Podcast Questions: How to Do a Good

[Golem]

Not a lot here yet, but I think it'll be good to have a place to jot down notes on this kind of thing. If you have any input, please share!

Proven questions:
-Name a specific instance of X. (where X can be something like "a slow-paced tower" or "you backtracking to find an upgrade")

Things to avoid:
-feeding examples (for instance, "What did you think of moment X?" "How was the third tower paced?")

General notes:

Hypothesis

Before your questions reach your panel, they should already offer an interpretation of the game. They should point to whatever makes the game unique or interesting. Just by reading the questions for Demon's Crest, for example, you can tell that the game focuses on bosses, revisiting old areas, and character swapping. Yourself's questions for Terranigma highlight the game's sense of environment. Questions that ask "what kind of challenges did you face in this game?" are too broad. Those questions should be asked of the host before he or she puts together questions.

Specifics

You want the other person to be specific; the other person should be able to name a specific instance of something in the game and break down its structure. Everyone is able to do this instinctually. Your job is just to create the proper floor for the example to be shared and unfurled. By asking the responder to name a specific instance of X, he or she can find an example from any corner of the game to illustrate something, and it'll be an example that person is comfortable with.

High-level ideas can be reached by building from low-level examples. It's a matter of spotting trends.

It's easy to start out with a high level concept and not know what to do for a podcast. In that case, the next step is to find a way to ask for a low-level example that speaks to high-level concepts. This is the success of the Demon's Crest and Counterfeit Monkey sessions, and it's the failure of the second Shin Nekketsu Kouha session as well as the first Terranigma session.

Interpretations

However, you also want to be able to challenge the responder to approach high-level concepts via his or her low-level example. For this, it helps to have carefully considered the game yourself; in this case, you will already have a high-level interpretation in mind that you can use as comparison against the responder's low-level example. If you think Lolo's timing challenges are difficult and Shouty thinks one particular timing challenge in Lolo is trivial, you should be able to, uh, do something with that. I lack concrete things to say at the moment, but the point is, don't think that just because you start with a low-level example it can't be taken to a more abstract, interpretive level.

One notable failure to reach abstraction came in the first Shin Nekketsu Kouha session, where we spent the whole time talking about which moves worked and which didn't. In that case, it may have been a matter of focus, since we were trying to cover the entire moveset and how it stacked up against all the enemies in the game. Sometimes, interpretive work does need to go into hewing the questions down before they're even asked. I've been wary of tactic-centric questions since then, since I tend to have a hard time finding the route from tactic to abstraction.

Follow-up questions:

The dreaded "Responder A said what I was going to say." In this case, your job is to find an appropriate tangent to explore within that example based on context (the game, the person answering, the person who gave the previous answer, and your own experience). Then, you find a question that can properly explore that tangent and pose it as a follow-up question. I have no idea what this process looks like, because improvisation is hard.

[Golem]