LISTEN: YOUR TIME IS WELL SPENT LISTENING TO A LIFE WELL WASTED
A confession and a high, high recommendation: for as thorough a radio junkie as I am (it was, in fact, my teenage career choice before veering wildly off onto the path that led me here), I find it almost impossible to get into a podcast groove.
Part of that is the nature of the beast itself: the usual podcast fare is limited to people I don’t know having a conversation I can’t participate in, making for an experience about as compelling as watching two amateurs gracelessly toss a frisbee back and forth for an hour.
Here’s where everything changed: the recent sale of Ziff Davis’s former games press unit to Hearst let loose one Robert Ashley, who took the opportunity to pursue his own radio journalist leanings and create his new podcast, A Life Well Wasted.
Really, podcast’s not the right term — it’s never been more apt to call something “internet radio,” because, despite the format, Ashley’s clearly a graduate of the Ira Glass school of production, and has put together as close to gaming’s version of This American Life as we’ll likely ever get.
The two episodes put together so far (the production work involved for a one-man team is so heavy that Ashley isn’t committing to more than an episode a month) aren’t about gamers and their opinions, it’s about the personal stories of This Gaming Life: the first episode introspectively devoted to the aforementioned Ziff Davis sale and the closing of U.S. games mag legacy EGM, and the second to “collectors and archivists” obsessively devoted to games.
And it’s that second in particular where you should start — near the end, Ashley pitch perfectly calls forth one of those fabled NPR ‘driveway moments’ with a tearful farewell from a game developer about to pull the final plug on an MMO server. Right there is where I knew Ashley got “it,” and where he set the high watermark for both games radio and for his own future episodes — I can’t wait to see where he goes next.
A Life Well Wasted [episode links, see also: the accompanying blog]
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