Cranky T-Rex's Blog

"Let SHIELD go!" - Elsa auditioning for Avengers 2 It occurs to me I never reviewed Captain America:  The First Avenger despite the scathing rebuke I had written  about the director's plans for the character.  Suffice it to say, his first outing was actually a pleasant surprise that I rather enjoyed. Now we’re into Phase 2 of Marvel’s plan for their movie world, and Captain America: The Winter Soldier continues the story of WW2 super soldier Steve Rogers following The Avengers ( which was pretty awesome. )  It seems a common notion that The Winter Soldier has dethroned that movie as the best thing Marvel has done to date, and those folks do have a convincing argument. While Iron Man is Marvel’s most consistently good movie (and my favorite) and The Avengers is the most fun ride, The Winter Soldier is the best story they’ve told.  Instead of your standard Guy Becomes Hero/Supervillain Needs Stopping movie, we have a man trying to hold on to t...

I’ve written previously about why involvement in gaming culture is important and worked through an example of how video games can help us explain political concepts to the youth of America . Now let’s talk about how the video game industry can teach us how to fight the culture war directly. The gaming world operates very much like our political system. Thanks to new technologies, the whole industry goes through cycles where consumers “re-elect” the existing brands/franchises or hop on board with the inevitable newcomers.  Instead of political parties and ballot boxes, rabid fans will line up along battle lines and try to drag moderates into their camps, and their vehemence makes hardcore Democrats and Republicans look like posers. After all, nothing quite compares with the stream of obscenities that can come from a 9 year-old that disagrees with your opinion of the latest Call of Duty game.  So if you want to learn about swaying entrenched supporters, there are fe...