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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Tom Keegan is one of the leading performance directors in video games, whose career spans theatre, film, animation, and interactive entertainment. After starting out in the New York theatre scene, he worked in animation on Johnny Bravo, The Powerpuff Girls, and The Woody Woodpecker Show, then moved into video games at a pivotal moment in the industry’s evolution.

For the past two decades he has shaped performances for Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, Battlefield, Resident Evil 2, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and Survivor, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. BAFTA-nominated for his work on Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, he now shares his experience in his new book The Complete Guide to Videogame Performance Directing.

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Keza Macdonald is a Scottish journalist and editor who has spent more than two decades chronicling the culture and business of video games. She started early, as a junior staff writer for GamesTM while she was still a teenager. Then, after earning a degree in German and Japanese from the University of Edinburgh—including a year studying in Japan—she became UK Games Editor at IGN, helping shape the site’s global editorial strategy.

She then launched and led Kotaku UK, where her team won multiple industry awards. Since 2018 she has been Games Editor at The Guardian, where she writes the widely read “Pushing Buttons” newsletter and appears regularly on television and radio as an expert on the medium. She is the co-author of You Died: The Dark Souls Companion, and her new book, Super Nintendo: How One Japanese Company Helped the World Have Fun, explores the cultural impact of one of gaming’s most influential companies.

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My guest today is a video game executive whose career spans the medium’s earliest home computers to the rise of the modern console business. He created his first games for the Atari 800 in the early 1980s, before joining Microsoft in 1986, where he spent a decade as an early developer on Excel and Word.

In 1996, he left the Office team to pursue his passion for games, founding Microsoft Game Studios and laying the groundwork for the company’s entry into interactive entertainment. Over the next eight years, he grew the division from fifty people to more than twelve hundred, publishing over a hundred games—including more than a dozen million-sellers—and co-founding the original Xbox project.

Since retiring from Microsoft in 2004, he has worked as an advisor, board member, and investor, and in 2019 helped launch 1Up Ventures, a fund dedicated to supporting independent game developers around the world.

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Prokop Jirsa is a Czech game designer whose work has helped redefine what historical realism can look like in a modern role-playing game. After completing his Master’s degree at the Prague University of Economics and Business, he joined Warhorse Studios as a designer on Kingdom Come: Deliverance.

There, he helped shape the game’s uncompromising approach to first-person immersion, historically grounded combat, and player choice rooted in consequence rather than power fantasy. Following the success of the first game, he continued that work as Lead Designer on its sequel—expanding its systems, scope, and narrative ambition while holding fast to the studio’s commitment to authenticity and player agency.

Across his career, his design philosophy has consistently favoured trust in the player, an approach that has earned Warhorse a devoted audience and a distinctive place in contemporary RPG design.

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