Posts Tagged ‘play’
Demaryius Thomas’ Mom Will See Him Play in the NFL for the First Time This Week
Denver Broncos Wide Receiver Demaryius Thomas’ mom will see play in the NFL for the first time this week. Why does this matter? Well, it’s a nice story. It’s also one of the rare times that parenting and fantasy football intersect. Since I do both of those things, I had to write about it.
Stay with me. There’s a point here. I promise.
English: Demaryius Thomas, a player on the Denver Broncos American football team. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
From FantasyPros.com:
Thomas will face the worst secondary in the NFL and will be playing with a little more on the line. Peyton Manning is fully aware that this will be the first time Thomas’ mother will see him play in a professional football game, and he will make it a special day. I am going bold here in predicting two touchdowns for Thomas this weekend.
Emphasis added.
I will admit that my heart likes the analysis. Read more »
Ouya Football Game Raises Eyebrows With Kickstarter Campaign (And Why This Matters To Parents)
Ouya is an attempt to create an alternative gaming console. By “alternative” I don’t mean REM back in the day, I mean “a gaming console that isn’t an XBox 360/One, Wii/Wii U or PS1/2/3/4.” It’s unclear whether or not the thing will succeed, but the folks at Ouya seem to have cash because they’re offering some kind of matching funds to developers who can raise a certain amount of cash via Kickstarter.
One of these developers, MogoTXT, is causing consternation amongst the console cognoscenti, according to a story post at IGN. (Note: all of our information in this post is from the linked IGN article below. That’s our source. We’re not going to go into all of the details because they did all the work so you should go there and read their story if you want to know all the stuff.)
The game Gridiron Thunder (video below) raised sufficient ducats to get more ducats from Ouya, but they had very few backers, and many of the backers seem to have names remarkably similar to each other, as well as to MogoTXT CEO Andrew Won. In other words, some suspect… foul play.
Another intriguing wrinkle: how is MogoTXT planning to release a football (as in NFL) game without having permission to use the images of real players? Maybe they aren’t planning to use images of real players? We don’t know. In general, video sports gamers prefer to play games featuring their favorite superstars, or at least real dudes. I thought the license for this was sold exclusively to the good folks at EA, which they use to make a little game called Madden NFL.
The IGN story states that Gridiron Thunder is the second game to reach the funding mark required to receive extra moneys from Ouya. The other is Elementary, My Dear Holmes!, which sounds much more fun: “A point-and-click adventure game starring legendary sidekick John Watson on an epic quest to prove that Sherlock Holmes is just a jerk.”
By the way, Sherlock Holmes? Public domain. No rights issues there. Just saying.
Why are we writing about this? One, kids play video games. Two, Kickstarter is a real thing. By that I mean crowd-funding is a way to get the money to make a professional quality video game, as well as movies, watches, and who knows what else. Your kids are going to be asking you about Kickstarter. They may already have asked you about it. It behooves you to put crowd-funding on your parental digital radar. Yes, it’s one more thing to think about/learn about/be annoyed with. (What, the Facebook, the Twitter and the Snapchat weren’t enough? Now I have to learn about the Kickstarter too? Oy vey.) At least with this one, your kids could potentially find the money from people other than you to turn their great idea into a reality. That would be awesome.
That’s why I care if a Kickstarter campaign turns out to be skeezy. I would prefer that it NOT be skeezy. There will always be a certain percentage of skeeziness with anything involving the Interwebs. But the less skeeze the better.
Suspicious Ouya Game Kickstarter Campaign Raises Eyebrows via IGN
Getting Kids To Exercise While Being Afraid To Let Them Out Alone
Is there anything more important than teaching kids to exercise? Well, yes, technically there is. But in an age when there are an endless number of screens that children are exposed to, it’s more important than ever to teach kids that it’s important to GET OUTSIDE and run around.
This link is to the American Heart Association web site. Of course, most kids don’t spend a lot of time perusing sites like that. So people come up with cutesy ways to convince them to do it.
I like the NFL’s Play 60 program; I don’t know how effective it is but the idea is certainly a good one. Here’s a video report I did for AOL ParentDish about it. Read more »
