Sometimes a tech problem requires a little strategy to resolve. With some trouble with a microphone among a few other snafus leaving us potentially unable to discuss our planned topic this week, gamers that we are, our solution was to turn this weeks show into a game by putting a little social media to work for us and treating this podcast as something a little more interactive than usual.

The result is this week's experiment in podcasting, a show based on utter miscellany about gaming and gaming culture. We sent a "voiceless" Kris Ligman out to Twitter to gather possible mini-topics for discussion this week related to gaming, and then, of course, arbitrarily assigned points to our podcasters ability for improvisationally riffing on said topics in short conversational bursts.

You will find that some of our intial efforts to shoot from the hip on topics like Lesbian Spider-Women from Mars or "books on video games" may not be all that exceptional, but as the podcast moves along and we bite into some other topics like "rewards in video games" and "spectacle in video games," I think that we gain some conversational momentum and that things get a bit more interesting.

Hopefully, you're willing to bear with us as we experiment a bit with the form. We still don't know if this is a format that we will ever play with again. We'll just have to see how response to the cast goes.

Many thanks though to those who submitted topics to Kris for the sake of this experiment (and apologies to those whose topics we just made a hash out of).