My Perfect Console with Simon Parkin

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.rth Have I

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