Check out the charity auction!

If you got here from the link that Jamey Stegmaier posted in the Scythe Metal Mechs Special Edition Charity Auction on boardgamegeek, welcome! If you like podcasts about games or psychology, you have come to the right place! Let me know if you have questions!

If you are unaware of this auction, Cognitive Gamer is part of a charity auction on the popular boardgame site, boardgamegeek.com. You have from now till mid-day Saturday to bid on the new metal mechs upgrade for Scythe. All proceeds will benefit charities that the various bloggers/podcasters/etc. that Jamey has picked to highlight during the auction. You can check it out here! Whatever Cognitive Gamer raises will go to the Boston Children’s Hospital Trust. Thanks so much!

Next episode will be up soon!

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Hi all! Just wanted to give a quick update on Episode 09. This will include an interview with a special guest, and we’ve been at issues on scheduling! At the latest, we’ll get it done this weekend, so look for a new episode by early next week. Sorry for the wait (it will be worth it, though!). In the meantime, play some fun games! In the last few weeks we’ve acquired and played Sagrada, the Metagame, and 7 Wonders, all of which I would recommend! And, special shout-out to Ryan, who gifted me with a deck of Epic Card Game and a couple of other goodies he acquired at GenCon. Here’s a picture of the “gaming pile” on our dining room table.

Growing slowly but surely!

I’m trying to get the word out about the podcast. If you found this website via Boardgame Geek and my attempts there to get the word out better, welcome! I’m now seeing triple digits in some of the episodes! Woo hoo!

I know what the next episode will be, one on problem solving. Then, either Episode 09 or Episode 10 will have a special guest it looks like. We are still working out the details.

Thanks for being on this ride with me! I hope you are enjoying it!

State of the Podcast

I’ve now done four episodes of the podcast. I’m pretty proud of them. I know what the next two are going to be. The next one will be about decision making (well, one small area within decision making, as that broad topic could have 6-8 episodes at least). Then, the sixth one will be a different type of episode, one I’m currently calling a “game vivisection,” where I take one game and examine it from different angles, both cognitively and otherwise. I think I know which game it will be first.

Six episodes then I think will be, not necessarily a “season” but a set. A set of episodes will then have 3-4 shows where I look specifically at a cognitive concept, relating that one concept to a number of games, 1 or 2 more philosophical podcasts, and then 1 or 2 game vivisections.

And, there are people I don’t even know listening to the podcasts! The Word Press plugin I use gives me some info about number of downloads per episodes, along with how they got the episode (Hello! Overcast listeners; that’s the app I use; and, hi to my one listener from Stitcher!)  I set a pretty modest goal of listeners for the outset, think double digits, and it has been met. Once I get six episodes in the can, I’m going to try to “market” a bit more and I have a new goal for after that.

Thanks to all who have listened so far!

We’re Live!

Okay, the first episode of the podcast is now up on iTunes, Google Play, and Stitcher. More than likely, no matter how you listen to podcasts, it probably works with one of those services (but, let me know if it doesn’t). Please subscribe!

The direct links to each of those services can be found here, on the About page.

It’s submitted!

Okay, I figured out ID3 tags and the whole publishing process. I just logged into Apple’s portal for submitting podcasts to their service, and the Cognitive Gamer podcast is now under review (see picture!). Wheeee!!! Oh, and I just got this email:

Dear Podcast Owner

Your podcast feed, [ my feed URL] was successfully added and is now under review.

Sincerely,

The iTunes Store Team

I will let you all know when it goes live and you can acquire it via iTunes’ Podcast app or any other app that subscribes to that service. I may submit it to a couple of other services, but basically about everyone uses iTunes’ feed.

Oh, if you want to listen now, you can just click the Podcasts link in the menu above and get it that way… But, hopefully in the next 2-3 days (Apple’s review process takes a little while) it will appear in podcast feeds everywhere.

The game is afoot!

I have recorded the first podcast! I have the mp3 file that might be what I push out into the world as the first episode. I need to give it another good listen and get some feedback. I have been figuring out ID3 tags and how exactly to register my podcast feed with iTunes’ podcast connect service so that everyone can access it. Perhaps by the end of the week anyone who wants can download the first episode!

I have a draft of the second episode written, so it is almost ready to be recorded. I know what the third one is going to be about, and have ideas for the next couple. My hope is to have 6 episodes up on the RSS feed by the end of the summer (so, August 31, let’s say).

It’s summer!

Hello! It’s been a while since my last update. I made it through finals week, and then my 2-week summer course happened, PSY 225: The Cognition of Game Playing. From my perspective, and I think from my 8 students’ perspectives, it was a success. I had a lot of fun teaching the class, the students enjoyed it, and I believe they learned some cognitive psychology as well. Here is the syllabus, and the revised schedule. Things went pretty much according to plan, except that we didn’t play quite as many games as listed (though at most only one got cut out per day, or we didn’t play through a whole game as planned). We went back and forth between discussing material and playing games. As you can see, I picked games that tied to the topic we just talked about (for the most part), and used that to jump start some good conversations. The textbook was okay (perhaps as good as any textbook, I suppose), and we had some good discussions surrounding Jamie Madigan’s Getting Gamers book.

I would call the course a success. I would change a few things here and there, as I would with most courses. I need to figure out a better way to more tightly couple the game playing with talking about cognitive psychology, and for when I teach this as a regular semester course, I need to think about how to make the course work for 25 students. It worked great with 8.

Of the couple dozen games we played, Secret Hitler was their favorite, somewhat surprisingly. We ended up playing it 3 times in a row on the last day. Other favorites included Carcassonne and Dixit. I also brought in my Playstation VR setup and we enjoyed it for part of one class, talking about various psychological issues relating to virtual reality.

Now that we are through that experience, and the kids have ended their school year (and, we took a couple days off to visit Disney), I will buckle down to my main summer activities: sabbatical stuff with the Glazer Children’s Museum, vacation bible school, a chapter I’ve been asked to write about blogging, and what I’m really looking forward to, creating a podcast! I have the first one about done. Once I get two, maybe three in the can, I’ll get them up on iTunes and figure out how to make a bigger splash on this site.