That’s right, if you’ve ever been tired of reading my scribblings, then fear not! Now, you can give your eyes a rest and plug my thoughts directly into your ears by listening to my limited-run podcast, “How to Play.” For some time now, I’ve felt that my usual MO of doing case studies of individual games limits the depth of insight that I can provide about video games as a whole. I don’t just mean to say that I should be doing deeper comparisons of titles and genres; those comparisons can only take us so far because the games themselves are only part of the story. When I started this blog, I said that I wanted to explore this question: what does it mean to play a great story? To truly answer that question, I need to look at how we play—after all, we first need to start playing before we can experience those great stories I’ve been talking about.

That’s where “How to Play” comes in. Over the course of four 10-20-minute episodes, I unpack the question of “How to Play?” through the different modes of engagement and interpretation that players bring to their games. Along the way, I draw from various ludonarrative and games studies scholars, as well as case studies of experiences that I and other players have had with various games, especially NieR: Automata and Doki Doki Literature Club. Below, I’ve included the description for the first episode in the series as well as a link to the podcast playlist on Soundcloud. Enjoy!

“In 2001, ludologist Markuu Eskelinen infamously claimed that video games cannot tell meaningful stories and attempted to prove his point through this analogy: ‘If I throw a ball at you I don’t expect you to drop it and wait until it starts telling stories.’ Most arguments I’ve seen that respond to Eskelinen focus on the differences between games and balls, but I’ve been wondering: ‘Couldn’t you just pick up the ball and use it to tell at story?’ That’s what we’re going to look at in this podcast. We’re going to shift the focus from how games tell stories to how players engage with games to have meaningful experiences. Put simply, we’re going to talk about how to play.”

Listen here!