Episode 26 – HDYS Interview with Matt Rossi!

Show Notes

Welcome to Episode 26! – 2:03

A wide-ranging interview with games journalist and fiction writer Matt Rossi! I’m not even going to pretend to make a list of topics, but we talk about starting hit WoW career with his wife, how to approach WoW when your job demands that you spoil all new content as soon as it hits test servers, and his need to dive into lore in any game.

Plenty of talk about lore and storytelling in WoW throughout the years and how the Wrathgate was a turning point in how the stories are delivered to us, the players. We even get into the true purpose of any fiction in our human existence.

We also discuss Matt’s ongoing visual disability, a form of blindness that he explains in more detail. July is the celebration month for Disability Pride, and in hopes of sharing awareness of disability and accommodations in video games, he explains how his severe visual impairment affects his play of Warcraft and other types of games. It turns out that flexible difficulty and voice acting are two great accessibility options. Developers take notice.

Lightning Round! – 1:19:53

This round of 8 questions is not quick, but it takes the form of “Two Lizzes and a Joe (and a Cory)”.

Outro – 1:31:13

• Thanks to Blizzard for the amazing music and sound, to OGRE for intro/outro music, my lovely and supportive wife, and you for listening.
• Big thank you to Matt! BlizzardWatch puts out podcasts weekly and you can find Matt as a regular host on BlizzardWatch and LoreWatch. He also writes a column and other videogame coverage for the news site. You can also check out Matt’s published fiction at the Goodreads and Amazon links!

• https://blizzardwatch.com/author/matt/
• https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B01M6BQ5SF
• https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/308134.Matthew_Rossi

• You can contact me at soloqueuewow at gmail.com, Bluesky, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.
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• Support the show at Patreon.com/SoloQueueWoW
• Thank you to contributing patrons, Andrew, Righteous Bandy, ThatSkyGuy, Cyn, Snek of Vol’dun, Jon, and Scott! And thanks to all the free supporters as well!

“We will see you out there."