Listening to casts whilst gaming

[maxwellyoung]

I, evidently, love listening to podcasts and find them an excellent form of entertainment for their convenience. I listen to podcast when walking, exercising etc but also find that playing particular video games while listening to podcasts can be enjoyable. Spelunky, Just Cause 2 and FTL are my go tos currently which is kind of a shame because of Spelunky and FTL's excellent soundtracks but their minimal narrative and dialouge allow for a focused listening experiances without detracting from my extreme gamer level. Do you do this? (I know Chris has while playing Zumas Revenge) Do you have any suggestions of games to play while pods are being cast?

[Merus]

I do this for MMOs, which generally involve working out how best to acquire some specific resource and then hoofing it.

[hedgefield]

I do that too for any game that doesn't have much of an explicit narrative. It's great during TF2 matches, or when playing Grid Wars, which I use as a 'quiet-thinking-time' game anyway to occupy my visual senses. I've had middling results with survival games like DayZ and State of Decay because those also have an element of having to watch for audio cues in the environment for whether you're going to get mangled in 5 seconds or not.

[JonCole]

Open world games where you can make yourself do stuff that doesn't "matter" in a story sense are obviously great candidates, I spent hundreds of hours playing Elder Scrolls/Fallout games while listening to podcasts. Gotta discover all those map locations!

[tegan]

I listen to 'casts while playing Spelunky, Animal Crossing, grinding or hatching eggs in Pokémon, or replaying narratively-driven games that I've already played at least once before (ie: I get an urge about once a year to replay Metroid Other M and end up listening to old podcasts every time).

[Double H]

I like playing games while listening to podcasts as well. Some games that I like to play are Burnout: Paradise, Super Meat Boy, Spelunky, Doom and Doom II, Miasmata, Just Cause 2, XCOM, the Trials games and Tower of Guns. I also have Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved and Pac-man: Championship edition and I just realized they are probably also good.

[Cordeos]

Any game I have already played, doesn't have important dialog or I'm just straight up ignoring the story (Saints Row 4), i listen to Podcasts and audiobooks during. I also make sure to turn off ingame music as it gets distracting having too many noise sources at once. 

[Syd]

MMOs and Spelunky are my podcast-listening games. For Spelunky, I still have the music turned on, since it's a useful tool for knowing when there's still an angry shopkeeper to be concerned about, but I have it set very low.

[syntheticgerbil]

I have gotten so disgusting about listening to podcasts when anything idle (get it!?) is going on that I almost can't do something unless there's some kind of podcast or commentary or news or radio going on in my ear. Sometimes music.

But yeah I will leave podcasts on if I am doing anything repetitive with gaming, like playing a level over, time attack, hard mode, or anything like that. If it's a game where I've heard the sound a hundred times before, then podcast. I also need podcasts to do the dishes and I went grocery shopping today while listening to a podcast on my headphones. Sometimes I can only sleep if there's a podcast going.

[thefncrow]

I do this a bunch with ARPGs.  Diablo 3 and Marvel Heroes are games where I basically start them up, set the sound as low as possible without muting it, and then I listen to podcasts while I play.

 

I also do this a lot while laying in bed and playing something on a handheld.  My routine the last week or so has been to lay in bed and play around 30 minutes of Vagrant Story on my Vita while listening to podcasts, but it's not just that game.  Rogue Legacy, Olli Olli, pretty much most of my Vita games outside of Lumines or Hotline Miami, stuff where the audio is either integrated to gameplay or just so good it'd be a crime to mute it.  And, before anyone gets on me, Rogue Legacy was decidedly on this list until I just had my fill of the music.

[Badfinger]

I do that too for any game that doesn't have much of an explicit narrative. It's great during TF2 matches, or when playing Grid Wars, which I use as a 'quiet-thinking-time' game anyway to occupy my visual senses. I've had middling results with survival games like DayZ and State of Decay because those also have an element of having to watch for audio cues in the environment for whether you're going to get mangled in 5 seconds or not.

 

I definitely can't do podcasts with DayZ. I feel like I always have to be watching and listening for something. That plus the often extremely long periods of serenity is very calming between bursts of craziness.

 

Spelunky is a go-to for me, as well as Diablo. I'll also play some League listening to a podcast, and I haven't been playing MMOs that much but when I occasionally dip a toe in I do. Definitely can't with shooters. I'm betting grand strategy or world builders would work really well too.

[chummer]

I have gotten so disgusting about listening to podcasts when anything idle (get it!?) is going on that I almost can't do something unless there's some kind of podcast or commentary or news or radio going on in my ear. Sometimes music.

But yeah I will leave podcasts on if I am doing anything repetitive with gaming, like playing a level over, time attack, hard mode, or anything like that. If it's a game where I've heard the sound a hundred times before, then podcast. I also need podcasts to do the dishes and I went grocery shopping today while listening to a podcast on my headphones. Sometimes I can only sleep if there's a podcast going.

 

I'm cracking up, but mostly because I'm very much the same way. Do you find it disgusting as a habit itself or b/c of the shows you're listening to? I've made an effort to step away from just video game and comedy shows and start exploring other ones based on people I'm interested in hearing about (searching the store for an author or director's name, for instance). This way, at least I feel it's edifying and not just noise that I need.

 

Lately I've been listening to 'casts while playing Mark of the Ninja, Minecraft, Luftrausers, and XCOM. I've already beat Mark of the Ninja when it came out, but I'm going back and completing all the optional objectives and setting different goals for myself; what a fantastic game that was.

[syntheticgerbil]

I guess it feels disgusting because it's gotten very constant and almost like a crutch if I don't have some MP3s hanging around on my phone or my iPad at hand to become another speaker in the room. Also it feels like podcast listening is something I sometimes I have to hide from my wife because some podcasts might have bad sound quality or come off completely amateur like and it annoys her to be around them and headphones aren't so polite if she's hanging around me at the time. However, she requests I don't listen to the good ones around her when she's trying to sleep because then she wants to know what happens next and can't sleep, like This American Life.

 

But often I just wonder what I used to do before filling my ears with noise all the time to keep my brain from feeling bored. I think there used to be more music, but this was long ago when I still used a portable CD player (I was actually pretty late to start loading up MP3s on devices). I think as I find myself around any amount of devices able to play some sort of content at for me at almost any time of the day it's sort of an addiction.