Gaming podcasts

Daniel Floyd appeared on a gaming podcast a few days ago so I checked it out.

I've always avoided gaming podcasts previously, mainly because whenever I load one up, they always start the same way:

"Hello"
"Hello"
"I'm Dave"
"I'm Charles"
"Welcome to The Awesome Gaming Podcast"
"Hi"
"Today we're talking about-"
"Yeah, we're talking about shooters today."
"Yeah"

Then one of them makes a crap joke and they laugh.

Gaming podcasts are one of the only things I can find online where people seem to genuinely think they don't need any form of editing. These damn things can stretch to over two hours.

But whatever, I thought. I need to go to the market, I'll stick it on my Zen and check it out. Floyd's on it, it can't be too bad.

So I listened to it. I got through the first hour whilst being very entertained. In this particular episode they had a bunch of industry podcasters on there. Most of them were pretty interesting. They were talking about things that annoyed them in video games.

It was a bit like intellectual masturbation but the guests were clever enough to properly argue. It was great to hear some real vitriol aimed at things such as quick time events and games that don't end properly. Hearing someone mention Assassins Creed and then have to compulsively yell "FINISH YOUR FUCKING GAME" is really cathartic.

Anyway, Daniel Floyd came on, he wasn't very good but whatever.

Then the podcast started to decline sharply. I eventually had to stop listening because it got boring and painful. I loaded up another of their Room 101 podcasts and found it to be even worse.

So I thought I'd detail what I don't like about the damn things. Why? It's my blog, no-one reads it and I like setting this sort of thing out.


1) They're all too long

In theory, there's nothing wrong with a lecture/discussion lasting for an hour and a half. But.... I'm going to have to illustrate this with an example from my own life

I've kept a diary for most of my life because I'm quite narcissistic. However, when I was very young (14ish I think) I kept an Audio diary where I talked at a tape recorder. This didn't work at all because if I lost my train of thought or I didn't have something to say, I'd pause and wait for something to occur to me. I wouldn't pause the tape though. In a pen and paper diary (or a Blog, to keep up the podcast comparison) If you haven't got anything to say, you don't write anything. Similarly, if you need to work something out in your head, you wait until you know what you're going to say before you say it.

Consequently, my audio diary, as well as every podcast I've ever listened to, consisted of about twenty minutes of decent material, surrounded by an hour of badly formed sentiment and people going "urr".


2) Peoples personalities come through

This guy came on the Podcast, called Chris O'Reagan from the Super Happy Funtime Show. Now, he did say some quite interesting things but the *way* he was saying everything and the belligerent way he approached the topics... it made me want to fucking punch him.

Here's where text wins again, you see. If anyone read this, they wouldn't really get a feel for my personality, they'd just get a feel for my writing style. The good part of that is- with the exception of annoying formatting stuff like italics and *putting* *asterisks* *next* *to* *words*, you're interpriting the sentences how you want to. That way, you decide if I'm being an arse hole or not.

If someone's just chatting with someone, their personality is there. And, I gather from my unrepresentative sample of the 12 or so guests on these shows, four are boring, four are interesting, four are complete dick heads.