Tag: podcast reflection

Zachary and I knew that we were going to do this podcast together since we live in the same hall, and on a normal weekend, we’d end up playing GTA V at least once or twice. However, when we first started working on the podcast, we only wanted to talk about the “fun” parts of the game. We weren’t really looking at literary analysis, but rather at GTA as an instrument of stress relief, played by college kids to let out their impulses in a world where there are no consequences. When we met with Professor Morgen, we realised that our idea was cliched to an extent, and did not really satisfy the academic purpose of the assignment. So we were given the word ‘Transit’, and Zach had seemed to understand the connection of the word to the game, but I was still confused, and didn’t know how to connect GTA V and ‘transit’. So to clear my mind about the topic, I decided to speak about my experience playing GTA in India, making presumptions about America through the game before I had actually come to America.  Now, this seemed to work out perfectly as an introduction for us. But before Zach and I could start doing some actual work on the podcast, we decided to have some fun. For weeks, we’d been practicing “Love Yourself” by Justin Bieber, and when we decided to be the first ones to do the podcast, we couldn’t help but record a parody of the song called “GTA Yourself”, which did turn out to be a lot of fun and at the same time helped us introduce our topic for the podcast. The greatest learning outcome from the podcast was mainly structuring it, and breaking it into smaller parts that could later be combined into one single podcast. When we first tried to structure it, Zach and I both thought that it was a bit choppy, and unprofessional. So we looked up ways to make our podcast well structured and coherent, and finally decided that we should ask each other questions and answer those questions to cover our literary analysis. So we started creating a set of questions; Zach picked 3 questions to be asked, and I picked 2 as I was also speaking the introduction of our podcast. As we started recording with this structure, there were no choppy pauses and awkward moments in our podcast. We were able to go about it so smoothly, improvising as we speak, and coming up with new ideas on the go! We also made some mistakes that could be avoided by others working on their podcasts. The first mistake we made was not defining the word, “transit” until the very end of the podcast. It still worked out for us because we formed the definition of transit in our own senses, providing context for the major arguments in our podcast. We also thought we wouldn’t be able to complete 5 minutes of literary analysis, but to our surprise, we were able to complete about 8 minutes of just literary analysis. So, I think 5 minutes may not necessarily be enough to analyse a game as such. In conclusion, I am glad that we were the first ones to do the podcast because we set the example for the rest of the class and got through the challenge of doing something like this without any prior experience and without having a paradigm for it.

To start with, this was the first podcast in the series so Rohan Gupta and I had no idea what we were doing. At first we thought we were just going to ramble on about how fun GTA V is and how much we love playing the game. However, after a meeting with our professor, we realized that our idea had been done 100’s of times over. So we started thinking of how we could describe GTA V in a literary sense. Eventually we narrowed it down to a theme of transit, since the game is rooted to transit. Once Rohan and I decided the basis of our podcast, we both instinctively knew what we wanted to talk about. Rohan was going to inform us about an outsiders view of America with only knowledge of GTA as a reference, and I was going to talk about Ian Bogost’s book, How to do Things with Video games. Soon we both thought we should spice of the podcast a bit and set ourselves apart from other groups by remixing Justin Bieber’s song “Love Yourself.” Our primary goal was to keep the listeners interested. We didn’t want to bore anyone with solely literary talk about the game, but we also knew we needed to include as much information as we could. Our song was our best success at entertainment, and our biggest failure was finding time to have our friend Corey Eisner be able to record with us. Fortunately we were able to gather some quotes from Corey to make up for his absence. I believe that the learning outcome that best applied to the creation of our podcast was the Writing as Process objective. First we needed to figure out what video game we wanted to cover, then what vocabulary term. Next we needed to create a structure for our podcast and insert information where it was appropriate. Eventually we got to the editing point where we rerecorded multiple portion in order to sound perfect. Then before we submitted our podcast, we reflected heavily on it. We listened to it countless times to make sure we were completely happy with it. As far as suggestions for my peers future podcasts, I would say set aside much more time than you think it will take you. Not because this assignment is hard– quite the opposite actually– but because it was so much fun being able to create something. I would also suggest planning on more than 5 minutes worth of content. It was difficult to make our episode approximately 12 minutes, I could not imagine including all the information in 5 minutes. I am most proud of having the ability to create a podcast. At first I thought there was no way it could be possible, but now I have the confidence and know that I can apply the same concepts of making the podcast towards future assignments.