Nintendo Nation: Jeff Ryan on Super Mario, gaming culture, and the ludology of play

In this episode, I talk to Jeff Ryan, author of Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America. We discuss gaming culture, the gender dynamics of the gaming community, and Jeff defines the key to gaming, in what he calls "the ludology of play."

Jeff Ryan is the author of A MOUSE DIVIDED: HOW UB IWERKS BECAME FORGOTTEN...AND WALT DISNEY BECAME UNCLE WALT and SUPER MARIO: HOW NINTENDO CONQUERED AMERICA. He has been published in Salon, Slate, Fast Company, Wired.com, Kotaku, and All Things Considered; and has been featured on NPR’s Marketplace, Time, Forbes, The New York Times, The Economist, The Independent, and Star Talk With Neil DeGrasse Tyson. He lives in Bloomfield, NJ, with his wife and two daughters. A lifelong gamer, he has reviewed over 500 video games and covered four console launches as the games editor for Katrillion, a popular dotcom-era news and entertainment Web site. He swears his books were not undertaken to write off family vacations to Orlando on his taxes.

A note on today’s episode: In recording this episode of “Technically Human,” our human interlocutors encountered some technical interference! None of this at all alters the brilliance of Jeff’s comments.

Some exciting news: We are launching a series of live events on ethics and technology, scheduled for the next few weeks, including an important and urgent conversation with Dr. Rashawn Ray on race, policing, and tech, a screening of the new documentary, Coded Bias, followed by a Q and A with the director, Shalini Kantayya, and a Fireside chat with former CIA agent and former NSA advisor to Joe Biden, Yaël Eisenstat, who, in the wake of the 2016 election, oversaw Facebook’s Global Elections Integrity Operations, and has since become one of facebook’s leading critics.

All events are free and open to the public, but space is limited.

Check out our website, www.etcalpoly.org for more information about the events, and to reserve your spot.

This episode was produced by Ana Marsh and Matt Perry

Podcast art by Desi Aleman