Play Make Write Think

As the main producer for this episode, I chose Monument Valley due to its uniqueness among other games. Unlike competitive multiplayer games that require skill, experience, and focus, Monument Valley is a game that gives you a space to think, relax and enjoy. There is no pressure to play this game and there is always a sense of reward for players to find out more about their imagination and what they can do in this game. This game design is heavily focused on aesthetics and representing 3 dimensional objects within 2 dimensions. Many seemingly impossible shapes and structures are suddenly possible in this game and challenges users to abandon their current belief of dimensions to really enjoy the imaginary world this game creates for us. Making this episode is much more smooth from our previous experience with other episodes. It only took us very few trials before the audio is ready for final editing. To combine the discussion with background music, Ruohan helped me edit music from Monument Valley original sound track and that fits this episode perfectly.

Genuinely speaking, I had more fun producing this episode than making my own episode. Since the game Monument Valley truly focuses on limited aspects, we were able to maximize our expressions and opinions on these topics, alone with some minor points, which makes all the ideas come together to form a complete episode.

I played this game the night before planning the podcast, therefore I was able to have vivid memories when doing the outline. I would say both playing the game and producing the podcast were fruitful experiences to me because I enjoyed playing the game for sure, and I also enjoyed analyzing it and elaborating the concepts and deeper meaning within the game. The part that I enjoyed the most was producing the background music for this podcast. We decided to use the original soundtrack from the game itself because we were both impressed by the style and quality of the soundtracks. I went through the collection, picked out seven soundtracks, edited them into small pieces, and combined everything at the end. I would definitely recommend all the soundtracks in this game, they are as beautiful as the game itself.

I hope everyone enjoys our episode, and check out the game and music yourself. I did not regret spending $5 for this wonderful experience.

The first time I played Settlers of Catan was for the summer assignment of AP The first time I played Settlers of Catan was for the summer assignment of AP Microeconomics before the senior year. For the assignment, we had to tie this game to the fundamental principles of economics. Even though this game was given for work, my friends and I actually played this game for fun and really liked the quality of the game. Out of many games I have played, I chose this game as my episode because I believe that this game contained many factors we have discussed.

I was the main producer of the Settlers of Catan, working with Alan. the assistant producer, and Ruohan, the line producer. This was my second time podcasting, and this time we discussed in more detail the real-life applications rather than the strategies, such as telescoping and probes of the game itself. (I appreciate professor Morgen for his advice during the meeting.) We planned on podcasting that way so that any audiences may understand our conversation with the minimal understanding of the game rule. We discussed recent topics, including the coronavirus and education in college, which can be related to many of our classmates and professor. There were, again, several challenges we faced while we are making the podcast episode. One of the challenges was summarizing the analysis of the game strategy with some explanations of rules. However, with several times of recording, we were able to overcome this difficulty by organizing our thoughts by using google docs, and we took away unnecessary details or paraphrased the sentences to make them clearer and shorter. We were also required to think of real-life examples that link with the idea of this game. Eventually, we were able to pull out easily comprehensible examples. One of the applications was about the college, and this topic was discussed during one of the earlier English classes. I was satisfied with how we connected our previous discussion to my podcast. I believe that there were more other challenges, but some expected problems, such as the quality of voices, came out okay. Overall, I hope we were able to discuss the game from a different angle and that showed the creativity of this episode.