Taking a step back from life

Well, the reason I haven't been blogging much lately is because I've been tending to my sick boy while my wife is out of town. Today was the first day I took him in to day care, and by 10am at work, I had a fever and felt woozy. I think I caught what he had, so now I'm burning leave for myself after several days of burning leave for him. *groan*

A side effect of this is that I have had little time to blog, of course, but also, staying home with him doesn't typically generate much blogworthy content for me to write about (at least, not anything that people besides doting grandparents and the like would care to read). I've felt pretty removed from "the real world" as I spent my days just interacting with my son, which was actually pretty nice. Tiring, yes, but nice.

It also gave me a chance to watch Finding Nemo every day, because he would point at the television and say "Nemo! Nemo! Nemo! Nemo!" Normally, that would be a drag, but it turns out that Pixar makes a movie that is entertaining every time you watch it, even if you just watched it yesterday and the day before. There's always something new to see, from the color design to the environment details to the reactions of characters in the background.

Personally, this got me thinking. As we move into new productions, I'd like to start bringing higher level of detail and planning to the attention we pay our characters, the visual design, and the "emotion design" of our products. I think we're finally to the point in our educational game production setup that we can start bringing that level of sophistication to educational gaming. Why shouldn't an educational game be as entertaining as any other game? Why shouldn't we tell great stories with great characters?