Tag: podcastreflection

This week we had to produce our final podcast episode. Its crazy to think that we are basically at the end of the semester! In addition to this, our game project is also due, so my group decided divide and conquer. As a challenge, though, we wanted to pick a game that wasn’t a true video game to serve as a change to the already videogame-packed week. So, we decided to analyze the game of fantasy football. This episode was definitely different from many of the others of The Longest Rainy Sunday, but I think we made some good points when it came to analyzing a separate type of game. Once again, we utilized this “dry run” method to see what worked and what needed improving, and my editing job has obviously progressed from unsavory to somewhat decent! This episode was really evident in showing how I could use this class in writing and analyzing things other than video games. Our group was able to structure an argument that used evidence to look at the benefits of “playing the game” of fantasy football.

This week, it was time for round two of producing the class podcast The Longest Rainy Sunday. Last time, we had the daunting task of making the first episode. Now, more episodes have been produced, we now know what our show should generally cover when it comes to analyzing a game. This time though, we accounted for the time it takes to actually develop a script and show that puts forward a cohesive argument. So, we developed a strategy that I think worked out well. Over the week, we thought up our central argument, building an outline that then expanded on each point that we could talk about. As the deadline grew closer, we then did what we called a “disaster run” where we just tried to organically build a show from the outline. By not stopping mistakes we knew what ideas in our outline needed to have more structured, scripted pieces and wrote down some of the talking points we made in our first run. I think this led to us making a great episode with fleshed out arguments – and I learned a lot about old-school Mario!

This week we were tasked with writing and producing the first episode of our class’s podcast: The Longest Rainy Sunday. For this inaugural episode, my group decided to do a game we unanimously appreciated: Minecraft. This task seemed really easy at first because Minecraft’s sandbox structure makes it a versatile game in which a player’s possibilities are seemingly endless. Unfortunately, the same sandbox structure complicated our analysis of the game as there were so many angles we each wanted to examine it from. The day before the deadline, we tried recording off our outline to give a more free-flowing conversational style of podcast episode, but in practice – it is hard to read cues of when to jump in on a topic when everyone is virtual and recording. Still, I think our episode was generally a success for a first episode. The editing was a bit off, with the music awkwardly playing in the middle of the episode but I think we now know what to do in preparation and in post-production for our future episodes of the podcast.