The following is an episode of The Drawing Board, a podcast and video series by With a Terrible Fate that highlights the unstructured conversations about video games from which our analytical content is derived.
Today, we’re delighted to introduce a new video interview series, Meet the Game Analysts, designed to give readers of With a Terrible Fate a richer understanding of the people behind the video-game-story analyses you’ll find on this website.
To kick off the series, Dan and Aaron sat down with Lauren Spohn, the latest addition to With a Terrible Fate’s team of video game analysts. Lauren made her video game analysis debut with “The Outset Island Effect,” an article using The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker and Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time to explore how and why video game music often stays with us throughout our lives in ways that other kinds of music do not.
We spoke with Lauren about a wide range of topics, including:
- How she got started with video games and video game analysis
- What The Wind Waker means to her
- A close study of “The Outset Island Effect”
- The past, present, and future of co-op gaming
- Whether and how she sees video games dovetailing with her interests in aviation and her intellectual history program at Oxford
- How to approach video game analysis in a way that improves our passions for the medium, rather than detracting from those passions
- Which video games and storytelling topics she’s most eager to analyze next
Check out the full interview below—and look forward to more insights from Lauren in the future!
1 Comment
Scott Sheppard · January 8, 2021 at 2:23 am
Welcome aboard Lauren! Thanks for being a light of shining nerdiness in a world that lacks enchantment. Your enthusiasm and willingness to share is infectious. I look forward to your future articles!
And I loved the video format for the interview, y’all. I agree that it’s easy to lose the face behind the text-only analysis. This helped me understand her Wind Waker article better. Especially seeing it through the lens of Lauren’s academic interests really made the article take on more meaning for me.
I’m excited to read your thesis when it’s done!
And, as you say, happy new year! Go forth in games.