Everyone plays. Kids and adults. Men and women. Uptight or relaxed. Tall or short, from any place on the Earth and with any skin colour. We play with our hair and our food. We play when we tease our friends and family about their weird habits. We play videogames and boardgames. We roleplay as practice for a big interview or new job, or just for fun. Play is a natural part of being human, and even if we don't realise it we all spend at least some of the time every day playing. Ludiphilia is a highly-polished, thoroughly-edited collection of stories about how and why we play.
https://ludiphilia.net
Gesamtlänge aller Episoden: 8 hours 4 minutes
Episode 7: Ausretrogamer
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...
Episode 6: The Manhole
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...
Episode 5: 5 - Where the City (Simulation) Stops
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...
Episode 4: Fernando Pessoa
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...
Episode 3: Avatars in Need
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...
Episode 2: Mercy
[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.
Support Ludiphilia
Episode 1: Playful Pedagogical Primers
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...