As the Features Editor here at Destructoid, I get to force my will upon others here. I had the urge to try and stretch the staff's creativity by putting together themes from month to month for content. This would let us rope in various columns, features, and the community together to have some fun and explore some ideas. So here's our first attempt at the thing.

I wanted to cover the topic of sports because it's a bit of a paradoxical genre. Pretty much all the activities that go on in the game we could easily do ourselves, if we just got up off the couch and went outside. Similarly, for whatever disdain hardcore gamers have towards NFL, NBA, MLB, etc. titles, "extreme sports" titles seem more accepted by the game crowd. All in all, I feel like it's a genre we could explore a bit more here at Destructoid.

One of the things we'll be doing in these themed months is have a guinea pig project, as well. One of the editors will submit themselves to some sort of torture for a month. Is there a point in it? I'm not too sure. For this first month, though, I'm leading by example. For the entire month of December, I'll be playing Madden NFL 08. I've never played the game before, and so I want to see if in a month's time, I can learn to play the game competently, and actually enjoy it.

Many of the columns on the site will take on the sports theme for an article or two, along with CTZ working with the community bloggers to bring sports-related posts to the front page. We're hoping this will turn out to be a fun project for everyone, both the staff and the readers. If not, we'll just chalk it up to sports games sucking at it being no fault of my own.

So, I hope you enjoy this upcoming month of Madden. I've got no choice but to.