I Turned My Podcast Into a Video Game

The age of AI continues to deliver countless efficiency gains for podcasters.

Tools like Descript once held the lead position in AI-assisted editing, amazing us all with the automated removal of filler words. Now competitors like Riverside offer nearly all of the same editing tools with a better native recording experience.

Creating podcast cover art with AI can save you a bunch of time if you don't have the budget to hire a human.

But what about creating a discovery experience for your podcast? Something that goes beyond automated AI clips or social posts to win over new followers of your show?

In this video, I'll explain how I built a game for Agency Action, a podcast that I publish as part of a tiny podcast network I own.

Why did I create a game out of my podcast feed?

It's getting harder to stand out from the crowd in an era where podcasts continue to dominate the zeitgeist.

Saying the word "video" at a podcast conference might part the crowd like Moses did the sea. There's no faster way to reopen the "what is a podcast?" debate than speaking that word.

While pundits continue to argue over audio vs video (myself included!), I wanted to focus on the experience of the content. Something that went beyond the feed or the YouTube channel.

At the core of Agency Action, we aim to deliver an educational experience for the audience, so the challenge was to deliver that in a new way. One that could reach new listeners to grow the show, and one that could enhance the dedicated listenership we already have.

Agency Action Replay takes in new episodes every week and turns them into a fun 8-question educational game styled like a retro arcade machine. It's a lightweight experience that gamifies each new episode as an educational challenge.

Why the RSS feed is important

RSS feeds give us portability and a standard to operate from.

In the podcast world, we say it gives us the freedom of distribution. Anyone with an RSS reader or dedicated podcast app can ingest the feed to play your content. But in the coding world, it also means we can build on it or extend it.

Thanks to the transcript tag, I was able to easily analyze each episode's content and turn it into a new level.

Every Tuesday when a new episode is published, my system ingests the feed and transcript file and creates a new 8-question "level" for the player to interact with. If I didn't have transcript files readily available in the feed, building a weekly automated workflow would be much more cumbersome, even with AI.

The technical stuff

I won't get too deep into how I built the game, because it doesn't really matter to the end goal, which is encouraging you to think about creating new experiences around the RSS feed.

In this example, it was a game based on the transcript. Earlier this year, I made a searchable directory of trends and keywords based on Podnews Weekly Review. Don't overlook the value of your content and the backlog of information you've accumulated.