11.04.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 6:26 pm by Greg Landgraf
Keynote
“Gaming with Children”
Andrew S. Bub, GamerDad
“GamerDad was born of my frustration at what passes for common sense in the media,” explained Bub, particularly in the wake of the Columbine shootings, where the media treated the fact that the shooters played Doom as a cause of their actions, rather than observing that most kids did.
Bub said that the ESRB—the Entertainment Software Rating Board, which rates video games for content—isn’t broken, but it is limited, because it can only give broad themes that a parent might find objectionable. Instead of declaring that a game contains “Comic Mischief,” as ESRB ratings might cite, GamerDad will describe the comic mischief a game contains.
One question he frequently receives is from children describing the type of movies they are allowed to watch, and then asking if they can play similar games. “I don’t judge parents. I don’t believe it’s my job, and I don’t believe it’s a librarian’s job,” Bub said. But he did note that he believes games to be good for children, in moderation.
“In general, gamers are smart people,” he said. “Gamers are curious people. No kid is sitting there with a glazed look on his face playing, because games are hard.”
What Every Librarian Needs to Know about Videogames and the Law
Mark Methentis, attorney, Vernon Law Group.
Methentis covered two gaming-related areas where librarians could run afoul of copyright: videogame tournaments and machinima contests or showings.
Tournaments can be problematic because copyright restricts the right to perform or display works, and because games are packaged with End User License Agreements (EULAs) that generally restrict usage to personal use only. Methentis recommended getting approval from the copyright-holder in writing before holding tournaments. The approval doesn’t need to be too formal—e-mail would suffice—but librarians should plan ahead because publishers do not always respond quickly.
Machinima is the creation of movies from actual game play; it’s popular for games with rich virtual worlds like Halo or World of Warcraft. Many game developers actively encourage machinima and the active fan community it helps build, and have posted machinima guidelines. But even with these games, librarians also have to be concerned about unlicensed music, audio, and photos.
Methentis said his best practices would be to stick to titles that have Machinima rules and use non-copyrighted music and other materials. For showing machinima, treat the movies like any other movie: Get approval from the author, and if it’s a part of a library contest, make the screening a condition of entry.
“Even though it’s entirely possible no one will ever pursue any sort of action, it’s better to be safe than sorry,” Methentis said.
Pokemon Primer
Eli Neiburger, Ann Arbor District Library
Neiburger told of one timid student who had truly been brought out of his shell by AADL’s Pokemon tournaments. “He didn’t win, but he won some battles with interesting techniques,” Neiburger said. Because of that, other kids started watching and cheering; it developed into a social circle for the child, who had never had one before.
Pokemon is an obsession for many youths. It’s also an incredibly complex game—players do battle with their pokemon, which come in more than 500 varieties and fall into 17 different types, each of which are particularly strong or particularly weak against certain other types.
“There are far more Pokemon than elements in the periodic table, and players track more information about each Pokemon than scientists track about their elements,” Neiburger observed.”
He offered recommendations for libraries to host their own Pokemon tournaments, including using the Level 50 All setting to equalize matches, disallowing “Legendary” pokemon until the final rounds to ensure variety in matchups, warning against using hacked pokemon that have unfair and artificial statistic levels, and running battles with three pokemon on a side and two per side on the field at any time, to allow for complex strategies.
Closing Keynote
“The Power of Play Today”
Jon-Paul Dyson, Strong National Museum of Play
“Play is so vital to who we are and how we identify ourselves,” Dyson declared. He also noted that play has clear benefits: providing refreshment, increasing flexibility to life, promoting learning, and making the player happier.
Controversy over the effect of gaming has its analogs throughout history, Dyson observed, from early 19th-century novels, to juvenile serial fiction, to comic books. “Libraries have made choices in each phase of these different developments about what they do and how they stock each type of media,” and will do so again for video games, he said.
Dyson observed that when libraries have been faced with deciding whether to simply provide popular books or try to promote the best books, most try to do both, and suggested they could do the same for gaming, and concluded by suggesting that a Newbery Medal analog for games for children may help to achieve the latter.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 5:30 pm by Greg Landgraf
The symposium ended a few hours ago, and Day 3’s wrap-up is on its way. But before I write that, there are a couple other conversations I had on Day 2 that I’d like to share. (Both were on-video interviews, and I didn’t have the energy last night to make the necessary transcriptions.)
First was Larry Lewis, Jr. of Flying Blind LLC, who presented “Integrating Non-Visual Access into a Library’s Gaming Experience”. In his presentation, Lewis demonstrated the Talking Tactile Tablet, a $700 device that connects to a computer and allows visually-impaired users to play multimedia games by incorporating speech, Braille, and tactile sheets with raised representations of on-screen pictures. “With all these ingredients, not only can gaming be made accessible, but it could also be a learning situation that would turn out to be fun and fairly all-inclusive for sighted and vision-impaired library patrons,” Lewis said.
Lewis suggested that libraries interested in increasing the accessibility of their gaming offerings first take inventory of what they can make accessible without major effort. Then, think in terms of the “ingredients”: the type of audio and tactile components that are available.
“One point that I really drill home is that it should be inclusive, in that the sighted individual is not left out of the process,” Lewis noted. The goal is to get all users to the same place, rather than having a sighted way of gaming and a separate vision-impaired way.
Second is Rick Bolton of Library Mini Golf, a charitable foundation that produces mini-golf fundraisers to support libraries. Symposium attendees could play on a scaled-down version of a Library Mini Golf course on Monday evening after the symposium sessions.
Libraries pick a day to host the fundraiser, and Library Mini Golf turns the library into a course, working with the layout to weave the holes through the stacks. Most of the revenue comes from sponsors; Library Mini Golf will solicit local businesses to sponsor a hole or a tee for a few hundred dollars. Libraries can also run additional fundraising activities such as raffles, silent auctions, or food sales concurrently.
“Every time I’ve done this two things have happened: It’s been the biggest event in the library’s history and it’s raised a minimum of $10,000 for the library,” Bolton said.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 3:16 pm by Leonard Kniffel
I arrived at the polls this morning at 6:50 a.m. There were 50 people in line ahead of me. I live in one of those Chicago neighborhoods that over the last dozen years has seen an exodus of mostly Latino residents and an influx of McMansion builders, yet we still vote at Christopher House, a 100-year-old community center that provides “integrated social, educational, and human services that help families thrive in an environment that nurtures and values diversity,” largely to a community that has been forced to move away because of yuppie development and accompanying property tax hikes.
Inside the voting place, the usual cadre of fussy election volunteers was lumbering through the motions of trying to move too many people to some eight badly lit porta-booths, where we used a felt-tipped “special pen” to mark our ballots before feeding them into a machine. Suddenly, one anxious woman pulled herself out of line and addressed the rest of us. “Voters, voters, um, um,” she stammered, “my daughter has a test at eight o’clock. Does anyone object if I go to the front of the line?” I wanted to tell her that my job at the American Library Association, waiting for me at 8:30, was every bit as important as her daughter’s test. But I didn’t; no one else said anything either. Instead, I amused myself by wondering at the contrast between this over-eager mother and the antiquated voting system I was about to use.
So here I am at work now, trying to complete an article for the December issue of American Libraries that sums up Laura Bush’s eight years as the librarian in the White House. We’ve been told that we can leave work early today to avoid the traffic and congestion that is likely to ensue once the Barack Obama camp starts gathering in Grant Park to learn the election results. But I don’t want to avoid the crowd; I plan to get lost in it and begin here and now to plan for ALA’s engagement with the new administration, whatever the outcome.
Emily Sheketoff of the ALA Washington Office says, ““No matter who wins and no matter what happens in Congress, this is going to be a very tough year. It’s going to demand of library supporters that they pay attention and be very active in talking to their elected officials, both local and federal.” Indeed. ALA has recommended that Congress appropriate $100 million for libraries in stimulus funding, and the Washington office has briefed both presidential candidates’ staffers and talked to members of both the House and the Senate, but no matter what the outcome of the election, ALA must work across the aisle, and one of things I’ve learned during 20 years of observing ALA’s aisle-hopping is that there is no basis to the assumption of some that libraries fare better under a Democratic administration. It’s going to be a struggle, with a lot of unknowns ahead of us, especially when it comes to things like McMansion building and antiquated voting procedures.
What I do know is that at five o’clock this afternoon, I’m heading downtown to witness a historic moment, with an eye toward what this means for our profession and our Association. More later.
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