[NSFW] GC Podcast #54: The Long One

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It’s the first Sunday of the month, and that means it’s time to podcast! Or, at least, it’s time for you to listen to the podcast. We actually had cast this pod a few weeks before. But, anyway! The podcast is here! For you!

On this podcast, Alex Jedraszczak, Paul Franzen, Michael Gray, Christian Porter, and Michael Ridgaway all get together to talk about popular topics like Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator and PC classic The 7th Guest. This podcast is extra long as we go totally meta near the end of the podcast and discuss the show itself! Bullet list, if you please:

  • The staff makes fun of visual novels
  • How much better Phoenix Wright would be if it had a “Punch” button
  • Michael Ridgaway going on about deleted saves
  • Christian Porter doesn’t bear twenty-year-old grudges against inanimate objects
  • The 7th Guest
  • Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator
  • Cosplay! And, unlike those other times, we actually talk about it for a bit!
  • How we make the podcast
  • Maya isn’t in Ace Attorney 5 because she married Winston Payne—or, was it Apollo Justice?
  • The Wii U: That’s the joke!

But, wait! There’s more! As we’re about to wrap things up, the GameCola staff starts talking about the format of the podcast itself. We decided to leave this in so that you, the listener, can tell us what you think about:

  • Podcast length: At what point is a podcast too long?
  • Podcast content: More topics from fans or more topics from the staff?
  • Podcast format: Should fan mail be at the beginning or end? How long should we spend reading fan mail?

So, give it a listen and leave us some feedback! It’s about an hour and a half long, just to warn you before you get stuck sitting in the parking lot at work waiting for it to end while you worry about getting fired for being late. So, make sure you have a full hour and a half to spare before starting this one. Maybe make some Constant Comment, sit down in a comfy chair, and get your listen on right over here:

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About the Contributor


Since 2007

Alex "Jeddy" Jedraszczak is presiding Editor-in-Chief at GameCola, not only editing content but often writing it as well. On top of all this GameCola work, he also develops indie games.

8 Comments

  1. I believe the two Wiipad feature was something added on later in development, so that’s why it’s not supported by games yet, most of the early games probably weren’t designed with the feature in mind.

    Okay, for the Podcast, I really like it when you guys answer *all* the e-mails sent to you, it keeps the podcast feeling like something the fans can readily be involved with. However, focusing entirely on e-mails has some inherent issues, such as “what if no one sends e-mails” or “everyone asked the same question.” Even barring those extremes, if the podcast was focused soley on fan mail then I feel a certain organic quality of the podcast would be lost.

    I’d suggest you come to the podcast with one or two topics originated from the GameCola staff, or whatever that list is, and then move on to the fan e-mails. I don’t know how much screening of the e-mails Jeddy does, but a general look around before starting may help decide how many topics you should do before moving on.

    Also, I’m sure the GameCola faithful would completely understand pulling back on the number of topics included in each e-mail if it would help everyone get their time in the limelight.

    Personally, I don’t have much issue with the time in general, though I would agree with Anna that two hours (of full content) is probably the limit you want to avoid.

    I do kinda like the e-mails at the end, if you included your own topics after emails I feel like they’d still have too much relation with the e-mails. By keeping the e-mails at the end, you can keep the Staff Topics and Fan Topics sorta independent of each other, which leads to more variety.

    1. I flag all of the emails I get that are for the podcast, read them ahead of time, then just read all of them. It can be difficult to say that like, “I should read this email and not that email”… Maybe I can start just email-replying to ones that I don’t think are suitable for the podcast, or are questions we’ve been asked before, or that kind of thing. I feel bad not replying to people! As we get more emails, though, it becomes difficult to reply to everyone, especially in the podcast itself.

  2. In retrospect maybe it’s a little–a LITTLE!–conceited for every game concept we come up with to be about us, but the idea’s still solid. We have the writers; we’re just a collaborative Google Doc and free Ren’py download away from VIDEOGAME.

  3. I am appalled it took you that long to come up with 999 as an example of a visual novel. However, you totally made up for it when Mike brought up MST3K’s method of handling fan mail, which is also the first thing that came to mind when the topic was brought up. So kudos for that.

    Obviously we’ve got a good thing going with the podcasts the way they are, as people are rating them well and leaving encouraging comments and sending positive e-mails. However, I’ll volunteer to be the bad guy and say that the podcast is inconsistently entertaining to me because of how much of a grab bag it is.

    I’m of the mindset that the podcast, like the main website, should have a clear direction that we should stick to. Right now, it’s ostensibly a podcast about videogames. Realistically, we talk about Nicktoons and My Little Pony just as much as we talk about videogames, if not more so.

    An occasional off-topic digression is fine, but I as a listener (and participant) am bothered when a podcast, or any other form of entertainment, sells itself as one thing (in this case, a podcast about videogames) but ends up being something totally different (in this case, a podcast that’s frequently about anything but videogames).

    If it’s that hard to stay on topic, then it doesn’t make sense to call it a videogame podcast, and we should open the floor to whatever we feel like talking about, always, period. OR, we should start enforcing that this is a videogame podcast, and excise the off-topic discussions altogether from the final cut, and save them for designated Off-Topic Podcasts.

    Right now, we’re in a weird limbo where we’ve got a lot of fans liking the podcast, but the podcast has very little to do with the website’s direction as a whole (unless “a videogame podcast that’s only sometimes about videogames” is sufficiently outside the mainstream); committing to one direction or the other, I feel, would ultimately strengthen the podcast and potentially draw in more listeners who are looking for a videogame-themed podcast or a free-for-all podcast instead of, specifically, The GameCola Podcast.

    Deciding on a clear identity for the podcast also answers most of the questions about how much listener mail and how many Topic Pile topics we should go through. If it’s a total free-for-all, we can go until we get bored. If it’s a videogames-focused podcast, we can squeeze in a non-sequitur fan e-mail or two at the end, but incorporate the videogame-related topics our readers ask us in the main portion of the podcast.

    In other words, while we could still respond to e-mails individually, we could also look at the topics our readers want to hear about and synthesize them into our main topic(s) for that podcast, supplementing them with our own. That way, our readers are satisfied, the staff writers who penned the Topic Pile questions are satisfied, and we’ve got a podcast with a definite theme or logical flow from one topic to the next, and we’re more likely to stay on topic.

    Bottom line is that things ARE fine the way they are, but I see the potential for a broader appeal (that doesn’t alienate our current fans) and more consistent feel if we establish a clearer direction or identity for the podcast. I personally would love to see more of a structured videogame focus, even if it takes more effort to pull off, but I think we could be just as entertaining and successful if we dropped the videogame focus altogether and had no restrictions about what we discussed.

    1. I kind of like the idea that the site is going in a new, clear direction, and therefore, the podcast should follow suit.

    2. That’s an interesting thing to think about! We know that our fans like the current format… But, what about people who are new to the site or the podcast? We don’t really get any hatemail, so it’s difficult to tell what people who don’t like the podcast think.

      I can also see that while the podcast may be “An entertaining podcast”, it’s not really a “Podcast about Gaming Outside the Mainstream”. Maybe in the next couple podcasts, I can experiment with format a bit and see what works. I also guess it’s time to catch up on that off-topic clip pile I’ve been aggregating…!

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