Conferences, Workshops, and Symposiums

Highlights from the

TechSource Gaming, Learning, and Libraries Symposium

Chicago, IL

July 22-24, 2007

Audio files for sessions:  http://www.techsource.ala.org/blog/Gaming+and+Libraries+Symposium/

Flickr Photos tagged with glls2007:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/glls2007/

Delicious links tagged with glls2007:  http://del.icio.us/tag/glls2007?setcount=100

What Librarians Need to Know about Games, Media Literacy, and Participatory CultureHenry Jenkins, Director
Comparative Media Studies Program, MIT

Games assist kids in developing social skills and cultural competencies and can be used to develop the critical learning skills they need to navigate in life

Who Else is Playing? The Current State of Gaming in Libraries

Scott Nicholson, Assistant Professor
School of Information Studies
Syracuse University

Study 1–White paper:  The Role of Gaming in Libraries: Taking the Pulse
http://boardgameswithscott.com/pulse2007.pdf

Stated goals for gaming programs

Respondents indicated that they most important reason for providing the gaming programs was:

  • provide service to attract new/underserved users 34%
  • to increase the library’s status as a community center 18%
  • provide service for current users 16%

Outcomes

  • 77.97% indicated that the reputation of the library had improved
  • 76.27% indicated that users who attended gaming programs came back for non-gaming related services
  • 73.45% indicated that the users who attended the gaming programs improved social connections with their current friends
  • 68.36% indicated that the users who attended the gaming programs used other library services while there for the program
  • 65.54% indicated that the users who attended the gaming programs improved social connections with new people
  • 49.72% indicated that the libraries got improved publicity from the gaming events

The Payoff, Up Close and Personal

Eli Neiburger, Manager
Information Access and Systems
Ann Arbor District Library

“If you think our [librarians] role in people’s lives isn’t threatened, talk to a travel agent.”

Libraries do recreational programming for adults all the time.  “If you have a knitting club, it’s not because they need socks.”  Why isn’t it acceptable to do recreational programming for teens?

Game programs offer an opportunity for teen to have a positive interaction with staff

There are preconceived ideas about who we (librarians) are, and you don’t want to prove them right.  Get your peer pressure working for you instead of against you.  Get staff involved that are not usually part of the public services staff

Libraries have an opportunity to prove relevance to a group that would never have believed it otherwise

Libraries, Gaming, and the New Equity Crisis

James Paul Gee
Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies
Arizona State University

Games provide an outlet that embraces learning principles better than most schools.  Consider the following 12 principals for successful learning as they relate to games and gaming:

  1. Lower the consequences of failure-Encourages a person to take risks, to stretch beyond his/her comfort zone.  Company IDEO has credo:  “Fail early, fail often.”  Every failure is a learning event.
  2. Performance before competence.-You learn through performance.  Learn on the job, practical knowledge and skills.  SWAT 4 game places you in charge of a SWAT unit, and at first, your team members have more knowledge than you.  You can more knowledge as you go through (with little/no instruction) until you are the master of the team.
  3. Players high on the agency tree-Your choices and decisions are very important to the progress of the whole community/agency/team.
  4. Provide well-ordered problems-Level design is at the core of most video games.  There is a logical progression.
  5. Provide cycles of challenge, consolidation, and new challenge–Routine mastery of one problem, leads to new problem where the mastered solution no longer works.  Requires new solution, new mastery
  6. Stay within, but at the outer edge of the student’s “regime of competence.”– Getting to the state of flow…where the task is still challenging enough to maintain interest, but isn’t so challenging that he/she gives up.
  7. Encourage students to think of “systems,” not individual variables (Big picture thinking).  The true significance of an item or clue discovered in one level may not reveal itself until a different level.  Players must consider how all variables will fit in for overall success.
  8. Empathy for a complex system–What’s the difference between a game and a simulation?  In a game, you’re “in it,” gaining empathy for the system because you are affected by it, either positively or negatively.
  9. Give verbal information on an “as needed” basis or on demand-
  10. Situate meanings of words and symbols and show how they vary across different actions.  Associate words with actions, images, and dialogues, not just definitions.
  11. Provide opportunities to establish a “modding” attitude (modifying attitude), a student that can learn to modify actions, behaviors, situation, for success–For example:  Tony Hawk game where you can make your own skateboards, skate parks, etc.  Allows player more control over situation and their success.
  12.  Provide Assessment and Feedback–Games test players constantly.  There is instant feedback on success or failure.

We’re in UR Library Bein UR Books: Using LiveJournal to create Role Playing Games (RPG)

Kit Ward-Crixell, Student
School of Library and Information Studies, Texas Woman’s University

  • The book-based RPG is played by reading and writing
  • Players write in the voice of a particular character and interact with other characters
  • In-canon storylines keep to one “world,” one set of characters in a particular time period. For example, Levicorpus is a LiveJournal RPG from Harry Potter, focusing entirely on characters from the period when Harry’s parents were at school together, known in the community as the Marauder’s era, named for the Marauder’s Map in Book 3.
  • Out-of-canon storylines allow characters from different genres to mingle. The Milliways Bar RPG has characters from a variety of sources, sitting down for drinks at a bar named for the “Restaurant at the End of the Universe, part of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series.
  • In her study, Ms. Ward-Crixell found that a typical post is around 1000 words, averaging around 30,000 words a month, as long/longer than the average young adult novel.

 

Tournament Games for Any Occasion

Eli Neiburger, Manager
Information Access and Systems
Ann Arbor District Library

What do people want from a game?

  • Kids-socialization, possession, knowledge
  • Teens-superiority, display, skill, coolness
  • 20’s-mastery, depth, accessibility, impenetrability
  • Adults-seriousness, nostalgia, realism, accessibility
  • Parents-redeeming value, accessibility, comprehensibility
  • Seniors-ease of use, simplicity, skill over reflexes, realism

 Genres

http://www.gamerankings.com

  • Action/Adventure
  • RPG
  • FPS-first person shooters
  • Racing
  • Fighting
  • Sports
  • Simulations
  • Strategy
  • Oddball
  • Music

Sub-Genres

  • Retro
  • Sci-fi
  • Fantasy
  • Modern
  • Historic
  • Horror
  • 2D
  • 3D
  • Casual/arcade
  • Ultra-violent

ESRB Ratings–http://www.esrb.com

The Entertainment Software Association-http://www.theesa.org

  • eC-early childhood
  • E-everyone
  • E 10+ –ages 10+
  • T- teen
  • M- Mature
  • AO-adults only (kiss of death for any game)

 Genres and Titles for Tournaments

Action/Adventure
  • Not good for tournaments.  Too long for single match.  Often single player
  • Best:  Legend of Zelda, Mario Bros, Resident Evil, Metal Gear Solid

 Role Playing Games

  • Not good for tournaments
  • Not flexible and takes too long
  • Best:  Elder Scrolls, Final Fantasy, Pokemon, World of Warcraft

First Person Shooters

  • Great for tournaments, but not for kids.  Teens and up.
  • Best:  Halo, Call of Duty, Unreal

Racing

  • Great for tournaments.  Typically no content concerns
  • Best:  Mario Kart, Burnout, GranTurismo, PGR, Forza

Fighting

  • Best for tournaments, but not for kids.  Teens and adults
  • Best:  Super Smash Bros, Soul Calibur, Tekken

Sports

  • Not great for tournaments
  • Best:  Madden, NBA Live, The Bigs, Fight Night

Simulations

  • Bad for tournaments
  • Best: Sims and Sim City

Strategy

  • Great for tournaments, but often not very accessible

Music

  • Fantastic for tournaments
  • Best:  DDR (Dance, Dance Revolution), Guitar Hero

 Big Fun, Big Learning: Transforming the World Through Play

Gregory Trefrey, Game Designer
GameLab
Festival Director, Come Out & Play Festival

 Big games

What are they?  They’re big, bigger than you.  Can expand to the size of your neighborhood or your city.  No clear line between the playing field and the rest of the world.  They’re local.  There can be technology involved, but it isn’t required.  Often includes some kind of spectacle.

Digital Downloads

Beth Galloway, Consultant
Information Goddess Consulting

Free Online Games to Bookmark

Gaming For Adults

Martin House and Mark Engelbrecht
Public Libraries of Charlotte Mecklenburg County (PLCMC)

$70,000 LSTA grant to provide game-based programming for adults:

Questions they wanted to answer:

  • Would adults come?
  • Would they travel outside their home location to attend?
  • What kind of space requirements would be needed?
  • How much staff time would be needed?

 Challenges

  • Staff who wanted to spend the money on books, who saw no value in the games
  • Worries about education value of the games

Response

  • Provided staff-only events to help spread awareness. Staff were much more understanding after they had a chance to play and interact themselves.
  • Encouraged staff to attend the public events so that they could see for themselves just what the program was doing for the participants.

Findings

  • Users from the low-income/urban areas made up the majority of attendees. Attendance was far lower in the suburban location.
  • Average age of attendee was 26 and up, but there was good turnout for the 19-25 years
  • 84% had a library card before attending the program. They saw no statistical correlation between age or location and having a card.
  • Most attendees had never been to a program before
  • Most attendees did not travel out of their “home area” to attend the programs in the other branches
  • Ethnicity ratio: 5:3:1 African-American: White: Other
  • Gender ratio: 7:2 Male: Female
  • Attendance was low at the beginning, but increased
  • Events need to be 3-4 hours long in order to get a good return on the investment

Outcomes

  • The library had increased visibility in the community
  • The library saw social interaction among different community groups
  • Board games were overlooked by the users
  • Most attendees found out about the program while they were already at the library, through a friend, through the flyers, or through the website. The website was the least effective marketing method. They believe that is because of the lack of in-home access to the internet in the low-income areas.
  • Early results suggest trend toward increased usage of the library in other areas, especially in reference.

 

 Core Collections (a circulating game collection)

Beth Galloway, Consultant
Information Goddess Consulting

Delicious links:  http://del.icio.us/informationgoddess29/glls2007

Review Sources:

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