Members of the Playable Stories: Unarchived team (Jeremy Andriano, Jason Boyd, Patrick R. Dolan, Tanya Pobuda, Chelsea Russell) presented a panel on “Best Practices for Choosing Games (or Topics) for Episodes” as part of the Fourth Annual Humanities Podcast Network Symposium, “Best Practices,” held virtually on November 8th-9th, 2024.

The team involved in the Unarchived podcast have a diverse range of interests and abilities when it comes to video games, and this can sometimes pose challenges when trying to select games for episodes and when trying to produce episodes: do enough team members have the necessary technology, the skillset, and/or the interest in a game that is being considered? This roundtable panel of Unarchived podcast team members will discuss their experiences proposing games for episodes, explaining why they are suitable for the podcast, dealing with concerns about playing and articulating something meaningful to say about selected games. What if no one seems interested in the game you have proposed? What if you can’t ‘figure out’ a game for an episode you are a part of? How can you help fellow panelists who are struggling? How do you bow out of an episode without causing bad feelings? The panel will discuss how they deal with these challenges in order to be inclusive of different interests in games and different kinds of games while preserving goodwill and, most importantly, successfully producing podcast episodes. We will also discuss how our experiences with choosing games for episodes can be generalized into a set of ‘best practices’ that podcasting teams can use for collaboratively choosing topics for episodes.

After discussing the issues raised above the panel concluded with a list of Dos and Don’ts:

• DO cultivate a diverse team, with a range of interests and perspectives related to the scope of your podcast, and therefore with a diversity of potential topics to choose from. Variety is the spice of listening!
• DO propose topics you feel unsure or tentative about: you might be surprised at the level of interest in a topic by others on the team, and a dialogue about what topics are suitable for a podcast is an excellent way to keep a team engaged and interested in the podcast.
• DON’T be overly prescriptive when choosing the order of episodes: while the topic of certain episodes might require them to be produced at certain times, generally let the interests of team members play a role in what episodes get produced when.
• When choosing and scheduling episodes, DO spread out the labour: when a podcast is a non-monetizing side-project (or one of many on-the-go projects), be mindful of team members’ time, capacity, and resources when assigning the roles of writer and host, producer, and panellist. 
• DON’T rush into recording an episode when a topic has been chosen: make sure what you want to say and that what you have to say is worth listening to.
• So, for educational and scholarly podcasts, DO (as the designated writer) prepare a detailed script for a podcast episode, while allowing panellists the choice to pre-script their own responses if they would like.
• DON’T pressure yourself that you have to be an expert for every podcast episode you choose to be on–even the ones you are the host and writer for! Once a topic is chosen, its exploration is a shared endeavour.
• DO have confidence that you have something meaningful to say in an episode that you have chosen to be on. You might feel unsure about a topic, but being a panellist should ideally be a learning opportunity, for you as well as the audience. 
• DO assure others on the team that you will support them if they choose to join an episode on a topic they feel might be beyond their capability. If we don’t persuade our fellow team members that they could be a part of most proposed episodes, then we risk ending up with a list of proposed topics but no panellists (and thus no episodes!).
• DO remember that an off-hand suggestion can lead to choosing an episode the topic of which all the panellists actively dislike. However, this can still result in a good episode!

Watch the recording of the panel :

Also, check out the playlist for the all the Symposium panels.