Dr. Elin Festøy is a Norwegian creative producer, researcher, and storyteller whose work uses interactive media to illuminate some of the most painful and overlooked histories of the 20th century. After completing a Master’s degree in 1995, she began her career as a journalist covering tech during the early emergence of digital culture. She later founded the transmedia studio Teknopilot, and in 2013 began a long-running project about the Lebensborn, children born to Norwegian mothers and Nazi soldiers during the Second World War.

She co-produced the documentary Wars Don’t End, and in 2018 created the BAFTA-winning mobile game My Child Lebensborn. Last year she completed a PhD at The Norwegian Film School, where she examined the unconscious biases that shape our understanding of children born of war. Most recently, she released My Child: New Beginnings, a follow-up game that further expands this vital narrative through interactive storytelling.

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Jon Ingold is a British game designer and writer whose work has helped redefine how narrative, choice, and player agency function in interactive storytelling. He began making parser-based text adventures and releasing them free on the internet. After studying mathematics at Cambridge University, he moved into professional game development at Sony PlayStation, where he worked as a designer in the concept group on several unreleased titles.

In 2011, he co-founded the independent studio Inkle, where he has been a driving force behind a body of critically acclaimed narrative games, including 80 Days, Heaven’s Vault, Overboard!, and A Highland Song. Alongside his studio work, he co-created the open-source scripting language Ink, now used widely across the games industry to build reactive, branching narratives. His latest project, TR-49, is a haunting narrative deduction game built around a mysterious wartime machine, and the urgent act of making meaning from archives before time runs out.

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Before the start of My Perfect Console's fourth season, we revisit a classic early episode with the reclusive game designer, Phil Fish.

Phil studied game design in Montreal and, after a brief stint working at Ubisoft, left to begin work on a game of his own, a platformer that combined the art style of the Super Nintendo classics of his youth, with perspective-shifting innovations of his own.

Six years in the making, Fez launched in 2012 to near universal acclaim, part of the first wave of so-called indie games. After featuring heavily in the film documentary Indie Game: the Movie, my guest, who is passionately outspoken, became the subject of co-ordinated online attacks, which culminated in his retreat from public platforms, nearly a decade ago.

Become a My Perfect Console supporter and receive a range of benefits at www.patreon.com/myperfectconsole

Take the Acast listener survey to help shape the show: My Perfect Console with Simon Parkin Survey 2025

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.