Coming Soon: New With a Terrible Fate Podcast Series

Today, it’s my pleasure to announce an upcoming addition to With a Terrible Fate’s suite of video-game analysis that many people have requested over the years: a weekly podcast studying the storytelling of games.

You’ll be able to find the With a Terrible Fate podcast right here on withaterriblefate.com, but it will also be accessible on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever else you may like to listen.

While Dan Hughes and I will be regular voices on the podcast, I’m pleased to announce that the project will be spearheaded by a new addition to With a Terrible Fate’s team of video game analysts: game studies scholar Stefan Heinrich Simond, a researcher and lecturer at the Institute of Media Studies at Philipps University Marburg. Stefan is currently working on a PhD thesis analyzing the construction of madness in video games, and he previously served as the host and chief editor of Pixeldiskurs, a German game studies podcast boasting 230 episodes of weekly content.

Check out the audio trailer for With a Terrible Fate’s new podcast below, then read on for more details on format and scheduling.

We’ve meticulously designed the structure of our new podcast in a way that we hope will be both engaging and authentic to With a Terrible Fate’s unique mode of analyzing video-game stories.

• ~30 minutes of each episode will be a “main story,” exploring some aspect of video-game storytelling in depth.
• The remaining ~30 minutes will be subdivided into “side quests,” in which each analyst will bring to the table a smaller topic concerning anything that’s currently on their mind about the world of video games.

While the spirit of the new With a Terrible Fate podcast will be similar to that of our first podcast attempt, The Drawing Board, it’s our hope that the new podcast will be an improved experience for listeners in three ways:

1. It will be more accessible. Whereas The Drawing Board’s podcast was constrained to SoundCloud, our new podcast will be broadly available across all podcast platforms.
2. It will be more regular. Whereas The Drawing Board was sporadic in its releases, our new podcast will consist of weekly conversations, forming a balanced counterpoint to our analysts’ longer, written, less predictably published analyses.
3. It will be more variable in topic. The Drawing Board focused almost exclusively on free-wheeling discussions about specific video-game storytelling concepts our analysts were considering for future articles they’d like to write; while that type of discussion will still feature prominently in our new podcast, we’re also excited to offer other kinds of “main stories” such as interviews, video-game “book clubs,” and reading circles for other articles pertaining to the study of video-game stories. We’ve planned our first month of topics to give listeners a clear sense of just how far-reaching we hope this podcast will be.

We’ll start publishing the podcast next month, in May. You’ll be able to easily find it by either following us on social media or simply looking at the publication’s homepage, which now includes a carousel dedicated to showing you our latest podcast episodes. If there are any particular topics you’d like to see us cover or people you’d like us to invite onto the podcast, just send us a message at podcast [at] withaterriblefate [dot] com. And, as always, if you like the mode of video-game-story analysis we’re building and would like to help us do more, you can support us on Patreon.

We’re excited and honored to start this new journey with you—and we can’t wait to share more articles with you soon, as well.