Bloons Tower Defense and Habituation Podcast Reflection
Before my co-producer and I started the podcast, we discussed both of our personal experiences about the game. We also decided to not include live gameplay in our podcast because it really doesn’t add anything to our discussion. All you would hear are balloons popping and maybe us saying what towers we put down. The listener wouldn’t understand what is happening. This is how our podcast differed from the others in this series. We kept the format for the rest though. We started by saying what the game is about and then incorporated the Bogost term afterwards. However, instead of gameplay, we discussed our personal experiences with the game and how it made for a social interaction between people.
The goal of our podcast was to explain how Bloons Tower Defense exemplifies habituation and also creates a social opportunity for all the people who play it together. We did have to discuss the negative effect of habituation of these games as well. They are very addictive and distract mostly students from their work. We talked about the positives of the game in that it is ideal for completionists and it is a good way to ease your mind if you are really stressed.
The learning outcome we used the most on this projects was collaboration because we had to discuss with each other what to do and how to do it.
