Non-Producer Character (NPC)

Non-Producer Character (NPC)

From Eminent Americans by Daniel Oppenheimer

April 21, 2026 · 1h 27m

About this episode

Daniel Oppenheimer interviews Robert Scaramuccia about his departure from the podcast and his passion for video games.

My guest on the show today is audio producer Robert Scaramuccia , my longtime collaborator on the podcast. Robert is leaving me, as of the end of this episode, so that he can get a healthy work/life balance in place in advance of starting an MFA writing program in the fall. We talk about the things you’d expect — our experience of working together, his thoughts on Eminent Americans , his plans for the future — but we also, fortuitously, focus a fair amount on a topic that I’ve thought about addressing on the show, in the past, but have never pursued because I couldn’t see a obvious way in. It turns out that Robert is wholly fascinated with video games. Pretty much exclusively, to this point, his engagement has been as a player of them. But his hopes, going into the MFA program, is to write about them seriously, and perhaps also to produce podcasts on them. He’s really effing serious about video games. They’re important to his identity, and intellectually and aesthetically fascinating to him. They even, as we get into, played a role in him dealing with some of the emotions around the long sickness and then death of his mother when he was in college. I’ve never been a serious…

People in this episode

Host: Daniel Oppenheimer

Guest: Robert Scaramuccia

Topics covered

  • audio production
  • work-life balance
  • MFA writing program
  • video games
  • personal identity
  • emotional health

Keywords

  • audio producer
  • MFA program
  • video games
  • personal identity
  • emotional health

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: Eminent Americans

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