Cranky T-Rex's Blog

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...

Tonight, this T-Rex was watching a classic movie on AMC as he often does. In that movie, Kevin Costner's character of John Dunbar became known by the Sioux Indians as "Dances With Wolves", thus giving the film its title. There are many things to be said of this film, be it the many Oscars it won or the stirring epic of a loaner on the prairie adapting and making friends with the local tribe, but rather than drone on about some of the more philosophical aspects of this movie that I have been dwelling on this evening, I thought it would be more interesting to create a contest of sorts instead. As "Cranky T-Rex", I essentially already have an Indian name, but what Indian names would some of our politicians have? Here are a few I thought of while I was watching Dances With Wolves: Barack Obama: "SpendsBigMoney" Joe Biden: "DropsWordsfromMouth" Nancy Pelosi: "EyesThatBlinkOften" John Kerry: "ThreePurpleHearts" Robert Gibbs: ...