Posted in Uncategorized at 12:56 pm by Sean Fitzpatrick
Children, teens, and adults showed up in droves to play board games and video games at the biggest National Gaming Day yet November 14, with 1,365 registered libraries participating, easily doubling the number of participants from last year, NGD mastermind Jenny Levine told American Libraries.
Libraries who participated in the massive, nationwide, ALA-sponsored event received board games donated by Hasbro, and also provided their own. Eli Neiburger, author of Gamers… at the Library?!and director of IT and production atAnn Arbor (Mich.) Library District Director who headed up his library’s efforts at interlibrary, simultaneous gaming, called the concept “a complex beast.” He told AL that “when the library becomes a place where patrons can be a part of something big, that’s happening all over the country, that they can’t get anywhere else, and that gives them a chance to represent their library and their hometown on a larger stage, that’s a transformative moment!”
As gaming in the library continues to evolve and mature, Levine argues, it can further engage the library and its patrons with their community. Echoing that sentiment, Neiburger maintains that gaming “gives kids who already carry an access point to the world of information around in their pocket a chance to feel that they’ve taken their first steps into a larger world–at the library.” He adds that “National Gaming Day is a powerful way for potential patrons to discover the joy and the appeal of socially consuming beloved content.”
A patron at the Skokie (Ill.) Public Library playing rock band during National Gaming Day. Photo by Ruth Sinker for Skokie Public Library.
The Skokie (Ill.) Public Library attracted more than 300 people to its Gaming Day events, of which about 35 participated in the library’s Beatles Rock Band Tournament (right). According to the November 18 NGD blog post, “the Rock Band High Score contest included 14 events on or around National Gaming Day and 70 performances were scored.” Nintendo Wii games were also popular among participants. The Super Smash Brothers Brawl Tournament included 42 libraries across the country connecting up to play.
But not all the gaming was high-tech. The Mammoth (Ariz.) Public Library’s treasure hunt was a big hit among patrons. The hunt, which served as entertainment and also as a way of giving patrons an in-depth look at how the library works, took no more resources than just some staff time and scraps of paper, according to Library Director Diana Stirling. “Entire families did the treasure hunt together, and invariably the people who had already finished helped others,” she said.
Posted in Uncategorized at 5:20 pm by Leonard Kniffel
People have been commenting about the ironic juxtaposition of the two top stories in this week’s edition of American Libraries Direct:
#1 Nebraska Auditor Cries Foul on Gaming: A 10-minute YouTube video posted by the Nebraska Library Commission to announce the purchase of Rock Band and Dance Dance Revolution resulted—roughly a year later—in an audit in which Nebraska Auditor of Public Accounts Mike Foley concluded that “the purchase of gaming equipment is a questionable use of public funds,” and that “using social websites and gaming equipment on State time and with State computers . . . appears to be an inappropriate use of public funds.”
#2 ALA Releases Gaming Tool Kit: In recognition of the increasing value of gaming to literacy improvement, ALA—with assistance from a $1 million grant from the Verizon Foundation—has developed the “Librarian’s Guide to Gaming: An Online Toolkit for Building Gaming @ your library.” The toolkit includes a wide range of resources, contributed by expert gaming librarians across the country, to help librarians create, fund, and evaluate gaming experiences in the library.
Coincidentally, these two stories were the two top stories of the week, but their appearance together was also a deliciously subtle slap at the rather shallow judgment of one Nebraska auditor and the unidentified taxpayer who initiated the audit, who both might better have turned their attention elsewhere to look for government waste. Libraries are notorious for their wise use of public funds and for squeezing more bang out of a buck than any other institution.
While one reader told me she worried that the placement of the stories one after the other might offend the Verizon Foundation, which has been so instrumental in supporting library gaming initiatives, others have assured me that the second story reads like a rebuttal to the first and a great counterpoint to two barely informed people who haven’t a clue about 1) the value of games as learning tools, and 2) the good stewardship that libraries in Nebraska and across the nation have shown for every support dollar they are able to obtain.
Dale Lipschultz, literacy officer in the ALA Office for Literacy and Outreach Services, sent me an e-mail immediately after AL Direct mailed, saying, “I love the juxtaposition of these two news stories! This made my day.” She agreed that the appearance of the two stories together was fortuitous, and gave the appearance that ALA was way ahead of the game, so to speak.
It is unfortunate that library gaming got a bad rap in Nebraska, but the state’s librarians know what to do. Good information and an afternoon with a group of young learners @ their library just might just turn Mr. Foley and the irritated taxpayer around.
Posted in Uncategorized at 12:40 pm by Greg Landgraf
The final bit of coverage (on this blog, at least) of GLLS 08: The video. The full interview list:
Lawrence Kutner, Center for Mental Health and Media, Department of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital (keynote: “Grand Theft Childhood? Real Data on Violent Video Games and Youth”)
Seann Dikkers, University of Wisconsin-Madison Games Learning Society Group (presentation: “Building After School Game Clubs Using Total War”)
Lindsey Wesson, Tennessee State Library and Archives (presentation: “Turning Gamers into Readers: What Wii Can Do”)
Amanda Lenhart, Pew/Internet Life (keynote: “Teens, Video Games, and Civics: What the Research is Telling Us”)
Rick Bolton, Library Mini-Golf (host, “Golfing through the Stacks”)
Larry Lewis Jr., Flying Blind LLC (presenation: “Integrating Non-Visual Access into a Library’s Gaming Experience”)
Eli Neiburger, Ann Arbor District Library (presentation: “Pokemon Primer”)
But if you prefer to watch just for the somewhat metaphysical song about gaming performed within a game, I won’t be offended.
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.
“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.
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:57 pm by Greg Landgraf
Today was the major day of the symposium, with a keynote and seven rounds of concurrent sessions. Because of the sheer number, today’s post is going to cover highlights rather than a comprehensive review.
Keynote
“Grand Theft Childhood? Real Data on Violent Video Games and Youth”
Lawrence Kutner, Center for Mental Health and Media, Department of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital
Adults viewing youth culture as a threat is nothing new. Kutner opened his speech reviewing some of the social panics of the past century or so, starting with Anthony Comstock’s 1886 outcry against the “corrupting” influence of paperback novels on youth, through the gangster movies of the 1930s, horror comics of the 1940s and 50s, and television violence in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s.
Against this backdrop, Kutner suggested that research data does not support the notion that video game violence leads to real-world violence. “Violence in schools in the past 20 years has gone down,” Kutner said. “Media coverage of violence in schools has gone up.”
Kutner surveyed about 1,250 kids from 12-14 years of age about their gaming habits. As others have found, gaming is nearly ubiquitous among this age group, and many play games that are rated M for mature. “Most kids who play M-rated games at age 12, 13, or 14 are just fine,” he observed.
Youths play games for many reasons. One area of genuine concern is gamers who play to manage their emotions—to forget their problems, get their anger out, or feel less lonely. These gamers tend to spend a lot of time gaming, and they tend to spend a lot of time gaming alone. “It’s not that the games are causing problems, but this pattern of play may be a marker of other problems” like depression, Kutner said.
Kutner also suggested that the ever-increasing realism of games may lead to less game violence. “We found in talking to kids that the attraction was not the violence, but the complexity of the characters,” he said. “Without that, they find it boring.
HYPEr Activity: Detroit Public Library’s Teen Center
Oneka Wilson and Steve Teeri Birth of a Teen Activity Room
Jean Gardner, YA Team Leader, Topeka and Shawnee County (Kans.) Public Library
In a shared session, Wilson, Teeri and Gardner discussed the new teen spaces at their respective libraries. Detroit Public Library opened the Helping Young People Excel center May 16 this year. The 4,000-square-foot space was the children’s reading room when the building opened in 1923, and has had several functions since then, most recently the business and finance department.
The room’s offerings include gaming on Wii, Xbox 360, and PlayStation, CD listening stations, DVD viewing stations, modular work tables, mobile couches, 3 quiet study rooms, and a portable stage. The room also houses a full teen book selection, including reference, nonfiction, fiction, manga, and urban fiction.
“Administrators were really energized by this,” Wilson said. “We had just gone through a millage a few years ago and one of the mandates of that millage was to be innovative.”
Topeka’s teen room, dubbed “The Edge,” is even newer—opening last Thursday, October 30. (Gardner admitted that due to travel, she had not yet worked a shift in the new space.) The library had a teen space built in 2001, Dave and Jay’s Place, but it was proving to be too crowded for the teens and too noisy for other patrons. Dave and Jay’s Place still offers teens traditional library services, while activities including gaming have moved to the Edge.
Building After School Game Clubs Using Total War
Seann M. Dikkers
University of Wisconsin Madison Games Learning Society Group
The Total War franchise is a series of war strategy games based strongly in history, with each title simulating wars through a different era. “[The apparent violence] ulls kids into the game to start with, but it kind of tricks them, because it’s a strategy game,” Dikkers said. “Your whole desire is to run a successful empire through an era. You want to protect your army.”
The game engages students with history. Dikkers provided an example of one scenario where a student was playing the side of the Native Americans trying to fight off Columbus. That student smuggled a history textbook into the library to try to develop a strategy to beat Columbus back. “If you’re interested, then you pursue literacy,” Dikkers said. “Once the interest is there, the academics follow.”
In a library setting, Dikkers suggested 2-3 hour gaming sessions, with a mandatory 5-10 minute break to help the students learn to stop playing, and a 10-15 minute period at the end reserved for the students to clean up the room and for students to interact critically about the game. “Don’t stop their game play, just prick them with questions,” Dikkers said.
Suitable questions include “What’s your strategy?” “Why are you doing that?” or “What would you tell a new player to focus on to get good at the game?” Dikkers also recommended against pretending to know things you don’t, because kids will respect a novice who is working at learning, and they will “gang up to teach you.” Grandma’s Got a Wii!
Allan M. Kleiman, former director, Old Bridge (N.J.) Public Library.
Kleiman shared his experience introducing gaming programs to seniors at Old Bridge Public Library. “I don’t think the seniors are ‘gamers’ yet; they’re still learning in terms of technology,” Kleiman said. That said, the gaming programs are successful and attract strong attendance.
Kleiman noted that many people have contacted him saying that senior gaming events don’t attract an audience. “Everyone that has failed has said that it’s a one-time event. How are you going to get someone who doesn’t really know what it is to come in and game when they aren’t going to do it at home again?”
One solution, obviously, is to have a regularly scheduled gaming program. Kleiman also suggested that light refreshments help to get seniors to try a program, and that it’s important to make the games fun rather than school.
Old Bridge also used its teen advisory board to help train seniors, although some special preparation was needed. “Usually teens are so fast in training that the seniors shake their heads that they got it, and when the teens walk away, they say ‘I didn’t understand any of that.’” Kleiman said. To counter this, the library trained the teens on how older adults learn, and rewarded them for attending the session with an open gaming session of their own.
Turning Gamers into Readers: What Wii Can Do
Lori Easterwood, Teen Librarian, Sacramento Public Library, and Lindsey Wesson, Continuing Education Coordinator, Tennessee State Library and Archives.
Wesson and Easterwood contended that games can be viewed as texts, so the games that a player likes can be used in reader’s advisory. For example, in strategy and simulation games, decision making has a big impact, puzzles are frequently integral, the games are usually first-person and take place in a realistic (and often historical) setting. Books with similar traits will likely appeal to the same audience.
In trying to turn gamers onto books, however, “Don’t treat it like a reference interview because that will turn them off,” Wesson said. “Treat it like a conversation.” She also suggested initiating the conversation, because many students won’t volunteer their gaming habits; publicizing books with displays, booktalks, and “If you like these games, try these books”-type brochures; and recommending the “big guns”—those games that best grab readers in the first pages.
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:21 pm by Greg Landgraf
ALA TechSources Gaming, Libraries, and Learning Symposium runs through Tuesday in Oak Brook, Illinois. I’ll be posting recaps every evening.
There were no concurrent sessions today; all of the speeches adressed the full symposium.
Opening Keynote Marc Prensky
“Don’t Bother Me Mom, I’m Learning: How Computer and Video Games are Preparing Kids for 21st Century Success and How You Can Help”
“I’ve got a really radical suggestion,” declared consultant Marc Prensky. “I think we should change our name. How about if we changed [library] to ‘the future’ That’s what the kids are passionate about.”
Games are beneficial to education, Prensky said, because they engage students. He offered several examples of professionals who attributed their success to gaming, such as Yahoo executive Stephen Gillett, who gained leadership skills managing gaming guilds; and Dr. James Rosser, who teaches laproscopic surgery and who conducted research indicating that laproscopic surgeons who gamed made 37% fewer mistakes, because both use a computer monitor and a two-handed controller.
Children do need guidance for their gaming experiences to be positive ones, Prensky said, although he quickly noted that the same could be said for many things. “I picture some kid being handed the Bible without any guidance and they come to the conclusion that if there’s ever a group that bothers them, they have the right to go out and kill their first-born,” he said. Prensky added that such guidance should be constructive rather than proscriptive—rather than saying “You shouldn’t play these,” parents or teachers should find out why kids play the games they do, and what they think about the values the games contain, public opinion about the game, and similar topics.
“I think learning is the real underneath attraction to why people play games,” Prensky declared. Skills that complex games teach include cooperation, decision-making under stress, reasonable risk-taking, ethical decision-making, scientific deduction, perseverence, the understanding of foreign environments and cultures, and the management of businesses and people. “That’s a pretty impressive list. It’s not the curriculum, but maybe it should be.”
Prensky argued that education is splitting into “school” and “after school.” School learning is forced on students, teaching a legacy curriculum that kids find boring. After-school learning, conversely, is sought by kids and teaches skills that will be needed in their adult lives. “It’s not about games. It’s about engagement, it’s about turning on the lights for our kids, and it’s about 21st century learning,” Prensky said.
“Teens, Video Games, and Civics: What the Research is Telling Us”
Amanda Lenhart, research specialist, Pew/Internet Life
Lenhart presented results of the Pew Internet and American Life Project’s new “Teens, Video Games, and Civics” survey of 1,102 youths between 12 and 17, each with one parent who also answered questions.
Nearly all American teens game in some way, the study found. “Gaming for teens is a way of interacting with other people,” Lenhart said, noting that 76% of respondents play with other people at least some of the time.
The survey found no relation between simply playing games and a teen’s level of civic engagement. However, games that incorporate civic experiences—identified as games where players help or guide each other, think about social or moral issues, or help to organize or run a guild or community—do have a correlation with higher levels of civic engagement, as does playing games with other people in the same room.
The survey did not determine whether civic gaming experiences encourage real-world civic involvement or if the relationship is because teens who are more engaged in their communities simply tend to prefer games with similar elements. “We think that both are operational.”
“The State of the Union: Data from the Annual Census of Gaming Programs in Libraries”
Scott Nicholson, chief scientist, Syracuse University Library Game Lab
Nicholson presented data from his second annual online survey. Of the 404 libraries that responded, 218 said they offered gaming of some sort.
Positive outcomes reported from gaming programs included improved reputation, gamers using other library services, improved social connections, and library publicity. Negatives included 10% who reported that the gaming programs annoyed other library users, although Nicholson laughed that off. “We always annoy 10% of the users,” he said. “If you’re not annoyed, see a librarian.”
Average start-up costs in the survey were $650, although Nicholson acknowledged that that was skewed by 22 libraries with no costs because they borrowed games, and by two libraries with $15,000 and $25,000 in funding. (The $25,000 was Columbus Metropolitan Library, which won funding to install consoles at all 21 of its locations.) More accurate was the decreasing price of gaming programs as they go on; the average cost to repeat a gaming program drops to $2 per user, and libraries in the survey repeated gaming programs 14 times on average.
“If our goal is to reach underserved users and we can bring them into the library every month, we can start to change their minds about the library offering something for them,” Nicholson said.
“Mapping Games to Information Literacy Standards”
Christopher Harris and Brian Mayer, Genessee Valley BOCES System, and Paul Waelchli, University of Dubuque
This trio made short speeches on fitting gaming to information literacy standards. Harris and Mayer spoke about bringing board games into schools. “We focused on board games because we found that board games in school had less of a stigma associated with them,” Mayer said.
Mayer offered selection criteria for school library games: Is it designed as an authentic game (as opposed to an “educational game,” which generally fail when it comes to a gaming experience); does it connect with the curriculum, either in the game mechanics or in the theme; does it fit within school’s time constraints (42 minutes is an ideal length, because that’s the typical length of a classroom session, although longer games may be justified to play over several days or a full semester); and return on investment.
Harris explained how they identified, with great detail, ways that about 50 games met specific performance indicators both in New York State standards and in the American Association of School Librarians Standards for the 21st Century Learner. Their library of games, with the standards that each game meets, is available at http://sls.gvboces.org/gaming/gamelibrary.
Waelchli focused on how games could meet Association of College and Research Libraries standards. Gamers must evaluate information, identify gaps in in the information they retrieve, create a system for organizing information, use that information to accomplish a goal, and reflect on successes, failures, and alternative strategies, he said.
“GT System Update”
Eli Neiburger, Ann Arbor (Mich.) District Library
The opening session ended with Neiburger’s quick introduction to Ann Arbor District Library’s GT system for gaming tournaments. The GT system includes features for tournament scheduling and promotion, registration, brackets and scoring, leaderboards, and the ability to develop custom layouts and use custom URLs. There will be three national events on the GT system for National Gaming Day @ your library: Dance Dance Revolution, Rock Band, and Super Smash Brothers. Upcoming features include a Flash tournament console, video chat, library card swipe-in, additional games, clans and leagues, and a player experience point and level system.
Gaming is much on my mind, with gaming programming at the recent LITA Forum, American Libraries’ December issue having a gaming theme, and the ALA TechSource Gaming, Learning, and Libraries Symposium beginning on Sunday. (I’ll be attending, so check here for daily reports.)
The idea of gaming in libraries gets a lot of pushback. (All together now: “It’s a library, not an arcade!”) All of this righteous anger, however, ignores an important fact: Gaming exists, and complaining about it won’t eliminate it. So it seems more constructive to me to attempt to use it in a positive way.
I do game, though primarily on casual online games rather than the consoles (Wii/Xbox/PlayStation) that are getting a good share of library attention right now. These games generally don’t have the community-building attributes that console games often do. But there are a fair number that support library missions in other ways: namely, as education, and as works of art.
Games with an educational bent are certainly the more familiar—Word Munchers, Number Munchers, and Oregon Trail (version 1, where hunting involved shooting a deer bounding across the top of the screen—none of that 8-direction stuff!) are fond memories from my elementary school library computer lab. (The librarian, Mrs. Sorvik, had the vision to be an early adopter of computer technology; the upshot was that we had an Apple lab sufficient for a full class by 1982.) The availability of Flash or other tools that make creating games relatively easy, and the rise of the internet as a distribution medium, means that educational games today can easily reflect current events and aren’t limited by salability.
“These games can be very successful, too, since interactive multimedia can engage its audience in ways passive media could never do,” said Jay Bibby, creator of the JayIsGames blog.
Examples include: (Some are my recommendations, some are Bibby’s, but all I found mine through his blog.)
FreeRice, which started as a vocabulary game but has branched out into math, chemistry, and other topics, and which has sponsors that donate rice through the UN World Food Programme for every correct answer.
Stop Disasters, a building simulation in which players must use sound building practices to prepare a town for a tsunami, wildfire, flood, or other natural disasters.
ElectroCity, another building sim where players must balance power needs with tourism, industry, and the environment.
Art games may well be even more intriguing, as they provide an immersive artistic experience that really can’t be replicated in other ways. Examples include:
Grow Island, a wacky but loving ode to human development.
Karma, a game-based take on the eponymous concept, where the player must attempt to wash his or her sins away.
Passage, which condenses a lifetime into five minutes of play and can be viewed as a rumination on exploration, on the phases of life, on marriage, on grief, and no doubt many others.
Samorost, a surreal point-and-click immersive experience.
Treasure Box, the equally surreal point-and-click Rube Goldberg Machine.
