My Perfect Console with Simon Parkin

Jerk Gustafsson is a Swedish game developer whose career has been shaped by a builder’s instinct — first in the physical world, and then in virtual ones. He left school at fifteen to work as a bricklayer, before discovering PC games in his twenties through Quake, the id Software classic that opened his eyes not only to play, but to the thrill of creating spaces of his own.

After teaching himself level design through modding tools, he joined Starbreeze in 1998, where he worked on acclaimed titles including The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay and The Darkness, eventually stepping into a lead design role. Later, as a founding force at MachineGames, he helped guide the studio’s bold revival of Wolfenstein with The New Order and The Old Blood. Today, as Studio Director, he has overseen the studio’s expansion into some of its most ambitious work yet, most recently with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
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Chandana Ekanayake is a game developer and creative director whose career spans more than two decades of work across some of the industry’s most varied and inventive projects. Born in Sri Lanka he moved to the United States at the age of eight, and grew up watching his parents rebuild their lives from scratch—an experience that shaped both his work ethic and his creative perspective.

After leaving art school early, he taught himself the skills that would carry him into the games industry at just nineteen. There he contributed to titles such as The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and The Matrix: Path of Neo. In 2017, he co-founded Outerloop Games, a fully remote studio built around collaboration across continents and a commitment to diverse, personal storytelling. Since then, the studio has released games including Falcon Age, Thirsty Suitors, and now, Dosa Divas, a game that combines turn-based combat and cookery.
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Natasha Hodgson is a British writer, performer, and composer for theatre, television, and audio. As a co-founder of the theatre company Spit-Lip, she co-created, co-wrote, and co-composed Operation Mincemeat, the wildly inventive musical that began life at the New Diorama Theatre in 2019 before evolving through multiple runs to become a West End phenomenon.

In 2024, the show won the Olivier Award for Best New Musical, with my guest also nominated for Best Actress for her performance as Ewen Montagu. In 2025 she continued the role on Broadway, where the production opened to critical acclaim and multiple Tony nominations. Alongside her theatre work, she has written for television series including Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared, The Amazing World of Gumball, and Bravest Warriors, and created the acclaimed BBC Sounds comedy series The Sink. Across stage and screen, her work combines sharp wit, musical invention, and a flair for ensemble storytelling.

Why on Earth Have I Seen the Same Broadway Show 13 Times? An Investigation - Taffy Brodesser-Akner, New York Times Magazine.
Operation Mincemeat Official Website
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Simon Lockerby is a game creator and studio co-founder whose path into development didn’t follow a traditional games pipeline, but instead grew out of everyday play and community building. While working as a sales director, he began playing Raid: Shadow Legends on his daily commute, eventually turning that hobby into a YouTube channel that grew rapidly.

Within a year, he had built an audience of more than 100,000 subscribers and, alongside his collaborator Dan Francis, co-founded HellHades Gaming—a central hub for players seekingguides, tools, and community events. As that community expanded, one question kept resurfacing: when would they make a game of their own? In 2023, my guest answered that call by co-founding Fateless Games, a studio built around player agency, immersive storytelling, and fair monetisation—one where players help shape the game’s direction.

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C. Thi. Nguyen is an American philosopher whose work explores what games reveal about agency, and the ways in which metrics can shape our desires. After graduating from Harvard, he enrolled in a Ph.D. program at U.C.L.A., completing his doctorate while simultaneously working as a food writer for the L.A. Times—an early sign of a career that would resist tidy categories.

Now a professor of philosophy at the University of Utah, he has become one of the leading thinkers at the intersection of games, art, and social structures. His first book, ‘Games: Agency as Art’, won the American Philosophical Association’s 2021 Book Prize, arguing that games are a unique art form that shape who we are within their rules. His newbook, ‘The Score’, examines how scoring systems—from basketball to social media likes—train us in what to value, and asks how we might stop playing somebody else’s game. An increasingly influential public thinker, he brings intellectual rigor, and playful irreverence to some of the most urgent questions of our time.
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Take the Acast listener survey to help shape the show: My Perfect Console with Simon Parkin Survey 2025
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