Irrational Games, nee 2K Boston, nee Looking Glass Studios, has a half-hour monthly podcast called Irrational Behavior. It consists of five to seven very short interview segments with various employees of the studio, not least among them Irrational impresario Ken Levine. As these are people who’ve had long careers at some of the more creative game studios around, their stories are uniformly interesting and frequently delivered with more than a little flair. The whole thing is nicely produced, with plenty of musical bumpers and narration by GFW/EGM alumnus Shawn Elliott to tie it all together.
Podcasts can be stuffed with filler or too topical to retain value in the future. At their worst, podcasts are little more than torrents of consciousness; unfiltered, meandering, and ultimately frustrating. Irrational Behavior avoids all of these traps, although probably at the cost of a more rapid publication schedule. The cast is slick, to the point, and satisfying. It is, of course, marketing, but it is also entertaining, and as long as you bear in mind what it is you are listening to, the fun can be safely sluiced out of the propaganda via various mechanisms within your brain.
You can find Irrational Behavior on the iTunes store, or get all of the episodes from the Irrational Games website here.
-ssr