grokludo

Paul Tozour is saying exactly what the industry needs to hear right now. Backed with data from his 2015 study titled The Game Outcomes Project, he's fictionalised the data in his new book The Four Swords: A Parable of Leadership, Video Games, and Dead Dragons.
Tozour goes through his lessons for studios, publishers, managers, and creatives, able to definitively describe what leads to a successful studio and point to the data that proves it. In this moment of post-largesse layoffs, these lessons are even more important.
And there are plenty of wacky stories from his time in gamedev to boot!
The Game Outcomes Project Part 1: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/the-game-outcomes-project-part-1-the-best-and-the-rest
The Game Outcomes Project Part 2: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/the-game-outcomes-project-part-2-building-effective-teams
The Game Outcomes Project Part 3: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/the-game-outcomes-project-part-3-game-development-factors
The Game Outcomes Project Part 4: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/the-game-outcomes-project-part-4-crunch-makes-games-worse
The Game Outcomes Project Part 5: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/the-game-outcomes-project-part-5-what-great-teams-do
Paul's series on decision modeling:
https://intelligenceengine.blogspot.com/2013/07/decision-modeling-and-optimization-in.html
The Four Swords: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/195019998-the-four-swords
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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 have an R18+ rating for games, the quagmire of loot boxes and gambling content in games, and some fun stories about what it was like at the Board in these big moments.
Chapters:
00:00 - Intro
01:00 - How games are rated differently
12:00 - The R18 Rating Debate in Aus
14:58 - What Margaret wishes people knew
20:37 - How classifying games works
25:08 - Publishers changing games after classification
28:47 - Diversity is the Board’s strength
34:30 - Watching disturbing content
38:40 - Funniest thing the Board was blamed for
41:08 - Margaret hates the C word
43:45 - Defending anime to the Aus Senate
46:43 - How do we get meaningful change on loot boxes?
56:31 - What responsibility do industry bodies have around loot boxes?
1:00:20 - An idea for ratings based on types of fun
1:05:08 - What Margaret misses about the board
1:08:03 - Today’s Classification Board
1:09:08 - Prisoner’s Aid NSW
The latest Digital Australia report by Jeff Brand:
https://igea.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/DA22-Report-FINAL-19-10-21.pdf
Prisoners Aid links:
prisonersaidnsw.org
matesonthemove.org
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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 - Intro
0:52 - An overview of loot box research
5:18 - Maarten's loot box study
9:37 - The problem with equating gambling and loot box research
11:54 - The nature of chance
16:58 - Pushing responsibility onto players
20:10 - New definitions for loot boxes
21:40 - Consumer law as a new tool versus loot boxes
23:46 - Non-compliance in Belgium's loot box ban
33:07 - The content ecosystem around gambling in games

Malcolm Ryan from Macquarie University speaks about his study that shows how suggestible we can be if a game's morality meter tries to nudge us in a certain direction... provided certain conditions are met beforehand.
Even when players think they're ignoring the morality meter, the results say different!
Read the study here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/15554120211017040
Play the game, The Great Fire, here: https://moralityplay.itch.io/the-great-fire
Ryan et al's paper on the four-component model of moral psychology can be found here: https://press.etc.cmu.edu/file/download/924/b557cd42-6151-4ecf-a8f8-d2c18bdfd27c
Follow Malcolm Ryan's work at Morality Play:
https://moralityplay.org/
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twitter.com/thejunglist
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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 publisher of Allure's tech suite.
The baseball has never been more inside -- but through that kind of insider discussion, hopefully there's an increased understanding of what made Kotaku AU special, and the current environment of dying games media. (And dying media in general)
Chapters:
00:00 - Intro
01:11 - How Kotaku AU started
09:35 - Mark Serrels' introduction to Kotaku AU
14:50 - Bringing on more writers
16:23 - Bringing on Alex Walker
21:30 - Seeing Kotaku AU end & the implications
28:10 - Campaigning for an R18 rating for games
31:23 - Mentorship and getting the right people
35:25 - Seamus' journey with independent media
40:32 - Kotaku AU's challenges towards the end
50:00 - Mark's favourite posts
52:00 - Readers bringing Mark gifts
54:48 - Kotaku AU's special place in media
1:00:30 - Our favourite unhinged posts
1:08:30 - What the world should know about Kotaku AU