This morning I was a guest on the Civ community podcast The Polycast. (There will be a link to the specific show once Dan Quick gets it all edited and stuff.) I love being invited on to other people’s shows and sites. It’s nice to interact with a different audience and panel, though I clearly did not bring my A game this morning. I didn’t have much to say on many of the topics, partly because the Polycast show format is to go over things that people are talking about on the community forums. Once things have been said, I find it hard to say a lot that is new and original and the Civ community is pretty smart in general. They play more Civ than I do.

People are always asking me for advice about how to do a podcast, which I suppose is a sign of some success. 65 episodes later, I have no idea how to advise others beyond the technical and really don’t consider myself an expert. This is a hard thing, and it gets harder the more popular Three Moves Ahead becomes.

I read an email today from a new listener who discovered us on the Something Awful forums. He was thanking me for providing a podcast where we go over games, concepts and topics in great detail. Three Moves Ahead is not a show that will spend forty minutes on “what we are playing” (not that there is anything wrong with that; two of my favorite shows – Gamers with Jobs Conference Call and Jumping the Shark do that). I can’t just skim a topic, either.

Three Moves Ahead is definitely not a show that pretends we are less mature or more amusing than we are. Tom’s offers of coffee are perpendicular to funny, in fact. We will drop names of battles and authors and political stuff and not always explain them and some people will be left behind, and that sucks but we’re not going to do relationship humor (someone seriously asked me if we had thought about doing that…) or riff on each others’ personal failings as running jokes (this too).

Three Moves Ahead is also not a show that goes over the latest gaming news and then offers a little commentary on the tidbits. As I told the guy who wrote the nice email this morning, I’ve lost no family in the console wars, so I’m not really invested in pushing a news driven podcast agenda. The early few Three Moves Ahead shows are more likely to have covered more than one topic or game. That just didn’t work well, so we avoid that now unless there is a unifying theme. (Big March RTSes, for example.)

Now I am not saying that our way is better – it isn’t. Somebody has to talk about the news and lots of other shows do that and do it very well. The round table talking about gaming news was the default pattern for a long time, though, and no new podcast can approach gaming in that way and hope to break in unless it has a lot of built in fan support.

Our way is definitely difficult, though. I like to jokingly complain about how hard it is to get my podcast team on the same page for an hour of recording. The hardest part is actually setting a schedule. We all have lives, and if there are two big, deep strategy games in a month it can be hard to actually play them in the depth they deserve. At this very moment, I am crash writing an article that refuses to be born and somehow I need to make time for Master of Magic before tomorrow night’s recording.

I’m not really complaining about how hard this can be because we do TMA on the cheap and easy – a single Skype recording that I edit and clean the sound on. No trying to integrate different files from different users. This morning’s Polycast was about two hours of recording and Quick will try to salvage an hour or so from it, I suppose. Lots of editing, lots of cutting. The sorts of things I have little patience for. If I had to do video, I’d simply go mad.

This E3, however, will be even looser. The show is in three weeks and, just like last year, Tom Chick will be the only other TMAer there. But we will be recording more E3 content, probably in the form of mini-shows as well as a longer one. Still playing it by ear, of course, but I did manage to get a third chair for the show: Jenn Cutter will be there and as one of my best friends she couldn’t say no to the chance to come back. (She is a frequently requested return guest.)

So what do you want to hear about at E3 2010? The strategy pickings are a little sparse, but then they always are nowadays. Fill the comment box with suggestions on the sorts of things you want us to talk about in 20 minute chunks in LA.

I promise not to record from the show floor this year.