Mario Kart 8 Podcast Reflection

I feel much better about this podcast than my first one, and I definitely think having experience helped tremendously. Our goal for this podcast was to show that Mario Kart 8 wasn’t just for kids. We were aware that it had quite a diverse fanbase and we wanted to examine and relay to the listener why the game attracts so many different people.

One of the key differences was that this go around we started a week before the assignment was due, and this made the entire process much less stressful, and gave us more time to fully flesh out everything we wanted to say. Also, while we met with the professor the first go around it wasn’t really an official meeting, but rather a quick conversation after class. This time Justin and I scheduled a sit down appointment which helped us narrow down what to talk about, and figure out the best questions that would prompt interesting analysis.

The hardest part was the live gameplay aspect. Justin and I had two friends play and we didn’t want to tell them any points to hit on because we wanted it to sound natural, but as a result it seems like they tried to say what they thought we would have wanted them to say instead of saying their genuine thoughts. This part of the podcast is always the hardest for me because in a way you are giving up control.

Once again I think the project required a lot of collaboration because obviously this was a group project. Justin and I always meet up with different ideas, and we use our differences as a way to build off of each other’s thoughts. Also, there was critical thinking and reading resulting in writing. One of the main components of the project is to relate one of Ian Bogost’s chapters from “How To Do Things With Video Games” and relate it to your game.