EXPLAIN LEEROY TO THE FISH: OFFWORLD ON AIR AMERICA
There’s a certain primary education process that I think a lot of us take for granted about games, and assume in other people. Case in point: yesterday, I was invited to be a guest on Air America Radio to explain precisely what it meant that Obama’s new FCC transition team co-chair was a level 70 Tauren shaman.
I’d made a lot of assumptions, actually, including believing the call to be a pre-recording that would get slickly edited down to a few seconds of soundbytes (which I had all pithily prepared) to go into a longer NPR-style news clip, assumptions which were summarily shattered 10 minutes before my phone was supposed to ring when a friend wrote on the wall of my Facebooks, “So here I am, listening to Air America… ‘coming up later, Brandon Boyer,'” and I realized I was about to be on live for quite a long time, facing questions I might necessarily not be up to answer.
That was somewhat relieved when host Ron Kuby led in the piece as I was on hold by rattling off facetiously sweeping generalizations of who World of Warcraft players were, and then brought me on to do some very, very basic explaining. Turns out: that’s a lot more difficult when you’ve been immersed eyeball deep in the culture for as many years as I have and have to take it all back to square one. As in: have you ever tried to explain what exactly ‘Leeroy Jenkins’ is or why it’s funny? I’d never had to, until I was live on national radio.
You can hear me valiantly try, though, via Kuby’s archives at Air America (though from what I gather the clip ends rather abruptly after an offhand ‘teamsters’ analogy). Coincidentally, and it would take me another few hours for this to click, Kuby is indeed one-and-the-same the Ron Kuby you hear ‘The Dude’ Lebowski ask for after the Malibu chief of police beans him with a coffee mug (!). Oh, right, and, you know, also a civil rights activist and lawyer of fantastic renown.
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