The First Olympics: Athens 1896
Cheap FFXI Gil are on hot sale on all servers, especially on American serversThey looked friendly enough--at least, no one had fruit ready to throw at usIt was simply kind of surreal, after reading the comments on TN this past week and hearing other things at the conference about the problems with game studies and developer/academic relations
After our "high energy" presentation, the questions were even strangerSomeone asked why humanities research got left out, and we had to say that we couldn't find it to be directly relevant on our top 10 list of bulleted pointsIan made the point, and I agreed, that doing the research for this panel made us think differently about academic researchWhile I'm not going to say that what we've done personally has no value, it was a definite challenge to try and make it *directly relevant* in a BULLETED POINT for developersAnd there are huge gaps in what we don't knowWhere is the research about sports games, to take just one example? Anyway, the point is, I enjoyed the exercise, and learned a lot from itI hope the audience did as well
But overall, I like to think that the attendance demonstrates that developers are interested in what academics might be able to tell them (again I will point out: no fruit was thrown)And all week, I talked with developers who were interested in what was going on with research, from the smallest to the largest companiesMaybe the issue is the "larger" communityIt's always easy to abstract and oversimplify at that levelBut I know that on an individual level, there are real conversations and collaborations going onI don't want this to turn into some rosy "it's better than we think" or "can't we all just get along" thing, but I do think that perhaps the situation is not as dire as it's hyped to beBut then again, I haven't gotte my evals back yet
The First Olympics: Athens 1896 Reviews
The inspiring story of a rag-tag team of amateur American athletes that stunned the sports world comes to life in this dramatization of the first modern Olympic games revived in 1896Veteran Actor Louis Jourdan stars as Baron Pierre du Coubertin, a relentless visionary who sets out to renew the ancient Olympic games after 1500 yearsDrWilliam Sloane (David Ogden Stiers) is the Princeton professor who pulls together the first American team with 13 unlikely boys and a meager supply of sports equipmentCompeting in events that had never been seen in the United States before the Americans went on to Athens and secured the winner's post despite almost insurmountable odds.
Amazon.comThis television miniseries tells the story of the founding of the modern Olympics by focusing on individuals in several countries and their preparations and eventual competition in Athens in 1896David Ogden Stiers (a familiar face to viewers of M*A*S*H reruns) portrays a Princeton classics professor whose knowledge of the ancient Olympics means he's given the task of recruiting an American team for the 1896 gamesThe stories of how some athletes have to be convinced to join the team may seem contrived, but they do reinforce the idea of how fragile the concept of reviving the Olympics was at the time. A young David Caruso (years before he'd swagger through the stationhouse of N.Y.P.D Blue) portrays a cocky Boston Irishman who walks away from a Harvard scholarship to participate in track eventsAnd if Caruso does veer perilously close to doing an extended James Cagney impression, he serves as a sturdy focal point to the American teamOnce in Athens, the focus is very much on the American athletes and their surprising success, and there are some interesting and humorous touches in the plotFor instance, the fledgling American team had enlisted a local blacksmith to render an iron discus, thereby giving them an unexpected advantage when presented with the much lighter "official" discus in AthensEven if the various plots and subplots about the athletes don't always hold up very well, the scenes of competition in Athens do provide an entertaining re-creation of the first modern Olympics--Robert J McNamara