The Dear Gamer Podcast was a game review column I wrote for parents on an old Christian website. It was meant to be an in-depth look at a game's content so parents could make better-informed decisions. It transitioned into a supplementary podcast with Jacob Vorland, Morgan Maurer, & myself, to be hosted through Rocket Demon Productions. I edited the audio and wrote the show notes. Over the years it formed into a Q&A podcast for gamers to write in any questions they had about the gaming space. It was inspired by My Brother, My Brother, & Me and grew more in that vein toward the end.
March 2012
Column on CatholicMom.Com
Being raised in a religious home, I knew the unnecessary restrictions religious parents sometimes put on their children. Especially because of the ESRB rating system. Not all Mature or Teen games are rated equally after all. With encouragement from my mother, I connected with CatholicMom.com to write in-depth game reviews to give a better idea of the game than the ESRB rating did. Unfortunately, all that exists on the site now are dead links. So my writing there is lost forever.
August 2012
Rocketdemon Productions
Jacob, Morgan, & myself met through The Dead Worker's Party Podcast group. When Spencer Williams left the group to form Rocket Demon Productions, the three of us were excited to take part. I had been making the Dear Gamer Column for a little while and thought adding different viewpoints via a podcast medium would be helpful & could be fun. So after explaining the idea, recording a test episode, & pitching it to Spencer, we quickly were added to the growing roster of shows.
Jacob, Morgan, and I had fun during this stage of the podcast. We put in a good amount of effort, pulled silly bits, and were happy with the show. Though we never really gained a following.
January 2014
Dear Gamer, A Q&A Show
I don't remember exactly what happened, but the show was put down for a time as Rocketdemon Productions wound down. A few years later I approached Morgan & Jacob to relaunch the podcast on our own. Morgan eagerly joined back up, but Jacob had become enraptured with his own career & was unavailable to rejoin.
So Morgan & myself remade Dear Gamer into a strictly write-in show for gamer-related questions. We never got in any emails so we got our questions through Reddit, Yahoo Answers, and some old debunk Q&A site. It again was a good time.
2016 & Beyond
The End
Over the years Morgan & I had some extended breaks, periods of time the show didn't get posted. But we were fairly consistent over the next two years. We added different segments to keep the show lively, included some recurring characters (voiced by the two of us), and scrapped every question we could from the depths of the internet.
Dear Gamer once again never gained a following, but we had a good time before our schedules diverged and we posted our last episode on January 10th 2016.