Category Archives: Games

Jan 06 2015
1 Comment
Athenae, Economy, Games, Kids Today, Television

Better Science Instead of Moral Panics, Please

Author posts hectoring piece on how your precious children should never be near a single screen in operation until they are 40, because while yeah, thousands of children are going hungry every day, the iPad is our country’s greatest parenting challenge. 

Trouble is, a lot of the science relied upon in that piece is, to use a technical term, total crap: 

5. False premises lead inevitably to false conclusions. Rowan says, “technology use restricts movement, which can result in delayed development.” The studies that have shown that restricted movement leads to developmental delays are animal experiments employing conditions of extremely restricted movement (i.e., the inability to move any of their limbs). Not only don’t those extremes apply to mobile device use, some platforms (Kinect, Wii) actually promote physical movement (Staiano, A. E., Abraham, A. A., & Calvert, S. L. (2012); Staiano, A. E., & Calvert, S. L. (2011); Graves, L., Stratton, G., Ridgers, N., & Cable, N. (2007); Graf,D., Pratt, L.V., Hester, C.N., Short, K.R. (2009)).

[snip]

10. Marketing is not research. Rowan’s 10th point, that today’s childrearing and education are unsustainable, is unsupported except by promotion for videos on the author’s website.

“Children are our future, but there is no future for children who overuse technology.” I’m not sure whether to first address the hyperbole (actually, in today’s society, the future is more dim for children who are kept ignorant to responsible and productive technology use) or the tautology (overuse of anything is a bad idea — we should be concerned about any child whose life is circumscribed by one thing).

We have a small apartment. I use my laptop and phone to do work around Kick all the time, because I have a powerful need to keep a roof over her head. My father plays music for her from the iPad he brings with him each week when he visits. And if I hadn’t been able to watch some Netflix during my maternity leave I don’t think any of us would be alive right now.

I’m not defending parking your kids in front of the TV 24-7 or having your child’s only toy be an iPod, but can we please, please argue for moderation and not for keep all technology away from children and read to them from comic books like we had growing up because nobody feared those OH SHIT:

Dr. Wertham, whose background as a civil rights activist has been forgotten, had no patience for super-heroes. He accused Batman and Robin of being light in their leotards, and called Superman a fascist. Wonder Woman, meanwhile, posed a sexually charged threat to morality. (In her early incarnations, Wonder Woman was indeed inappropriate for kids, but Superman was about as fascist as Betty Boop. As for the Caped Crusader and sidekick, one of the men behind Batman joked to Hajdu that their private lives were “their own business.”)

As Hajdu notes, Wertham and his cronies often based their much-touted “research” on nothing more than assumptions and a lazy understanding of causes and effects. Yes, some delinquent kids enjoyed comic books. So did almost all other kids. Where was the proof of a link?

Unless we look at kids’ media consumption in conjunction with their other life circumstances or real-life behavior, freaking out over your toddler knowing how to unlock a phone is pointless. I’m more worried about Kick unlocking the ferret cage.

A.

Nov 11 2014
2 Comments
Athenae, Games, Immoral Values

Shorter Andrew Sullivan: Ladies Need To Stop Overreacting to Rape and Murder

It’s about ethics in journalism: 

A group called Women, Action, and the Media, which advocates for better representation of women, is testing a new reporting process for gender-based harassment. The group developed a tool for reporting harassment and will forward confirmed reports to Twitter. “If it checks out, we’ll escalate it to Twitter right away (24 hours max, hopefully much less than that) and work to get you a speedy resolution,” says the group, which abbreviates itself as WAM. “But please note: we’re not Twitter, and we can’t make decisions for them.”

I wondered what exactly this small non-profit believes in. You can check them out here or check their agenda from the statements in the video above. Their core objective is what they call “gender justice in media.” That means that they are interested in far more than curbing online harassment. They want gender quotas for all media businesses, equal representation for women in, say, video-games, gender parity in employment in journalism and in the stories themselves.

THE HORROR.

This nefarious group of women will CENSOR TWITTER:

I can find no reason to oppose a stronger effort by Twitter to prevent individual users from stalking or harassing others – but if merely saying nasty things about someone can be seen as harassment, then where on earth does this well-intentioned censorship end?

SLIPPERY SLOPES! First you bitches won’t let us give you a simple damn compliment:

@SonBateman @chloT94 I would rape the shit out of her

— Pumpkin Fucker (@ELNEIGHBORADOR) November 10, 2014
@ELNEIGHBORADOR @chloT94 I would fucking eat her remains

— 2ND (@SonBateman) November 10, 2014

And next it will be marrying box turtles! Madness! Anarchy!

Somehow, I suspect the culture wars online just got a little more frayed. Because Twitter has empowered leftist feminists to have a censorship field day.

Sigh. From the announcement Sullivan quotes in his own damn post:

The group developed a tool for reporting harassment and will forward confirmed reports to Twitter. “If it checks out, we’ll escalate it to Twitter right away (24 hours max, hopefully much less than that) and work to get you a speedy resolution,” says the group, which abbreviates itself as WAM. “But please note: we’re not Twitter, and we can’t make decisions for them.”

So they are forwarding things. To Twitter. On an advisory basis.

“We’re always trying to improve the way we handle abuse issues, and WAM is one of many organizations we work with around the world on best practices for user safety,” a company spokesman told The Verge.

Where will this terrible tyranny end?

A.

Via Emma.

Oct 26 2014
4 Comments
Athenae, Games, Geek Cred, Kids Today, Twitter

On Losing Your Identity and #Gamergate

GamerGate and its bullshit makes the NYT: 

These players are so concerned about the fragility of big-budget video games in the face of cultural analysis and criticism that they circulated an online petition last year calling for the website GameSpot to fire a critic, Carolyn Petit, for daring to complain that Grand Theft Auto V “has little room for women except to portray them as strippers, prostitutes, long-suffering wives, humorless girlfriends and goofy, new-age feminists that we’re meant to laugh at.” (There were no such demands for the heads of male critics — including me, writing in The New York Times — who said pretty much the same thing.)

To me, these anti-intellectual players, who want games to be “just games” and want criticism of them to be devoid of things like political and social context, are almost as worrisome as the horrifying, and criminal, actions of the harassers.

It’s been hard for me to wrap my head around this because it’s so predictable and sad, and infuriating, and difficult to explain. I mean, not, not really, when you’ve been around angry white geekboys your whole life, but to the Normals this seems like anthropology. Who are these strange creatures and why do they interact with their environment in this way?

There’s a bizarre comfort to being a picked-on underdog in such a minor way. Like back in the 90s when we were the only ones who understood the Internet. It was like having a secret language, like belonging to something when all the traditional, celebrated ways of belonging (cheerleading, jock stuff, honor society) rejected us. This, this geek thing, this Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, video-game thing, made us special.

It wasn’t that this was the only thing left to us after the cool kids took all the good stuff, oh no. It was that we knew something others didn’t. It was that we didn’t even WANT your mainstream culture. It wasn’t cool enough for us. We told ourselves this over and over and over.

(My first couple of boyfriends from this world were real shitheads, if you’re wondering.)

And this was it, okay. Trying to explain dork culture prior to the Internet is like trying to explain the loneliest, saddest thing there is: You like wrote letters to other people who watched what you watched, who loved what you loved. You had to buy magazines. Conventions happened because there was no other way to communicate. Everybody in the world could have loved what you loved but there was no way of knowing it. If the six people who lived on your block weren’t into your stuff it was incredibly isolating.

So you take what used to make you special, what felt like the only thing you have, and suddenly everyone’s into it. Everyone knows about it. Everyone has opinions about it. Pretty girls, who wouldn’t look at you twice, they think they can have what you have! They think they can speak your secret language! But if they can, then what makes you special? If the jocks and the cheerleaders can play games, too, what have you got?

What story can you tell yourself now to make yourself special? If being a gamer is something anyone can be, while being lots of other things, what are you?

I don’t mean to sound sympathetic to these douchebags, by the way. I have zero patience for pasty nerds with entitlement complexes and personality disorders. I’ve backed out of game-dates with Mr. A specifically because if I have to sit next to one more B.O.-reeking mouthbreather who hasn’t washed his hair in a week who’s going to be angry at me for not remembering all 12,000 rules to Seven Wonders I will lose it. I’m not saying any of these guys are right. But I think there’s something going on here nobody’s quite nailed.

Maybe I’m not explaining it right. Why shouldn’t you take joy in so many people discovering what you love? Why shouldn’t you rejoice that now you can sit next to the pretty girls and jocks in the cafeteria of life because you can at least talk Diablo with them? Why shouldn’t games be open to all of us, and every opinion about games be valid?

This is a cousin to the demographic freakouts and the stupid War on Christmas bullshit and the way everybody loses their shit when somebody says Santa might not be white. Like on its face, who gives a fuck if some girl wants to play your games? If some girl wants to write about your games? If somebody you think is a Chipster meatstick wants to call himself a gamer?

Who does it threaten?

Only those who want to keep one thing, one secret thing, in their secret hearts, and not let anybody else in. Only those with nothing else to feel special about.

A.

Oct 08 2014
3 Comments
Athenae, Big Damn Heroes, Diary, Do Something, Epic Blogger Win, Games, Geek Cred, Immoral Values, Kids Today, LOL, Music, Political Crack, Pony, Bitches!, So Called Liberal Media, Stupid Republican Tricks, Television, Terrorism, Web/Tech, Weblogs

ANNIVERSARY PARTY CRACK VAN

Donate and join the fun below! 

Update: Thanks to all for joining in!

Dec 16 2012
5 Comments
Athenae, Economy, Games, Immoral Values, Kids Today, Terrorism, War in Afghanistan, War in Iraq

It’s Always Time to Talk About Shit That Doesn’t Matter

I keep going back to this, from the brilliant Cleolinda:

(Here’s my thought on that in a nutshell: Violent movies and videogames do not make people violent. Violent people are attracted to violent media. Of course, so are many of the rest of us, just for different reasons. I ended up watching The Matrix about 46,000 times–at one point on a three-day loop–for the book, and I shot nobody. If you want to talk about warning signs, don’t look at the kid’s taste in movies or his literary output–look at those two things in the context of his real-life behavior, which was already disturbing his teachers and classmates. Stephen King? A folksy, personable guy in real life. Quentin Tarantino? Full of energy and enthusiasm. Consequently, no one expects them to go on shooting rampages. The bitter, stalkative kid who won’t even speak when spoken to, who also writes about bloody murder sprees? For God’s sake, keep an eye on him.)

I would never say we don’t need to have a less nihilistic, brutal, violent culture. But we can start working on that by refraining from blowing up so many fucking kids in the world and starving them of food and care here at home. Once we are done with that I will listen to you about shooting hookers in GTA or whatever the hell we think is the problem right now. Once we are done making sure everyone can EAT, we can get on to what disaffected suburban brats are reading these days.

Once we’re done with this:

The police came quickly and carried my son screaming and kicking into the bowels of the hospital. I started to shake, and tears filled my eyes as I filled out the paperwork—”Were there any difficulties with…at what age did your child…were there any problems with…has your child ever experienced…does your child have…”

At least we have health insurance now. I recently accepted a position with a local college, giving up my freelance career because when you have a kid like this, you need benefits.You’ll do anything for benefits. No individual insurance plan will cover this kind of thing.

No individual insurance plan, and until the laughably toothless health care reform passed last year which has been called a staggering overreach of government power, few insurance plans AT ALL. The kinds of intensive therapies children need, even with Cadillac insurance, can bankrupt middle class families. Can bankrupt relatively wealthy families. Can, even if there is money to pay for them and doctors to provide them, can quite simply drag a family under with the grinding, every day process of staying level enough with the horizon to buy groceries and go to school.

It is one of the grand ironies of what little mental health assistance exists that when you need it most, that is when you are usually so far beyond the beyond that accessing it seems like going to the moon.

But getting back to Cleolinda’s wise words up there, what we’re not doing very well right now is creating a nonviolent world for any of us. (I almost wrote “our kids,” as if adults have no need of peace and decency.) That violence is not, primarily, on screens or in “the media” or anywhere imaginary, but imaginary violence is all we can seem to bring ourselves to talk about when things like this happen.

It’s all we can bring ourselves to try to address, because real violence, real agents of violence, are political, and controversial, and emotional and upsetting and they’re going to make dinner conversation awkward and difficult. Everybody agrees that shooting fictional aliens is probably not the most productive use of anyone’s time. Almost nobody agrees on the correct number of children that have to be killed in drone strikes so as to properly elevate our national dick, or how much money we spend turning schools into prisons instead of the other way fucking round.

It’s like there’s a list somewhere, of Things We Can Address, and it’s all stuff like why so many kids have ADHD, and how parents aren’t hugging their children enough, and where precisely in the schoolyard we should stick the plaque proclaiming GOD IS LOVE because that’ll fix everything. It’s how many teachers need to be armed, and how many cops need to be at every entrance, and the opinion that perhaps we need fewer cops in schools and OH SHIT RIGHT FEWER HOLES IN THE SCHOOLS’ ROOFS WHILE WE’RE AT IT never quite makes it through the World of Warcraft soundtrack blaring on every goddamned Sunday show.

(See, already there you go, asking why I have to put it just that way. Can’t I use nicer language?)

We have limited ourselves to addressing matters that don’t need addressing, so as to drown out the screaming of the things that do.

A.

Dec 16 2012
5 Comments
Athenae, Economy, Games, Immoral Values, Kids Today, Terrorism, War in Afghanistan, War in Iraq

It’s Always Time to Talk About Shit That Doesn’t Matter

I keep going back to this, from the brilliant Cleolinda:

(Here’s my thought on that in a nutshell: Violent movies and videogames do not make people violent. Violentpeople are attracted to violent media. Of course, so are many of the rest of us, just for different reasons. I ended up watchingThe Matrix about 46,000 times–at one point on a three-day loop–for the book, and I shotnobody. If you want to talk about warning signs, don’t look at the kid’s taste in movies or his literary output–look at those two thingsin the context of his real-life behavior, which was already disturbing his teachers and classmates. Stephen King? A folksy, personable guy in real life. Quentin Tarantino? Full of energy and enthusiasm. Consequently, no one expects them to go on shooting rampages. The bitter, stalkative kid who won’t even speak when spoken to, whoalso writes about bloody murder sprees? For God’s sake, keep an eye on him.)

I would never say we don’t need to have a less nihilistic, brutal, violent culture. But we can start working on that by refraining from blowing up so many fucking kids in the world and starving them of food and care here at home. Once we are done with that I will listen to you about shooting hookers in GTA or whatever the hell we think is the problem right now. Once we are done making sure everyone can EAT, we can get on to what disaffected suburban brats are reading these days.

Once we’re done with this:

The police came quickly and carried my son screaming and kicking into the bowels of the hospital. I started to shake, and tears filled my eyes as I filled out the paperwork—”Were there any difficulties with…at what age did your child…were there any problems with…has your child ever experienced…does your child have…”

At least we have health insurance now. I recently accepted a position with a local college, giving up my freelance career because when you have a kid like this, you need benefits.You’ll do anything for benefits. No individual insurance plan will cover this kind of thing.

No individual insurance plan, and until the laughably toothless health care reform passed last year which has been called a staggering overreach of government power, few insurance plans AT ALL. The kinds of intensive therapies children need, even with Cadillac insurance, can bankrupt middle class families. Can bankrupt relatively wealthy families. Can, even if there is money to pay for them and doctors to provide them, can quite simply drag a family under with the grinding, every day process of staying level enough with the horizon to buy groceries and go to school.

It is one of the grand ironies of what little mental health assistance exists that when you need it most, that is when you are usually so far beyond the beyond that accessing it seems like going to the moon.

But getting back to Cleolinda’s wise words up there, what we’re not doing very well right now is creating a nonviolent world for any of us. (I almost wrote “our kids,” as if adults have no need of peace and decency.) That violence is not, primarily, on screens or in “the media” or anywhere imaginary, but imaginary violence is all we can seem to bring ourselves to talk about when things like this happen.

It’s all we can bring ourselves to try to address, because real violence, real agents of violence, are political, and controversial, and emotional and upsetting and they’re going to make dinner conversation awkward and difficult. Everybody agrees that shooting fictional aliens is probably not the most productive use of anyone’s time. Almost nobody agrees on the correct number of children that have to be killed in drone strikes so as to properly elevate our national dick, or how much money we spend turning schools into prisons instead of the other way fucking round.

It’s like there’s a list somewhere, of Things We Can Address, and it’s all stuff like why so many kids have ADHD, and how parents aren’t hugging their children enough, and where precisely in the schoolyard we should stick the plaque proclaiming GOD IS LOVE because that’ll fix everything. It’s how many teachers need to be armed, and how many cops need to be at every entrance, and the opinion that perhaps we need fewer cops in schools and OH SHIT RIGHT FEWER HOLES IN THE SCHOOLS’ ROOFS WHILE WE’RE AT IT never quite makes it through the World of Warcraft soundtrack blaring on every goddamned Sunday show.

(See, already there you go, asking why I have to put it just that way. Can’t I use nicer language?)

We have limited ourselves to addressing matters that don’t need addressing, so as to drown out the screaming of the things that do.

A.

Sep 21 2011
3 Comments
Games, Science, VirgoTex

Winning the internet, all of it

It’s not often, lately anyway, that we read a story that makes us want to fistbump the whole interwebs and shout, “Fuck yeah humans!”

Butthis is one of those stories.

Video-game players have solved a molecular puzzle that stumped scientists for years, and those scientists say the accomplishment could point the way to crowdsourced cures for AIDS and other diseases.

“This is one small piece of the puzzle in being able to help with AIDS,” Firas Khatib, a biochemist at the University of Washington, told me. Khatib is the lead author of a research paper on the project, published today byNature Structural & Molecular Biology.

The feat, which was accomplished using acollaborative online game called Foldit, is also one giant leap for citizen science — a burgeoning field that enlists Internet users tolook for alien planets, decipher ancient texts anddo other scientific tasks that sheer computer power can’t accomplish as easily.

“People have spatial reasoning skills, something computers are not yet good at,” Seth Cooper, a UW computer scientist who is Foldit’s lead designer and developer, explained in a news release. “Games provide a framework for bringing together the strengths of computers and humans.”

110916-coslog-foldit-link.photoblog500


Feb 24 2010
2 Comments
Athenae, Games

Elder-Wii

This is awesome:

Youngster giving Wiis to seniors

A Christmas trip to visit his great-grandmother in a nursing home
sparked an ongoing service project for 10-year-old Lorenzo Little.

His trip to Heartsong Nursing Home in Belleville left an impression.

“(Residents) always look so bored,” the Janesville boy said.

“So I thought that at home, if I enjoyed my Wii, why wouldn’t they enjoy a Wii?” he said.

He talked with his parents, Greg and April, about his idea during the car ride home.

With their help, Lorenzo’s goal is to raise money to put Nintendo
Wii gaming systems in as many area assisted living and senior centers
as possible. The “Elder-Wii Project” already has raised enough money to
buy and deliver one Wii to the Heartsong Nursing Home.

Lorenzo started by calling family and friends to explain his project and seek donations.

“I ended with about $300 in a month,” he said.

He’s also been a guest on The Stan Milam Show on WCLO radio and has a Facebook fan group with more than 150 fans.

Lorenzo delivered the Wii to his great-grandmother’s nursing home
last month and showed her how to bowl and box on the gaming system.

He’s raised more than $600, and a second Wii soon will be delivered
to a yet-to-be announced senior home in the area. He’s working on plans
for his third donation.

Lorenzo and his parents are planning fundraisers to start in spring.
GameStop in the Janesville Mall is working with the family to supply
the Wiis.

A.

Jan 05 2010
10 Comments
Athenae, Games, Geek Cred

Resenting the Youth

Amanda comes close to articulating the thing that always trips my wires about Those Kids Today stories:

As much as it defeats the desires of curmudgeons to believe that kids
these days are somehow losing their way, the truth is that IQ scores
have been rising steadily over the generations, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. Science writer Steven Johnson wrote an entire book, Everything Bad Is Good For You,
where he effectively argues that the very “overstimulation” that people
like Farndale resent is probably why people keep getting smarter.
Having spent the past two days deeply immersed in the newest version of
Super Mario Brothers, I can safely agree with Johnson that video games
actually worked my brain pretty hard, with no noticeable decline in my
literacy skills. After all, a good video game is a rapid fire series
of problem-solving situations. Shouldn’t we want kids to spend their
leisure time working on that? (Scientist friend on hand wants it to be
known that video games are used as therapy for ADHD kids, to retrain
their brains to concentrate. Also that it works a lot better than
boring kids to death in public schools.)

[snip]

Not that I think any of this reality will cause the curmudgeons of the
world to lay off complaining about kids and their video games.Once
you give yourself permission to resent kids for having access to
pleasures that baffle you, you’re probably not going to be in the mood
to applaud them for also being better at problem-solving and having
greater comfort with rapidly changing technology.

Emphasis mine, because it is resentment, and the reason it makes me crazy is that it’s unproductive. Look, man, I’m sorry I don’t have to walk uphill both ways to school, but that … what … I mean, what does that even DO? If I apologize for not knowing how hard you had it, can we move on to cure cancer and end poverty and shit now? We have things to DO here.

I pull this shit, too, I’m not immune, I wear 1940s dresses and write about local history and this is mycurrent favorite movie, but let’s not pretend it’s a dodge. For example, my telling you all about how I used to go home from my job at the paper with line tape in my hair and six bandages on my fingers from Xacto knife cuts and covered in wax from doing paste-up may be funny to us both, but it doesn’t actually help you get the paper out your own self. Living in the world we live in, what are we to do? Memory lane is awesome, I live there part of the time. But memory lane starts being a destructive escape the moment you start acting like it’s a year-round hangout and using it as a way to avoid worrying that somebody is passing you by.

Now, granted, not everyone thrives with the Wii or the Interwebs jacked directly back into their heads, but this is exactly the point. This one-size-fits-all attitude that the future is always scary and entertainment is always suspect and pop culture is always destructive and TV rots your brain and typing on a typewriter is just more virtuous because it’s REAL ™ and whatnot is just as dumb as saying the iPhone is automatically better than anything ever and Facebook is the new Christmas andyou old, motherfucker and we should all stop speaking to one another in anything but binary and burn all our books because they take up space in the library. People do not all react the same way to everything.

We all have things that shaped us and we all have values but this turns into an argument not about those values but about brand loyalties. The Internet does not prevent us from working hard or having meaningful interaction with others, not by its own self. Video games by the nature of their existence do not make someone an anti-social asshole, they just help people who are already anti-social assholes reinforce those tendencies; if it wasn’t video games it’d be something else. Didn’t we have this dumbassed argument after Columbine, already? I don’t even play video games, because I’m lazy as hell and it takes work to build up any skill at those things, but I get so nuts when people try to blame the existence of morons on anything but those morons.

And it doesn’t really say anything all that nice about the speaker, either, saying that your generation was awesome just because you didn’t have all this stuff. Better to argue, really, that it was your superior work ethic and your general adherence to Good Things in The World and your innate power of Great that kept you from sucking, and not a lack of access to Playstation.

A.

Jul 24 2009
Leave a comment
Games

Pimpin’

My little brother’s fine establishment. If any of you are in the Racine-Milwaukee area, stop by and check it out. The owner personally kicked my ass at air hockey last week.

Tell him you’re a friend of his sister’s and he may or may not go easy on you.

A.

Mar 20 2009
3 Comments
Games

The Value of Madness

Don’t give me a pill or send me to a shrink. It’s just the Madness. I’m fine.

Each year about this time, I nestle into the couch with an over-sized box of Wheat Thins and 923 cans of Diet Coke. I’ve got the TV, laptop and computer all humming as I scour the monitors for the sign of the next greatest game. Eventually, The Missus will come downstairs and say something like, “For God sakes! Open a window and let some of this radiation out of here!The Midget’s pet rabbit is starting to mutate!“

March Madness cuts a wide path through the workforce each year. A lot of “personal days” get used anda ton of “24-hour flu” hits around this time of year. What other event inspiresa full streaming website with every game on it, complete with a “boss button” so you can dodge work without ending up unemployed?

I gave up on filling out brackets long ago. Sure, I’ll pony up for a newsroom league or something, but I usually punch down my picks in about six seconds and move on with life. I learned long ago that there’s more joy in finding a new favorite team every six minutes than there is in hoping North Carolina makes another run to the Final Four. The joy comes from the schools you’ve never heard of putting the fear of God into the blue bloods.

In the here and now, it’s trying to figure out why the Butler mascot looks the pretty much the same asGonzaga’s and yet one is nicknamed “the Bulldogs” while the other is called “the Zags.” It’s pulling for a team from a religious school, even though their belief system irritates you because they’re just so damned gutty. It’s wondering what the hell a “Zip” is andwhy a mid-Ohio team uses a kangaroo as a mascot. Even better, does anyone knowwhat the hell this thing is?

It’s Pete Carrill’sPrinceton Tigers unseating the national champs in 1996, giving the old man a first-ever tournament victory in his last-ever appearance.It’s the Richmond Spiders, the Santa Clara Broncos and the Hampton Pirates who give every 15 seed the glimmer of hope it needs to saddle up against Goliath. It’sWestern Kentucky’s miracle three last year that came off of the worst-designed play ever.

It’s still remembering the names:Lorenzo Charles, Harold Jensen, Bryce Drew andJermaine Wallace.

It’s the social changes brought about by teams likeTexas Western. It’s the cultural changes brought about byMagic and Larry. It’s the simple changes we make as we finally get to know the guy in the cubicle next to us by asking, “Did you see what Western Kentucky did to Illinois last night?”

Every year, I watch the first two rounds intently. That’s where the best games are. The 14 seed that refuses to die quietly lives there. The team that never got covered outside of its campus lives there. The guys with three hyphens in their names who tongue-tie Dick Vitale live there. After that, the regular patterns form. The teams that go 10-deep and reside in major conferences squeeze out the American Universities of the world. Still, for that one moment, we hope and pray we’re all one moment away from the next great game.

We can’t help ourselves. It’s the madness