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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My guest today is a games industry leader whose career has spanned journalism, publishing, public policy, and cultural advocacy. He began in 2002 as an editorial assistant at trade paper MCV, quickly rising through the ranks to become editor of Develop and later editor-in-chief of both titles. In 2013 he became publisher of the two brands before moving into a new phase of his career as Head of Games London, where he launched the London Games Festival in 2016.

Under his leadership, the festival has grown into one of the world’s leading games events, supporting more than a thousand companies, generating tens of millions of pounds in business, and welcoming a hundred thousand attendees in its most recent edition. Alongside this work, he has championed inclusion through initiatives such as Game Changer and helped raise significant funds for charity through GamesAid. In recognition of his services to the industry, he was recently awarded an MBE in the 2026 New Year Honours.

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Felicia Day is an actress, writer, producer, and entrepreneur whose work has helped define internet-era geek culture. After studying mathematics and music performance at the University of Texas at Austin, she moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting, appearing in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In 2007 she created, wrote, and starred in The Guild, the pioneering web series about a group of MMO players that became a cultural phenomenon and helped establish a new model for creator-driven digital storytelling.

She later co-founded the online media company Geek & Sundry, expanding her influence across gaming, tabletop culture, and streaming entertainment. As well as starring in dozens of film and TV roles, she is the author of two New York Times-bestselling memoirs, You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) and Embrace Your Weird. And now she’s bringing The Guild back, revisiting the series that helped launch a generation of internet storytelling in the form of a musical.

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Evan Narcisse is an American writer, journalist, and narrative designer whose work spans comics, criticism, and video games. After graduating from New York University, he began his career as a culture and technology journalist, writing for outlets including Time, Kotaku, and The Atlantic, where he explored the intersection of race, identity, and storytelling in popular media.

He left journalism to become a writer for Marvel Comics, and there helped redefine a cultural icon with Rise of the Black Panther. As a narrative designer he has contributed to several major video game projects, including Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Redfall, and Black Panther. Now, as a senior writer for Brass Lion Entertainment, he’s working on a new action title from the Wu-Tang Clan. Across mediums, his work combines sharp insight with deep empathy, expanding how, and for whom, stories are told.

Recorded live at the University of Chicago.

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Ed Atkins is a British contemporary artist known for his haunting, hyperreal digital videos—works that combine computer-generated bodies, poetic monologues, and a profound sense of longing, absurdity, and decay. Since the early 2010s, his art has been exhibited at major institutions around the world, including Tate Britain and MoMA, and he’s taken part in various festivals, including the Venice Biennale, the Holland Festival, and Manchester International Festival.

He’s also written a series of books of poetry and memoir, most recently ‘Flower’, which he describes as an anti-memoir. Working across video, text, and performance, he often explores what it means to be human in an age of simulation and screens, where flesh, feeling, and code are increasingly intertwined.

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