The proliferation of gaming in everyday society-

Before I get underway, I have to say Marie and Lily got home well last night and I'm so completely happy to have them home. I rolled around on the floor all day with Lily and gave Marie a kiss everytime she came within 4 feet.

Now, onto a rare Blogimus Rex update...

Disclaimer- this may resonate more with the guys than it does with the girls, but even if this isn't your thing, at least jump down to the end of the post for a surprise ending.

I admit that I like video games. When I was in the vicinity of 6 years old my parents bought me a Colecovision for Christmas with one game- "The Smurfs". A few years later it was Keystone Coppers on the Atari, then I delivered phone books one weekend with my grandma so I could scrape up enough money to buy a Sega Mastersystem, replete with Duckhunt.

My Uncle Bill felt that his Nintendo was destroying his social life, so he donated it to the cause in the early 90's. Double Dribble, Double Dragon, Baseball Stars and the best game ever made... Tecmobowl rocked our world.

We still played basketball, soccer and baseball outside when the weather was nice, but we were growing up alongside videogames, amazed at the graphics of each new system. Super Nintendo had 16 amazing bits. I was about 16 years old at the time, one bit for each year of my life and it was all I ever needed. Zelda on the SNES rocked my world solo style, and Mario Kart rocked my world, and several of my friends worlds simultaneously. Then we hit Nintendo 64 and got upgrades to Zelda and Mariokart and a Gauntlet game. For the first time, Marie joined in the fray and for a short time we had 4 player madness at our house in Springfield. I thought she'd be down with the princess, but she's always had a thing for a green dinosaur named Yoshi.

Now I'm still fascinated as the colors get brighter and faster, but the controllers have so many buttons on them now that it feels like I need to be a trained air traffic controller to wield them. I used to be hot stuff with 2 buttons and a directional pad. I mean c'mon, I still remember that to get unlimited lives in Contra you have to press up, down, up, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, Select, Start. But within the last year, I played Halo online at a friend's house and I felt like an Amish guy while 12 year olds were rerouting the space shuttle's flight path to land on route 8. These games have headsets and microphone voice chat now, so I could hear a little girl laughing at me while they tore me to pieces. I thought, "man, can't believe I lost to a little girl." but then I realized it was just some kid that hadn't even reached puberty.

That said, games will always have a place in my heart, and the "gamer demographic" has changed dramatically. The average aged gamer, taking the adults and kids into consideration, is now like 37 years old. There are Harvard professors addicted to games like World of Warcraft and who write about the genius of the virtual economy it creates. (Not that this helps my argument, but there's also support sites for those same people who are addicted- not tongue in cheek, but real support sites).

But if that wasn't enough, I now submit to my audience the following: Blogger.com, the blogging capital for millions of bloggers, has on their home page the following message. Pay attention to the last sentence:

"Old Blogger is dead! Long live Blogger!

Today at Blogger HQ we accomplished one of our most significant milestones ever: we changed old Blogger’s monitoring from “page us when it goes down” to “page us if it comes back to life in a horrifying, zombie state.”

Most of you probably haven’t noticed, since you’ve been happily (we hope) using new Blogger for several weeks or months now. But we’re excited to be done with it, since now we can focus 100% on the new Blogger and all we want to add to it.

While old Blogger totters off to realize its dream of getting to level 70 in the Burning Crusade, let’s take some time to remember what it took to replace the old Blogger with the new."

Burning Crusade? Level 70? Yep. A direct reference to the World of Warcraft. Just think, while the good people at Blogger.com are adding new ways to post pictures and stay connected to the real world, their minds are drifting off to a fake one where they can beat up dragons for fake loot.





The End