles – 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. But would a "periodic table of game design" be feasible? Would it be ever-changing, as newer forms of interaction are discovered? 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. Rather than some of the "hard" sciences listed above, Jose more readily compares this project to the psych ontology found in computer science. The amount of formal reasoning you can do with it doesn't match that of, say, prime numbers – but Zagal says it has helped designers think about games in a new way, as well as building a common vocabulary in teams that otherwise might be talking past each other. Some of the biggest benefits have been found in external fields that can learn from game design – architecture for example, or motivation in business (without using tacky gamification). That, too, resembles some of the hard sciences. The benefits aren't always known. The study of non-Euclidean geometry would unexpectedly support Einstein much later, just as breaking down symmetries would support future particle physics. Sometimes it's impossible to predict the practical applications. Today, Zagal joins us to talk about the Game Ontology Project, and the more recent research it has led to around goals in games, and ludonarrative dissonance, which occurs when there is a conflict between gameplay and its narrative. He has some interesting points about situations when the game's supported goals don't line up with the player's interpretation of the goals, which can be a fun game design space to play in. Sometimes this is intentional (as in Undertale), and sometimes not. When intentional, it can be a great moment when the player discovers there's actually a different, perhaps hidden, way to play the game. "I think that's a really interesting area of game design, which is players discovering goals which are supported by the game," says Zagal. Though I wonder, especially in the era of social media, if this might require restraint. Running a marketing campaign without spoiling entire ways of playing a game is its own challenge. Excluding those gameplay styles from marketing material is one thing, but how does one prevent previewers from spoiling that "Aha" moment, in the same way they would avoid a story or puzzle spoiler? As usual, I hope you enjoy the episode, and thanks for supporting grokludo!

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 - and how - publishers should end support for their games. At what point can access to a game you've "bought" be revoked? The Stop Killing Games movement aims to answer this by imposing legal liability on publishers, and though the details are vague, it's starting to be taken seriously by the UK and the EU. Much like the loot box issue, the engagement from publishers and industry bodies has been minimal – barely acknowledging it exists, and characterising any sort of action as too expensive, too impractical, and altogether too hard. Also much like the loot box issue, these failures could likely result in a cross-nation patchwork of sledgehammer regulatory schemes, devoid of technical nuance. A far worse outcome than if they had lifted their heads from the sand to consult with consumers, indie devs, and policymakers. This week's guest, Paul Kilduff-Taylor, is concerned that this process will hit indie devs the hardest. He's written about the complex middleware and third-party services in many modern games, each one a barrier to end-of-life solutions, and contends it's impossible to cover the myriad technical architectures of modern gaming in any one piece of legislation. Would any legal code that tries to encompass all of modern gaming be necessarily too vague to have teeth? Could such a thing be enforced? Would it hit small businesses hardest, and/or result in studios eschewing regions simply because of the increased admin? Paul believes so, and I find his arguments compelling. I consider myself supportive of Stop Killing Games, but I think Paul has coaxed me towards his position somewhat, even if I have much less faith in industry self-regulation. There's a special bit towards the end this week, where I get Paul to read out some of his absurd press releases from 2011 onward. I hope you enjoy!

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 organizer who gives talks to unions, activists, and more. Aussie locals will recognize the two as half of the entrepreneurial team behind Australia's first videogame bar, the Mana Bar. 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. I've known Guy and Shay for many years, and it's somewhat serendipitous that they're starting a "book club for games" at exactly the same time I dove into Tracy Fullerton's book, The Well-Read Game. The book emphasizes, as did Tracy on the podcast, the importance of journaling your experiences, sharing them with others, and comparing the differences in perspectives. It specifically mentions the "book club" format as a healthy way to share some of those growth moments that are perhaps unsuitable for social media. It's clear Shay P Leighton has done his research on combating the "friendship recession," and his last book club project, the Tough Guy Book Club, is already a success. He makes some great points in the episode about the removal of civic life, and how we've replaced our missing institutions with... nothing. I imagine each Game Club chapter will be different, and the idea of a designer-focused game club has piqued my interest. Is that feasible in Sydney? I shall find out. Worst case, I'll end up playing the monthly game on Twitch and fostering discussion there, which isn't so bad – though Guy and Shay feel strongly that in-person meetups is the right way to do this. In the meantime, if you feel like joining, make sure to use the code "grokludo" to get 50% off the first three months. This is an affiliate link and directly supports the podcast. As usual, thank you for supporting grokludo and I hope you enjoy the ep!

In 2007, while at E3, the question "are games art?" was one of the hot discussion topics. Interviewing for ABC's Good Game, we asked developers on the show floor what they thought, and one of the most concise and thoughtful answers came from Tracy Fullerton: "If someone could define art for me, then I could give you an answer to that. But seriously, to me, videogames are an expressive medium, that's more an important question to me than whether they are an art form or not. I mean art carries with it a number of connotations culturally, whether we respect it or not, how legitimate it is, but for me whether games are an expressive medium or not is the core question, and its a resounding yes, in my opinion." Of course, the debate is now considered settled. Games are art, and we've had many examples of it as such. Now, Fullerton is back with a handbook – not for _making_ games as art, but for _experiencing_ them as art. Art requires us to bring ourselves fully to the experience, to reflect, and to share with others. It requires work from the beholder. Fortunately, there's a long history of art interpretation for us to build on. The Well-Read Game builds on fields like reader-response theory in literature, and pulls from work by John Dewey, Louise Rosenblatt, and James Paul Gee, to provide a model for doing a "reading" of a game. There's a process here – some of it new, and some of which has already been practiced in literature classes for decades. Keeping a reading journal, for example, is common in literature. Taking games seriously as art involves implementing these practices too. It's doing the work. Crucially, a game ripe for reading can hit us very differently at different stages in our lives. Somewhat like the quote about a person never stepping in the same river twice, every time we revisit a game, we are different – as will be our reading. Journals help us compare these readings with less biases interfering with our memory. It's definitely a different way to play – goodness knows, with my background in esports, and my years in criticism focusing on the mechanics, dynamics, and systems in games, this was well out of my comfort zone. It felt like I had been missing out on a dimension of play all these years. In the above episode, Fullerton explains a little about how to take an "aesthetic stance" towards games, which is a sort of phenomenological practice, though I recommend reading the full book – especially if you're participating in Guy Blomberg's The Game Club. Book clubs for games seem tailor-made for "readings" of games. I hope you enjoy the episode, and thank you for supporting grokludo!

Wen You Ge, also known as Bearlike, leads the team working on Mechabellum, which I've routinely called the best autobattler since it hit Early Access years ago. Autobattlers 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. This style of game was catapulted to fame with Autochess and its variants, such as Valve's DOTA Underlords and Riot's Teamfight Tactics. Mechabellum is known for evolving autobattlers from a Poker-esque genre that requires multiple rounds against multiple opponents to determine a winner, towards a more deterministic, competitive 1v1 experience. Along the way, it had many design problems to solve. It's been a long, iterative journey from Mechabellum's original version, heavily inspired by Mahjong, to what it is today. Bearlike talks about a Poker version of Mechabellum, as well as solving problems like how far units should be able to move, and how unit techs solved the "deathball" problem. "We tried all kinds of different solutions. Making each piece unmovable is actually a very extreme solution. So that's the last solution we tried," says Bearlike. With each change, Mechabellum moved further from the established autobattlers and became its own entity. But there's one problem it hasn't solved yet. "We still haven't figured out how to add content to the game," says Bearlike. "You can't keep adding new pieces to your chessboard. And Mechabellum is hitting the point where adding even more new units doesn't really make much sense." This is at odds with the nature of a live service game, in which players expect endless new content. After a certain amount of time without an update, Bearlike says, player numbers start to drop. There are a few tricks up Bearlike's sleeve, including the addition of rotating layouts of buildings being the game's version of "maps." But there's a tension between adding content to keep things fresh, and keeping things simple for new players, which would be the Holy Grail for Bearlike to solve. Once you've got a successful live service game, how do you transition into something timeless? Does the content treadmill have an offramp? Bearlike talks about these problems and more in this week's ep, including the ill-fated RTS Battle Aces, hidden vs open information, and the simplest solution for positional play you've ever heard: "Add a ball." Thank you as always for supporting grokludo with your subscription, and I hope you enjoy!

Chris Simon is a technologist who's given talks about AI – specifically LLMs, or Large Language Models such as ChatGPT. He's best known for calling it a hype-fueled dumpster fire. Despite the spicy title of his talk above, his views around AI are quite nuanced. After researching the "LLM supply chain", including the process for how these models are trained and reinforced, he made an ethical decision to not engage with them at all – but he's still aware of the potential upsides, and charts a likely path forward after the hype bubble has died down. "Sometimes people point out that every hype bubble we've had in the past has left behind an infrastructure layer that's served the future in a way that was not predictable," says Simon. As such, it's possible that smaller, highly specialized models that run on your GPU are "a very probably outcome of this whole phase." AI is going to be an increasingly big topic in games. From things like art and 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 potential uses. 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 lore work. Chris Simon says it's not so simple, and it's easier to see the problem when you analyze LLM outputs at scale. Referencing a conference organizer who saw thousands of speaking submissions, Simon says "The creativity is not actually there. Because if you ask 2,000 people, you get 2,000 submissions. You ask the LLM 2,000 times, you get about five submissions with minor variations." Simon goes into the many inherent biases that the larger models have, as a result of scooping up all the text on the internet (including its rough edges), as well as all of literature before the civil rights movement. While it's possible that the EAs, Activisions, and Ubisofts of the world could train specific models without these biases, it's more than a coding problem. It's about server farms, GPUs, and the hyper-competitive market for AI engineers. I believe it's more likely these companies will reach out to incumbent enterprise services – meaning those inherent biases will make their way into games. As if on cue, EA just signed a deal with Stability. While I can see grokludo returning to this topic, given its vast scope, I'm glad Chris Simon is the first person on grokludo to talk about AI. Because just as many games and NPCs will use the enterprise LLMs as a foundation, all our future AI chats will use _this interview_ as a foundation, about the hidden costs of AI in games. Thank you all for supporting grokludo!

If Counter-Strike were made today, would it rise to the same heights? 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. In this chat, Goose opens up about the challenges of starting from zero, which he's had to do more than once in his career. I've always known him to be candid and humble - in fact, it's downright challenging to get him to take credit for Counter-Strike - and here, he talks openly about how hard it is to retain players when there's just so much to play. If even the creator of Counter-Strike has trouble rising above the noise of modern gaming, what hope have we mortals? Counter-Strike, Tactical Intervention, Alpha Response – there seems to be a type of game he's been chasing all these years. It invariably involves Deagles, GIGNs, and of course, vehicles. But modern warfare is more asymmetrical than the John Woo movies inspiring Gooseman, so he's leveraging these new gadgets to ensure Alpha Response can't be cheesed by campers. 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 I hope you enjoy this ep, and as usual, thank you all for supporting grokludo!