My guest on the show today is audio producer Robert Scaramuccia, my longtime collaborator on the podcast.

Robert is leaving me, as of the end of this episode, so that he can get a healthy work/life balance in place in advance of starting an MFA writing program in the fall. We talk about the things you’d expect — our experience of working together, his thoughts on Eminent Americans, his plans for the future — but we also, fortuitously, focus a fair amount on a topic that I’ve thought about addressing on the show, in the past, but have never pursued because I couldn’t see a obvious way in. It turns out that Robert is wholly fascinated with video games. Pretty much exclusively, to this point, his engagement has been as a player of them. But his hopes, going into the MFA program, is to write about them seriously, and perhaps also to produce podcasts on them. He’s really effing serious about video games. They’re important to his identity, and intellectually and aesthetically fascinating to him. They even, as we get into, played a role in him dealing with some of the emotions around the long sickness and then death of his mother when he was in college.

I’ve never been a serious gamer, but some of it I get. it was part of the mix with my friends when I was growing up, now has a significant presence in the social lives of my 10 and 15 year old sons, and is just this huge thing, obviously, in the social and emotional world of boys and young men and increasingly not so young men. It also seems to me a topic that hasn’t received nearly the degree of serious literary and journalistic attention that it clearly deserves. It gets a lot of ink, in a certain sense, but so much of it is quite shallow, and so little of it seems to even begin to grasp the profound role that games and the ecosystems around them have played, and are playing, in the social and psychological lives of the people who play them.Really enjoyed the conversation. Hope you do too. Apologies in advance as the pace of release slows down for a bit. Still working on finding a new producer, and have some good leads, but for a little while at least I’ll be on my own, and so I will not be as productive. Not going away, though!

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