I dunno why, but I can't stop laughing at this picture.
So, on the heels of me spending a good portion of the week ranting about depressing shit, let's go a little lite today. I guess playing lots of GTA IV has brought out my hostile and aggressive tendencies (ha).
Couple fun things I did lately with my friends: Talked to Chris at Hardcasual. He's posted the second part of the interview we did, in which he asks me for my opinion on things like Big Corporate, money, and our high-risk industry. I'm a little bit embarrassed, as I've said, by how much I talked and I can't believe he wants to post it all, but hey, there it is.
I also helped my friends at Multiplayer pick out the best birds EVER in video games. I've been helping choose animals with them over the past several weeks, like dogs, horses and fish, and now it's bird time. I wonder what's left now? Reptiles? Amphibians?
Finally, I love when teachers are into games. Too often, the academic approach to gaming totally misses the point -- hippie-style, shoegazing educational seminars simulcast in Second Life are the norm, very style-over-substance and lacking in understanding about the core of the medium.
That's why I've been so psyched to see things like this: Most of you have probably already seen, since I'm getting to this much later than I'd like, but my friend Michael Abbott of The Brainy Gamer has been hard at work consulting the community for suggestions on a course he plans to teach on the history of RPGs. So many of his readers were enthusiastic about helping him out that I wanted to point out that I've also just heard from classics professor Roger Travis, who plans to teach Homer using Fable, LotRO and Halo as course material. C'mon, how awesome would that class be? Travis, too, is soliciting the community for feedback, so check out the course info at his blog, Living Epic, and meet him.
Bonus material: Professor Travis compares Niko to Odysseus. Maybe if he'd been my teacher I wouldn't have spat on my copy of Ulysses and burned it.
