A common criticism of modern life is the need people feel to be constantly engaged. Any empty nanosecond will be immediately be filled by a whipped-out smartphone, spend any time on a computer and you’ll find yourself involuntarily opening Twitter, or Facebook, or Reddit, or Buzzfeed, or BoingBoing, or YouTube, or any of the other thousand procrastination tools that litter the internet. I’m not immune, I have a video of a dude pretending to be in space and a podcast open and ready to be played even as I’m writing this. While in the past I might have been content to sit in a quiet room, increasingly my days are filled with constant stimulation.
This got me thinking a little about what I’d probably term “Podcast Games”: games that take up just enough of your mental processes that you don’t get fidgety, but are repetitive enough that you can listen to a podcast or watch television while playing it. Massively Multiplayer games like World of Warcraft are an excellent example of this. In the process of levelling your character you could watch every episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine or go through multiple Michel Thomas language courses. Fallout has recently been my go-to podcast game, and I’ve ended up listening to a good amount of the Copenhagencast as well as a pretty big chunk of the Regular Features back catalogue during my time roaming the wastes. Even games which are not particularly easy, like Dark Souls, can make good podcast games.
The, probably accidental, existence of this type of game is a pretty big boon for someone like me. If I’m with someone it’s fine, but if I’m on my own then I find sitting down for a solid half an hour or more to be difficult. Usually if I am watching a television program on my own I’ll watch it in chunks, pausing it every so often to do something else. TV doesn’t quite distract me enough for a long, continuous sitting; and this applies doubly so to podcasts. I really like podcasts, and when I used to have an hour long walk to lectures multiple times a day and regularly had fairly long train rides I would listen to them a lot. These days I don’t have a convenient time to fill with podcasts, and during my leisure hours I generally want something that is more effective at taking my mind off stressful things.
A good podcast game, then, is almost the perfect escape for me. There is a fine line, of course, between a game leaving just enough empty space to be filled with something else, and a game just being boring. Years ago I played EVE Online for about a month, and I realised that I had to stop when I was actually playing other video games while I was “playing” EVE. That game had so much downtime that I just had my PS2 plugged into the TV next to my computer, and I was spending more time fiddling with Worms 3D than I was with EVE. Fallout works because it’s a world you want to explore, with plenty of things you want to see, but not necessarily with a lot dialogue between points of interest. A podcast basically replaces the in-game radio (which starts repeating a bit too quickly for my tastes), turning Three-Dog into four witty British guys talking about life, the universe, and funny poo stories.
