Tag: podcast reflection

In the episode of Democratic Socialism Simulator, I became the producer. This time we had an even more clearer focus on the tasks involved. As the producer, I need to lead the discussion on the game, record and edit the audio file, and attend meetings including the meeting with Professor Morgen. Compare to the previous podcast on Temple Run and Oxenfree, I think we are much more organized. We literally had more interactions with each other. Although we had a stricter time due to the oblivion to sign up, we actually find the perfect game within a shortened time frame. For the last episodes, we had to probe on how to record in zoom, who is doing what job, and we had to record several times before the final version. Yet, for this episode, everything is simply going as smoothly as possible

Importantly, the goals and main talking points had shifted significantly compare to the last two episodes. We improved on the “game-finding skills”. For Temple Run, we had barely anything to talk about on its meaning and mechanics; yet for Oxenfree, the mechanics would be a little bit confusing to talk about without having to play the game itself. For Democratic Socialism Simulator, we are intrigued by the complex viewing point it provided towards the ongoing election. Amongst our group we had a heated discussion on the game’s view. Some of us believed that the moderacy element means doing nothing, others believed that moderacy means staying neutral. We even discussed about the historical successful president to prove our point. To be honest, I would not change any part of the content this podcast provided if we had to do it again.

As we have more attempts on the podcasts, the ability to “demonstrate collaborative skills in classroom discussion and while working together on projects and presentations”, as stated in the Learning Objective page, are being tested again. As aforementioned, we had different viewpoints that leads us to different assertions. However, with collaborations skils, we overcome the dividing views and came to a conclusion with everyone being satisfied . With the projects, Anusha, Hayden, and I had definitely became more comfortable working with one another. Although learning how to cooperate is a gradual process, we had made clear progression to mastering this skill.

Being the producer of this episode came with greater responsibility on my end. However, I am happy that everything turned out well and that we were able to have a productive conversation about the game. Oxenfree was certainly a huge jump for us from the first episode due to how polar opposite it was to Temple Run, from the mechanics to graphics to gameplay. It was in a nutshell a much more complex game. When I was writing the script, I made sure we explain the game well before going into critical analysis and exploring different aspects of the game. I think I laid out the arguments in a logical way and everyone had the chance to talk about at least one specific part of the game that they like.

The beginning phase of the making of this podcast episode was pretty bumpy, especially when compared to our first episode on Secret Hitler. This was mainly because we could not figure out which game we wanted to analyze. This was worsened by technical difficulties, like not being able to download certain games. After much consideration, we finally decided on Hidden Folks.

The thing with Hidden Folks is that it is a seemingly very simple game. ‘Here’s a drawing. Find stuff.’ So, our overarching challenge was to look at the game in a different light and try to identify the implicit messaging and objectives of the game. What exactly did this game do to our minds, and how it is relevant in our everyday lives. These were not particularly obvious answers, but after having a couple of conversations and discussing our experiences playing the game, we found an angle, and some direction. We then created a Google doc to formulate a basic script for what we wanted to say.

One of the aspects we touched upon in the episode is how the game rekindles childlike fascination and wonder. As we grow up, we lay too much emphasis on ‘getting stuff done’ and being productive. We tend to not (intentionally) waste our time, energy and attention on something unless we have to, or it may directly benefit us. We try to block that unnecessary information out. Hidden Folks needs you to do the exact opposite, which definitely seems out of character and uncomfortable initially. It lets you just be in this monochrome landscape of dancing monkey-villagers, it lets you look around freely and explore it. All this for no apparent reason. It helps you to just slow down and take a moment away from the chaos and craziness that has swamped this world, especially this year. Every time you find one of the objects and a tiny celebratory sound is made, you feel satisfied, almost as if you are a child once again– excited about little things in life.

We were also interested in why Hidden Folks is different from Where’s Waldo, despite a very similar premise. Where’s Waldo is a game that has been immensely popular for decades. So, there has got to be something about Hidden Folks that makes it stand out and attract so many players. We think that the interactive nature of Hidden Folks was one of the key differences.

Additionally, we spoke about how the absence of a ticking clock enhanced the experience of the game, the visual and audio design, and what skills we can hone by playing Hidden Folks. At the end, I have to admit that I was pretty surprised about how many facets of this game we were able to uncover and talk about.

The last part of the production was editing the audio. This was much simpler than the previous episode as I was now well-versed in the workings of Audacity. We were also mindful to make fewer mistakes while recording the podcast, and this made the editing process easier.

On the whole, I think the task of creating the podcast episode was definitely not without obstacles. But I did learn a lot from it, including working with my teammates, how the audio medium is very different from the written word, and technical skills like sound editing. Most importantly, though, the experience taught me how to articulate an experience (in this case, the game-playing experience) into words, and how to interpret this experience as well.

For this week’s episode, I was the producer. With the experiences of creating the podcast from last time, we made a quick decision on the game that we planned to make the episode on and scheduled the meeting afterward. The game Plague Inc is a real-time strategy simulation video game that enables the player to create and evolve a pathogen to infect the human population with a deadly plague. Unlike Roy and Ryan, I had no experience with the game, so I think it will be better next time if I can play the game more to really get a player’s familiarity. All of us think the game Plague is interesting and is relatable to this pandemic. It is a game that provides deep thinking about the public health and reflections of the current society, it allows players to actually learn how to stay safe in a pandemic. After deciding the game, like last time, we split the script, and spent about 2 hours writing the script together. Since it is the second time for us to produce a podcast, we all have a more decent understanding of the whole process of the production of a podcast. 

So, for the first episode I was the producer for the first episode of the podcast from our team. We met a total of 4 times- decided on a few talking points, a meeting with our executive producer to brainstorm on some interesting point and how to move forward with the podcast, working on our script and decided on some questions for interview’s and the podcast recording day. We thought that instead of dividing up work and working individually we should meet together, which I think is particularly advantageous as I think it was crucial that we met as it was a good way to get to know people and bond in this virtual environment.

Before we even started the podcast, I decided that I would not listen to other podcasts as I felt that, even though it might have its disadvantages, I would have not been able to make points totally different than other groups and analyze the game in a similar way. I did listen to them after them and I really liked them. But one thing we did completely different from what anyone had done was to have 2 guest speakers in our episode, which I really thought was interesting and a fresh perspective as we loved to hear from someone who played the game just for “fun” and not from the point of view of analyzing it. 

Initially we did have a bumpy start as we debated what game would we analyze. It had to not only an interesting game, something that would appeal to a larger crowd, but also a game that had more depth to it than just say a game with rolling a die and moving three spaces forward. We ended up choosing Secret Hitler. We discovered that there were variations of the game. But, the reason the game was so successful, was – the underlying message “politics”. Politics is one of the most discussed topics throughout the world, and especially with the events of 2020 I felt that it was something that people particularly related to making the game even more successful in 2020. I think what made this assignment interesting and little restricted at the same time was that the fact we had to make it into a podcast and not just a narration of something we had wrote. All my life I have been used to writing essays so I think it was a challenge as we couldn’t frame it in such a way that it would be an actual discussion, however, when we recorded the podcast the first time, it did not sound good at all. Eventually, we came up with some basic tricks like to emphasize on things we said and talk a little slowly, making us happy with our end result!

The week our episode was due, I was initially stressed because creating a podcast is not something I had ever done before. Though, I am grateful for Hayden and Bob in how we all came together to produce an interesting and thoughtful episode. 

Our first challenge was deciding on a game. While we did start somewhat in advance of the project, we admittedly were constrained by time. When we got together, we all came to consensus that foremost, we had to choose a game that we had all played. Hayden and Bob definitely had played more games than me, so it took a bit of narrowing down, but we did settle on Temple Run. I proposed it mainly because when I was looking for games, I found out that Temple Run is still one of the leading games on the Apple play store. It really does surprise me how games that are no longer in the mainstream view remain popular for quite a few years (in the case of Temple Run it was almost a decade). I wanted to explore this aspect as well as think about the mechanics of Temple Run because I felt that it spurred the era of 3-D simulator games. I was slightly hesitant about pursuing the game because it very much was so casual that it did not necessarily fit into the definition in this class. Though, retrospectively, I think this factor of Temple Run being somewhat of an odd game made it that much more interesting to explore in our episode, especially with the added aspect of the pandemic. We will not be exploring casual games for every episode, though, so for future weeks, we plan to choose games that we are necessarily familiar with. 

We settled on roles based on our availability that week, and plan to switch for every episode. The responsibility was split up such that I, the producer, would be in charge of outlining the script of general ideas (including the sources) that we would cover as well as editing the episode. Hayden, the assistant producer, would be in charge of the transcript and Bob, the line producer, would create the cover picture and summary of the episode. We all, of course, contributed to the brainstorming of discussion topics and crafting of a main idea for the episode.

Looking back on my responsibilities, for the outline, I think I should have focused less on creating an actual script because our episode could have seemed more conversational. In terms of editing, I definitely do think I could have smoothed out the background noise or adjusted volumes more efficiently. Overall, however, the activity was more enjoyable than I had anticipated. I think being able to have the creative license to create something (video, podcast) has always been incredibly appealing to me, but I didn’t know how to even begin. After using Audacity and the Free Music Archive, I definitely see that I have areas to improve on, but I feel that operating the tools to create is not as much of a barrier as I thought it would be.

There was a lot that went into planning our podcast episode, Survival in Minecraft and in Quarantine. Since we were the first group to create a podcast episode, we did not really have much to go off of. We wanted to focus on what made Minecraft such a successful game, and what aspects of it were so endearing to the player. Looking back at it, we could have added more about what one could learn from Minecraft and less on the enjoyability of the game. We may have gotten a little carried away. I don’t think our group really thought of using the roles as a method of dividing the work. We were all pretty excited about recording a podcast about Minecraft, so we all decided to split up the work and make it together. Our first course of action was to write what aspects of games we can analyze and relate it to Minecraft. We chose to look at concepts like probing telescoping in the game, as well as analyzing how the type of game Minecraft is (sandbox) helped enhance its cause. We decided to do a preliminary recording after we put information down, without a script or flow, just to get out some initial points we had, and to test out the feel of the recording. It was successful, and we ended up using some points from that recording in our final one. In terms of organizing the podcast, we decided to focus on the different modes of Minecraft, and our personal experiences with the game. We were flirting with the idea of having a devil’s advocate who never played the game as a character, but we thought that concept was too forced. Focusing on personal experience made our podcast seem more authentic. Then we could add specific terms and concepts to explain our experiences. 

In terms of constraints, I do not think our group had many. As the first group to go, we had a little extra time to make our podcast, and we ended up covering all the topics we wanted to. Our podcast ran for 19 minutes, which was a few minutes above the recommended time for the podcast. Ideally, if we were recording in the same room, we would have jumped in on each other’s conversations more, and built of what we were saying. It was hard to signal when we wanted to jump in and out of the conversation, which made it hard to add on. 

Our podcast project could be considered the ultimate representation of the class’s learning objectives. We were able to summarize, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate our group members’ ideas during the podcast as well as the works of other writers writing about games. We were also able to undertake writing as a process as described by one of the objectives. We researched different concepts and works that could describe Minecraft and drafted our first podcast run. We revised our information and made a more clear outline in order to make our final podcast episode, and I am now reflecting on that process myself. This project allowed me to go through the writing process, collaborate with others, analyze various works, and use technology to connect to others. Although some aspects of typical essay writing can be found in the learning objectives, such as analyzing works, drafting revising, and reflecting, the podcast project was able to combine all of the aspects into one. I feel like I grew more as a writer and a thinker during my time working on this project. I also grew more open to other mediums of writing and sharing ideas. As an individual, I think I could improve my speaking and social skills when it comes to projects like this, as I feel like I have good ideas, but I find it hard to express them verbally. 

Overall, I think episode 1 on Temple Run was a success. My main job as an assistant producer was to work on the script and help with generating outline for the episode. Choosing Temple Run was Anusha’s decision and although initially we thought the game was too simple and lacking substance to give us enough talking points, we decided to stick with it anyway. It stems from 2 reasons. First, we wanted to save more complex and mentally challenging game for later episodes. Second, we reckoned that developing a deep analysis for a game as simple as Temple Run would make the podcast much more interesting since we will be talking about ideas most people have not thought of before. And I think we succeeded.

Logistics wise, we started a little late but I am glad things turned out well. In our first meeting, we had a very productive hour bouncing off ideas about how the never-ending, no-winning nature of Temple Run mirrors that of the pandemic situation. Everything just seems static and boring right now. That was the backbone for this episode. We also questioned Temple Run’s popularity given its simplistic nature. It is quite interesting how the most successful game or product on the market isn’t always the most exciting or fancy or complex. This shows a lot about human behaviour and how we perceive things. Sometimes, all we need is a time-passer game, something less “mentally taxing,” something that can entertain us while we are busy thinking about other things. After we gathered all the points, Anusha rearranged them briefly and we started recording on Thursday. Again, we had a really productive hour as we only had to run it 3 times. The result was approximately 10 minutes so we were happy.

I would like to thank Anusha and Bob for making this first episode a success and I look forward to producing future episodes with them.