Roleplaying Games and Spirituality

[ecosophia]

I was delighted recently to be interviewed by Gabriel West of The Table You Fear The Most, a recently founded  Dreamwidth journal/blog discussing the interface between fantasy roleplaying games and the spiritual and psychological realms of human experience. We had a good lively conversation, which brought back a lot of good memories for me. (Yes, those volumes on the left were the original version of Dungeons & Dragons, and yes, I played that version.) 

Interested? Check out the interview and the other fascinating content of the the journal here. 

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I'm glad you did a print interview! You do so many podcasts, and I rarely find time for them, as I have considerable difficulty just sitting and listening to talk (and I haven't found a suitable activity to keep my hands busy). Are there ever written transcriptions of podcasts? If so, could you let us know?

I much enjoyed the interview, thanks.

[ecosophia]

I don't know whether there are print transcriptions of podcasts -- and that's an interesting question. Anybody else?

[jprussell]

I also cannot just sit and listen to podcasts - if my hands and eyes aren't doing something, without a speaker to look at, I feel like I'm not "really doing anything".

1) How to get transcripts: Some of the bigger podcasts make transcriptions available. At the cheaper end is putting the podcast through a "text-to-speech" program of some kind, and at the more expensive end is hiring humans to do transcription. Some podcasts with larger audiences have folks that do fan transcriptions - for any with a large enough following, consider checking out Reddit or other discussion spaces for these. In the past, I've found most auto-generated text-to-speech transcripts nearlye useless, but maybe they've gotten better. You might try downloading some podcasts and putting them through such a program to see if they're helpful for you.

2) Activities for Listening to Podcasts: On the other hand, I do have rather more suggestions if you're looking for suitable activities for listening to podcasts:
1) Driving (obvious if you do it, not helpful if you don't have to!)
2) Walking (recreationally or to get places - when I traveled for my job, I listened to a lot of podcasts walking around airports)
3) Household chores (dishes or cooking are especially good for me)
4) Unfocused/Unskilled Handwork (Combines a bit with the above): Need to clean some stuff? How about fold laundry? Knitting uncomplicated patterns? Sanding large, flat spaces?
5) Caring for Little Kids: I have a ~2 month old and a ~4 year old, so when I need to feed the baby or fix dinner for the older one, I often put a podcast on headphones
6) Doing Non-Verbal Work/Play: When I was in college, I would sometimes do Sudokus during lecture to stay awake. I'm sure I wasn't paying as close attention as my full attention would have been, but the numeric-problem-solving part of my brain was apparently not the "linguistic/listening" part of my brain, as I felt like I was getting enough from the lecture and my grades didn't suffer. Use with care, as "multitasking" is usually horse manure.

Cheers,
Jeff

[(Anonymous)]

Addendum to 2): I recently found out that doing Jigsaw puzzles during podcasts works very well for me.

Milkyway