"If someone had told me when I retired from the Supreme Court that I would be speaking at a conference about digital gaming, I'd be thinking, 'You've had one drink too many,'" said the Honorable Sandra Day O'Connor, former Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
"I have not had much exposure to this world as you might imagine," the 78 year-old told a packed auditorium as the final keynote speaker at the 2008 Games for Change festival Wednesday afternoon. "I don't play video games, sorry," she revealed later during the question-and-answer session.
While O'Connor will probably never play "Halo," she explained that she came into the digital world after noticing how increasingly difficult it is to receive impartial judgments from serving judges who face mounting political pressure and partisan attacks. She feels that the only way to combat this is with video games about civics education. Yes, that's right: video games.
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Early this morning MTV News people who know things about football were passing around an e-mail subject-lined "GREAT STORY." And they sent this e-mail my way.
Didn't they know? I don't speak football.
What got them excited is the XOS PlayAction Simulator, an officially-licensed mod of "Madden" that is being used by some college football programs, including the one at Louisiana State University that is in tonight's Bowl Championship Series game tonight against Ohio State. The Associated Press was reporting that "[LSU quarterbacks] Matt Flynn and Ryan Perrilloux are usually still working on the game plan for the BCS national championship game against Ohio State when they fire up the Xbox these days."
And before it could even hit me that, "oh, apparently the BCS game is today," the gamer in me was realizing that the rest of what the story described seems pretty cool.
I reached out to the folks at XOS to understand what this was all about. A company representative told me that XOS has licensed the PC version of "Madden 08" and has worked with "Madden"-maker Electronic Arts to offer a version of the game designed for coaches and their players. The idea is to enable a coach to create a digital playbook and give it to their players to simulate and learn.
XOS sent me a summary of how it works:
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"If someone had told me when I retired from the Supreme Court that I would be speaking at a conference about digital gaming, I'd be thinking, 'You've had one drink too many,'" said the Honorable Sandra Day O'Connor, former Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.