Six years ago, when I was 12, I got my first iPod touch. I had wanted an iPod for years, and after suffering through operating a Sandisk mp3 player for two years, I decided I was finally ready. I saved up months of allowance and birthday money, and got one. It was everything I had dreamed. The idea of the “internet at my fingertips” was exciting, and being able to play games while listening to music on the same device was awesome, even if the games had Nintendo 64-level graphics at best. One feature of the device stood out to me, though, and it was something I didn’t really understand: podcasts.
I came to learn that listening to podcasts was basically listening to people having a conversation, and as a kid who wasn’t great at holding conversations and was a little socially awkward, that was awesome for me. Listening to people having fun, joking around, or listing the news from a week allowed me to really come to understand the art of conversation and how to be funny.
Was I obsessed? Absolutely. That was the beginning of my awful habit of having earbuds in almost constantly, ignoring the world around me to focus on these tiny, audio-based worlds where everybody got along and was just having fun, which definitely was not how I viewed the world. One show in particular really helped me out, and that was a show called “The GameSpy Debriefings.”
The Debriefings was run by a crew of people working at GameSpy.com, which I essentially viewed as a spin-off site of IGN.com, a website that I read nearly religiously as a 12 year old boy with an unhealthy pension for playing video games on his Nintendo platforms. It was ostensibly a show about video games, but one with wild, disgusting, and raucous tangents. It would not be a stretch to say that listening to the Debriefings made me funny. The show taught me comedic timing, what it meant to be doing character voices, and just generally how to joke around with and put down your friends in a way that didn’t hurt their feelings. If I hadn’t had the Debriefings, I doubt I would have been able to come out of my shell and be as successful as I am now, both socially and academically.
Podcasts have an incredible potential for kids with social issues, and if you know somebody like that, I highly recommend using them as a pseudo-therapy technique.
The GameSpy Debriefings is now dead, but the crew that used to run it has a new show called The Comedy Button. You can subscribe on iTunes, read about it on TheComedyButton.com, or help fund them on Patreon, as I continue to do, at Patreon.com/ComedyButton
I know that the honor system is in place, but I JUST became and a Patron and REALLY want to hear the episode where Ryan interviews his dad. Can any Comedy Button fans help me out?
