Ooookay - I kind of get where the critics are coming from. I hate Jason Rohrer preemptively myself because he is a hippy, and thus a criminal moron, because I fall into the Penn and Teller school of thought that most crunchy stuff these days outside of walking around with your tits out is pretty much grade A stupid, and the reporter really needs to get a room with his New God Among Men. I don’t like the non-critical way in which his lifestyle was examined because I think there’s a lot of criticism to be made there.
That said, this is the video game show that would be on NPR if there were a video game show on NPR - what did you expect? And really, there’s a little bit of the Zuckerberg problem here. I remember last year when the entire Twitter mafia wanted to slaughter that reporter and dance in her blood for basically flirting with the guy for an hour on stage, but it’s not like you could drag Jason here into a room and then attempt to castrate him for not putting a diaper on his kid or letting his wife die of asthma in the name of his “ideals” (the problem here being that it’s totally cool to have ideals when they’re you know, right, but sustainable anything is so far from correct that doing any harm to anybody in the name of it is like holding a benefit concert for Nazis). That’s not an interview I think he would want to give, and while I might enjoy listening to it, that’s more because it’s stroking the things I already know rather than introducing me to things I don’t.
Of course, none of that excuses interviewing the mother fucking MCP for the last fifteen minutes of the program. The voice effects kind of drug down this episode, and that’s the one technical note that I’d take away from this if I were producing it. When it interferes with listening (it does - seriously, I have to try hard just to understand what’s being said for that segment), you’ve got a problem on your hands.
That said, even the weakest episode so far of ALWW still beats out a lot of the other programming out there, and I’m not going to try and crucify Robert for trying to do something different. This particular experiment with vocal effects failed, which is bad, but I don’t hate it for the uncritical address of Rohrer, because that wasn’t really the point the show was trying to make, so, you know, whatever. 8.1 out of 10.0?
Edit: Oh, and every human that intends to attempt a phone interview or conference into podcast transition needs to talk to Russ Roberts at EconTalk and figure out how it is that he does it so well, because almost every one of his shows is an interview by phone and they’re all imminently listenable (well, if you like academic economics talk, but my point is that it’s good audio quality).
