Gaming

“Taming the Wild Geek”

Eli is in charge of the gaming tournaments that Ann Arbor District Library runs. And, he ran the tourney here last night!

Why videogames?
-An $11 Billion business, and just getting started
-Fundamental component of the modern media appetite
-Boys! 95% of teenage boys play video games, a traditionally hard to reach audience.

To circ, or what?
-MARC Records (hard to match things up)
-Intense competition (Blockbuster, etc)
-Even making platform decisions is hard – we’re at the end of a generation of systems
-Kiosks and The Bun: Toys R Us can do an ‘always on’ gaming setting better, and without the rules we would have to put into place. So why bother?

“This is something you tell the board you’re doing. You don’t ask to do it.”
Games are content, just another type than books. A new way of storytime.

Establish a brand
-The AADL GT (Gaming Tournaments) has a logo that is its own product brand and identity.
-Tournaments labeled as ‘seasons’. Each season focuses on a different game (Super Smash Brothers, Mario Kart, Dance Dance Revolution, Madden, etc) or a different age bracket. Each season has a champion
-As the event catches on, you can reproduce it and the audience will grow. The planning, like storytime, is essentially a one-time event
-Dance Dance Revolution is a pretty unimpeachable game to go with. Parent of a participant: “This is the first time he’s been out of bed before 11 all summer, and exercizing to boot!” The people who complain are the ones who don’t have any kids and are not reaping the benefits. There have been zero complaints from parents at AADL.
-One birthday party even came to an AADL gaming event

As public libraries, we have lost a generation. People in their 20s and 30s may, if we’re lucky, use the library

for story time. But that is all. We need to offer something to kids now that is relevant to them and will show the value of libraries. Creating a community of users like this, for free unlike other tournaments, is amazing.

View these programs if a loss leader, if you like, for getting people in the door. But this is selling the process short – story time is a core service, not a loss leader.

Recurring costs are very low. In year two of their program, almost nothing is being spent. The systems have already been bought.

Why Mario Kart? (and console games in general)
-Consoles are a great place to start, rather than PC games, for their simplicity. There is virtually no setup involved.
-Unlike MMORPGs, you are adding value with consoles. MMORPGs are social by nature, and there’s almost no point in bringing the people the together. Console games, on the other hand, are a definite value added experience.

-At home, 4 people can share one TV. At the library, 8 separate TVs are connected.
-The comparison between these tournaments and storytime keeps coming up. I like it, it seems appropriate.
-Where can PC and MMORPG games fit in? Run community events that do not focus on actually playing the game.
-Budget wise, a Gamecube is $99 including a game. A decent gaming PC can run $1000 easily.
-Nintendo’s games are the best on the market for all-ages gaming.
-Casual teenage gamers may dismiss Nintendo games as childish, but this is the audience that won’t come for anything less than the Mature-related games anyway. The true hardcore participants know how competitive and downright fun the games are.
-Speaking of Mature ratings, the video game ratings can be descriptive. Sometimes knowing a game yourself can provide a better selection process

“Nobody is too cool for Super Smash Brothers, despite the fact that you can play as Jigglypuff.”

Dance Dance Revolution
-Lower startup cost – one system, one game. Dance pads are as low as $20

Super Smash Double Dash
-6 month tournament season
-6-hour events
-Single player and Team Events
-$70, $50, $30 giftcards as prizes weekly
-Championship prizes: PSP, iPod, Nintendo DS, GBA, etc

Gaming tournament blog gives the community a focus between tournaments. They chat to each other, talk trash, and stay involved! Axis.aadl.org
Elaborate statistics are kept about each match: http://www.aadl.org/aadlgt/leaderboard
AADL has developed a Drupal module to handle all this on their web site, which will eventually be released to the public.

Running a tournament
-Check-in
-Open Play to start
-Build Brackets
-Qualification Rounds
-Keep Score
-Serve Food/Drink
-Elimination rounds
-Finals and award prizes
-Minimum staffing for this is two people – MC and a scorekeeper

Above and Beyond
-Play-by-Play and color commentary
-Project a cube, a camera view, or both
-Televise, or webcast it live!
-Music
-Make it a season
-Track stats
-Open play and tournament weekends

Now we’re watching the DVD that AADL put together, and was televised (live!) on community access tv at the tournament championship. Kids are doing the commentary! This is hilarious and extremely well put together.

“There’s a lot of things in the murky areas of copyright right now. All you can do is go ahead and wait for your cease and desist.”

Doing it on the cheap: Get the community involved – gaming shops, comic book shops, etc. “Follow the odor. If it stinks, you’re doing it right.” 🙂 Blogs and existing DDR community web sites are free marketing.

Selling it to the brass
-Popular with parents
-Again, like storytime
-Makes the library a focus of interest
-Guaranteed to induce gasps
-Promote your core services to a tough audience
-Its not all prostitutes and gunplay (that excuse is like saying we can’t get into DVDs because porn exists)
-They’re going to be taxpayers someday

What’s next?
-Retro Octathalon
-State of Gaming Panel with kids as panelists
-MaddenBowl Tournaments
-Online Mario Kart league – don’t even have to be at the library.
-Repeat it!

I’ll say more about this presentation in a wrapup entry for the day. I can’t say enough about how jaw dropping this all is!

Technorati Tag: GaminginLibraries2005

What Can Librarians Learn from Gamers?

George Needham is the VP for member services at OCLC.

Focus on the concept of gamers as metaphors. Developing, sharing, and extending knowledge.

Why should someone from OCLC speak on gaming? “It all started with…” the OCLC 2003 Environmental Scan.

It found 3 major trends:
-Self Service
-Disaggregation (bite sized pieces of information)
-Collaboration

Gamers show all 3 of these trends in action.

Question he thinks we are asking ourselves right now: “Why is an old poop like you talking to us about gaming?”
“When I see a line of historical continuity, I nearly wet myself.”

Flashback to 1889, giving us a slice of life of Needham’s grandfather. He was 14 when the Wright brothers flew.

Joe Duffy had a lifelong love of gadgets. He was 59 when TV debuted. 80 when Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the moon, watching it on TV. This was a life during an unprecended time of turmoil and technological advancement.

It was change or die. Today is much the same.

“According to Wikipedia”, the first video game was Tennis for Two in 1958. Games were originally designed to teach people how to use a computer. Then, Pong came along in 1975. Nintendo put gaming on the map for the general public in 1985. Air Warrior was the first multiplayer online game, in 1987. It cost $10 an hour to play!

There is a long tradition here, and libraries have not picked up on it. “It’s very easy to be a library futurist – look at what is happening in the rest of the world, and tell libraries they’ll get it in five years.” – Joan Frye Williams

New study from last week – the BBC determined that from age 6-65, the UK population has over 60% who have played video games.

What makes these folks so special?
Those who have grown up with the games see the world fundamentally differently. There is some evidence that the basic function pattern of the brain has changed.

Digital Immigrants – In the last 20 years, libraries have been helping to acculturate the older generations to new technology. But, it still still never be deeply ingrained as it is for the younger generations. There will always be a ‘digital accent’.

Digital Natives – The world has never been otherwise. Parallel processing instead of linear, graphical instead of text, payoff instead of process, fantasy instead of reality, “twitch” speed, etc. See Prensky for more information.

“Born with the Chip”: Format-agnostic, Nomadic, Multitasking, Collaborative, etc.

According to John Beck, gamers are always the hero of their own games. The world really does revolve around them. The world is a logical, friendly place. It is natural to move between tasks. There are many paths to victory. Victory is always possible, and the cost of failure is low. Leaders cannot be trusted. Lastly, life should be fun.

But, this is not the end of the world as we know it! Gaming has proven to help surgeons perform better.

Gamers:
-Compete
-Collaborate
-Create

Librarians should learn:
Rethink how we offer our services
-Multiple paths
-Many formats, platforms
-Consider the non-print learner
-Librarian as “information priest” as is dead as Elvis
-What can the user contribute?

“Yes, there really were wars about videos in libraries.”

Library mash-ups: example – ‘mash up’ everything Harry Potter related. Games, books, movies, etc. Or, tie in World War II games like Call of Duty to studies of the historical setting.

Rethink where we offer services
-Physical library layout
-Online library services are journeys and markers, not destinations. For example, spend some time getting library web sites mentioned and linked to from others.
-24/7/365 is barely enough

New OCLC study “Perceptions of Libraries and Information Services” – Libraries rank high on reliability with the public, but not on speed/flexibility/variety. Search engines rank just as reliable as librarians in their eyes.

(Study is available on OCLC web site)

Rethink privacy in this new context. Not being completely open with patron information, but thinking about what we do. In an Information Week experiment last May, 85% of people on the street gave up their passwords for a Starbucks $5 gift card. We think about privacy fundamentally differently than they do. Why not exploit the data we have lying on our hard drives to make user lives easier? Why not figure out what the 80% that doesn’t move on the shelves is, not buy so much of it, and let users point out when they would like specific items bought?

-Short cuts, not training. Repackage what we do as short cuts! We have better information than what is on the web. As shortcuts, not long step by step processes, it becomes more appitizing.

-Risk-taking and trial and error are OK! Don’t be afraid of an occasional failure. It happens, and isn’t the end of the world. “Nobody ever died of bad cataloging.” – Gary Houk, OCLC VP

-Expertise is more important than title or credentials. In public libraries, why not draw on high school students’ expertise?

-Can LIS learn from gaming academic programs? Electronic Arts, which makes video games, notes that in the last three or four years, students now come out of school with the ability to contribute to real projects, with less on the job training.
Why can’t library schools be focused similarly?

How do we apply this now?
-Play an online game once in a while
-Stock cheat books for video games in your library (or ‘strategy guides’ if you prefer)
-Offer services on IM, use text messaging – “This is a cultural hangup we need to get over.”
-Throw a LAN party in your library
-Bring digital natives into your planning process (even if they DON’T have an MLS)
-Respect non-print learning

There are a million ways to kill a new idea.

Now, a focus on his granson. Born in 1999. He was 5 when podcasting was added to iTunes. He had his first digital camera when he was 3, and does not understand the concept of film. “dialing a phone” has no innate meaning. When he asked his mom to “Google Spongebob” at age 3, his mom thought he had regressed to babytalk.

We are the only people who can change the ends toward which we are headed.

To sum up:
Nothing is built on stone;
all is build on sand,
but we must build
as if the sand were stone
-Jorge Luis Borges

Summed up in 3 words: “We Must Build.”

Info from the questions and comments: Use IM for staff communication. Needham’s ideal web page would work like Google (federated search?). The library at UC Merced (sp?) is the campus center – small collection, lots of public space.

“Libraries never have been the first place people go for information. We need to get over that.”
“There have been videos in libraries for 30 years. When does it become traditional?”
How do we make the jump from a ‘box of books’ to where we need to be? As we expand, bring people along slowly.

Don’t alienate the traditional user base as you bring in the new generation. A slow, slogging process.

According to the public, everybody who works in a library is a librarian. Anywhere else in the world, this situation doesn’t happen. Doctors do not staff the front desks. We are much more open and upfront.

A questioner brings up an example of his library’s selection process for a coffee provider: nobody making the choice was a coffee drinker! The result is horrible coffee. Bring in a diversity of people who are genuine stakeholders in a result.

I am lounging in my Holiday Inn’s brilliantly designed window seat. Lights off in the room, gazing out at the city. A bit of ice cold air drifts in through the cracks, just enough to be noticeable and make me appreciate the room’s heat. What a day!

I woke up and walked over to the American Dental Association for day 1 of Gaming in Libraries (or the Gaming, Learning and Libraries Symposium, if you prefer). Upon exiting the hotel I was greeted by a blast of -4 degree wind chill. Maybe I don’t miss winter quite so much as I thought. But, everything is in easy walking distance. The CTA guest pass I bought has gone largely unused. I’m such a nerd for mass transit that I may ride it tomorrow just for fun 🙂

A continental breakfast was provided a half hour before the opening keynote. This was brilliant, in that it gave ample time for socializing and getting to know fellow attendees straight off. There’s 131 people here, it’s sold out!

The back of the room was lined with eight televisions and their accompanying Gamecubes, all networked together and ready for Mario Kart play during breaks. I settled into “Blogger’s Alley” along with Michael, Aaron, Jenny, Chris, and a couple of others. If you’d like more coverage of today, they either already have posts up or (I assume) will later. The bloggers’ area was formed by necessity, as we all crowded around the power strip. Wi-Fi was provided by an Apple Airport plugged into the room’s one Ethernet jack. The signal was rather spotty, but I blame that more on the ADA’s connection than the wireless side of things. Something just wasn’t meshing quite right. In the end, it served its purpose. I was able to blog in (almost) real time. Here’s the notes I took during each speaker:

Les Gasser (Keynote)
Steve Jones (Pew Report)
Constance A. Steinkuehler (MMORPGs)
Walt Scacchi (Gaming opportunities in public libraries)

Most are sort of a stream of consciousness style, and I will likely put together a more refined writeup at some point. If you’d like any clarification, just ask.

After the speakers, it was gaming tournament time! I took first in the Mario Kart section, and second in Dance Dance Revolution. Congrats to winner Beth! It came down to the wire, but she simply out-danced me 🙂 The tournaments were a brilliant idea, and again provided some great ‘get to know you’ time. Eli did a wonderful job of MCing the whole thing, as he is very experienced in doing at his library’s events.

Next up, five of us walked a few blocks to the Cheesecake Factory in the base of the Hancock Tower for dinner. Delicious, and great conversation. We talked tech, authors, DRM, the net in general, of course gaming, and any number of other topics. A short chilling walk back, and here I am. Decompressing.

Today’s speakers were very theoretical. It was all about establishing a base: why is gaming important, and why are libraries justified in getting involved? The presentations also provided a foundation introduction to the world of gaming for those unfamiliar with it. Constance Steinkuehler’s analysis of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs, the most unwieldly acronym ever) was jaw dropping. I knew some of the facts already, but she pulled it all together so well! I’m hoping to run into her tomorrow and bring up the topic of Alternate Reality Gaming. It seems right up her alley, and I’m sure she knows much about the concept already. On a visceral level, I also loved hearing the Pew Report stats read out loud. Playing video games does not systematically cause real life problems! And the demographics of gamers are not what you think. I want this shirt.

Tomorrow looks to be focused more on the practical side of things. We’ll hear a lot of case studies, examples of how libraries have successfully integrated gaming and related concepts into their programming. I’m particularly looking forward to George Needham of OCLC’s keynote and the later discussions of gaming in academic libraries.

I was chatting with some of my gaming friends online tonight, and many are very interested in what’s being discussed at this symposium. They and I are surprised it hasn’t gotten much coverage from the gaming press and blogs. But given that this event was amazingly planned in a mere four months, I can imagine that advance publicity was hard. But I do hear someone from Gamasutra will be around tomorrow.

But for now, sleep. Another full day tomorrow!

Pictures from the symposium, including mine and others’, can be seen here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/gaminginlibraries2005/

Walt Scacchi – Institute for Software Research and Game Culture & Technology Lab, UC Irvine.

Gaming is a rapidly growing global industry.
Games as new media and cultural form
Game culture as social movement and career development

Many different genres of games
First Person shooters are very popular.
As an example, we’re watching video clips of Doom 3.

By one measure (these things are hard to quantify) there are 87,000 game servers online. Walt suggests you compare each server to a different TV channel.

Sourceforge.net, a site focused on development of open source software, has over 10,000 gaming/entertainment projects going. This is a substantial portion of the total number of projects.
While a very small percentage of people are actively working in the community, it only takes a few to connect everybody together. “It only takes a few Kevin Bacons to make connections”.

If a game comes with a Software Development Kit (SDK), players can hack the game to their heart’s content – big potential for education! The computer gaming industry is now helping people participate in the creation of new content. Again, 1-2% take part. But 1-2% of the massive gaming population is still very, very large. Likely in the millions.

“More to games than meets the eye.” It is a new medium.

Even new pseudo-languages are developing: l33t sp33k (leet speak) is a combination of numbers, letters and abbreviations.

L.A. public libraries allow games, and Walt points out an LA Times story about how kids are using the libraries as community centers again.

New Game related R&ampampampampampD efforts
Visual and performing arts
-Games as cultural media (www.selectparks.net)
Humanitites and social sciences
-Games as graphic narratives for storytelling; machinima – game based cinema
Alternative game cultures and venues
-“Hot rod” game machines, LAN parties, and GameCons
-One violent game was modified into a dance club for players to hang out at
Science learning and technology education
-Games for informal education in science
-Learning STEM domains and practices through immersive (role-playing) games

The Sims: most popular PC game of our time.
-Also being modified into a storytelling system

-Some stories from The Sims have over 100,000 readers
-Readers can download the character models, insert them into their own copy of the game, and modify the story as they see fit

A new game, The Movies, is completely focused on creating your own visual story.
-Example: Serious dramatic commentary on the recent French riots. Called “The French Democracy”. The creator learned English just to make the six minute film. View it here.

Another subculture of modding your PC has emerged. The objective is to either make your computer the absolute fastest around (sometimes resorting to dry ice cooling and other extreme methods) or just plain look the coolest (one example is structured like the Scooby Doo van).

If gamers like to play after 9 PM, and libraries are running gaming programs, shouldn’t they be outside of regular hours too?

The average gamer today is 29 years old.

Could libraries offer courses in modding? As of now most of the instructional information is scattered around as almost folklore online.

Where can you have a LAN party? Anywhere there’s room. (picture of an event in a Korean subway station)

“Bringing games into K-12 environments is a road to hell – paved with good intentions.”
I personally disagree with this statement – what about Oregon Trail? Number Munchers? I mastered these games in my younger grades and know I learned from them.

Walt is focusing more on games in the world of informal education – museums, libraries, etc. Example game – Kinetic City. It teaches 6th grade science.

“Today five year old children can play a game that 20 years ago the concept got someone a nobel prize in theoretical physics.”

‘games’ tends to conjure up pac-man or first person shooters. She’s going to talk about another genre which is getting more and more popular press: Massisvely Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs).

What are they?
-Highly graphical 2 or 3-D games
-Online social interaction
-Persistent virtual worlds
-Real-time, perpetually accessible
-Loosely structured by open-ended (fantasy) narratives, but…
-Players free to do as they please
-“Escapist fantasy” yet emergent “social realism” (Kolbert, 2001)

Lineage II is set in a medieval time period. “In three years of playing this game I have learned more about military strategy than I have ever wanted to” and “you wouldn’t beleive how much time you spend in meetings online”.

Why bother with these?
Socially Significant – Literally many millions of players are taking part. One year ago there were six million (the size of Chicago and LA combined), and that number has risen astronomically since.
Economically Significant – Full in-game economies have developed, complete with things like inflation. Players often sell in-game items on Ebay for real money. As a result, exchange rates can be developed. The world of the game Everquest II is actually the 77th largest national economy in the world. When this data was gathered a year ago, Its currency was trading higher than the Yen and Lira.
Intellectually significant – Collaborative problem solving, social networks, etc. Like in real life, cross-functional teams develop. The fantasy space looks more and more like ‘Fast Capitalism’.

The literacy scare – “The collapse of literacy and the rise of violence in the electronic age”
The media loves to write scare headlines like this. In fact, these games are literacy-intensive.
-In-game talk: The abbreviations of netspeak are frightening at first. In these games it is a functional requirement of needing to communicate as much information as possible in a few key presses.
-‘Orally’ delivered narratives of in-game events are told between players
-In-game letters are sent between characters
-Success in the game requires use of outside technologies (web browser, research, voice communication, etc.)
-If you ask players in the game about their info-seeking behaviors, they point out that the fan-generated resources and compendiums online are the most useful.
-Fan-run wikis, discussion boards, personal game blogs, and massive clan sites emerge
-Fan fiction: Players write (often at very high levels) stories taking place in the game world. The best develop followings.
-High school players say they like to create multi-month writing projects(!)
-“Whatever you want to call it – just keep doing it!”

Games are not replacing literacy activities. They are literacy activities.

What about quality?
Some (admittedly not all) literacy practices meet and exceed national standards.

Society has both a fear of new technology and a fear of youth culture. It is a fear of what kids are doing, not whether or how well they’re doing it.

How do players gain the skills to run high-level game activities?
Apprenticeship and learning from more experienced players. Many classic educational theories are reflected in these interactions, even when the ‘teachers’ have no formal training. Not just skills, but values are passed on.

A true meritocracy – Most of the time, personal appearance in real life plays no role whatsoever. One powerful leader in Lineage II was in real life an illegal immigrant who was waiting to apply for American citizenship. Imagine the power of letting kids play out what they can’t be in real life.

Awareness of different ‘games’
-Multitasking across multiple ‘attentional spaces’ (school, work, online, etc)

Primacy of the subjective
-McLuhan: “searching not for goals but for roles, a striving for an identity that eludes.”
-As employees, give gamers a role they can powerfully inhabit.

Why should libraries care about videogames? (I missed some of these, she went fast)
-Intellectually rich environments
-Collaborative problem solving
-Literacy practices (compare to libraries)
-Enculturation into practices & perspectives

Science & Art
-Some players spend all their time coding modifications to game code, for free, that thousands use.
-Others spend hours creating movies using the in-game visuals. Some are viewed by hundreds of thousands of players.

These games are developing into the “third places” where social networks form. Libraries also fill this role.

She had to skip over a lot of slides at the end due to lack of time. I can tell Constance is really into this topic area and knows her stuff.

Games, Learning & Society Conference – June 15-16 in Madison, Wisconsin.

Steve Jones works for the University of Illinois and the Pew Internet & American Life Project

Games were big as far back as his experience with Plato IV. Space War, Empire, Airfight, Freecell.

Preliminary online survey results from this year on The Gaming Landscape. The objective of this survey was to analyze the everyday use and integration of gaming into the public’s lives.

Three categories of games which are not mutually exclusive (admittedly crude, used in following statistics):
-Video games (require consoles and TV sets)
-Computer games (require a PC only)
-Online games (require an internet connection)

What we know-
70% of students surveyed play any category “at least once in a while”
65% reported being “regular” or “occasional” game players
All respondants reported to have played a video, computer or online game at one time or another. “This virtually never happens” in other Pew surveys.
27% of college students do not occasionally or regularly play.
-20% cited “lack of interest”
-13% cited “waste of time”
.5% cited unfamiliarity with games (margin of error is +-3%)

More research is needed on how gamers are self-defining their activities.

More women than men reported playing computer and online games (60/40).
The women/men split was just about equal in video games.

Gaming is uniform across racial groups – no one more plays significantly more or less than others.

Computer games hold a slight edge in popularity (71% play). 59% play video games, 56% play online games. Computer games also have an edge over video games and online games in time used.

Daily twice as many college students play an online or computer game as play a video game. Nearly half reported going online on at least one occasion just to play or download games.

No correlation was found between gaming and addictive behavior such as gambling online.

69% started playing video games in elementary school. Computer games were widely picked up in junior high/high school, and online games in college.

How do gamers decide what type of game they are going to play? This positioning of different games for different occasions is going to be relevant to libraries.

41% of college student gamers play mainly after 9 p.m. 31% play games the most at their parent’s home. This was the largest category compared to friend’s home (27%), dorm room (23%), and library (2%). (theory: parents don’t want to let go of the Xbox?)

66% said gaming had no influence on their academic performance. However, 48% agreed that gaming keeps them from studying “some” or “a lot”. “Maybe gamers are smarter? I don’t know.” Hours per week spent studying are about equivalent from gamers to non gamers.

69% have never used video, computer or internet gaming in the classroom for educational purposes. 32% have played games that were not part of the instructional activities during classes.

Graphics are the biggest thing wanted in a game. Racing, RPG, arcade games are the top 3 categories for video gamers.

Implications:

Most important trend spotted: integration of gaming into other activities.
-Multitasking
-While visiting with friends
-Brief distraction/break from work
-Almost everyone plays games “when bored” regardless of setting
-Even when gaming is the focus of a gathering, other things are still going on in the background

Age
-Younger = more likely to play
-The same trend applied to faculty and teachers
-Are we at a ‘verge’? As faculty becomes more familiar, there will be more opportunities for gaming in the classroom. But, students will have more experience with more up to the minute games. Emulation and the open source community ensures that older games will not die.

Is there a ‘gaming divide’?
-Higher family incomes correlate to a higher likelihood of regular gaming
-Again, race is not a factor, nor is gender

The cost of fancy immersive environments like The Cave is coming down, but applications for them are still sort of nebulous.
Future issues to play a role in the gaming landscape:
-Global high-speed networks (I think he means social networks)
-Culture and language – potential for cross-cultural game trainers?
-Public support of moving into this space

Older gamers drive the collaborative aspects more than younger.

Key Word: Immersion

“New Landscapes for Libraries”

Interesting point: Games are a form of Children’s Literature.

What’s a Library?
-Model 1: Information Repository (A Box of Books)
This model is financed by spreading the cost out over a very large base. It promotes knowledge in society. The critical question is: how do we keep libraries going?
Digital transformations are affecting this question – ebooks for example. These have some capabilites of traditional books, but miss a certain something. Real paper trumps in areas like flipping through pages. But, it’s a start. Despite the weaknesses, ebooks have been repurposed for games – displaying a chess board! Perhaps the next step towards real-life integration is flexible digital paper. It may fill niche applications first, areas more suited to a single page – signage or restaurant menus.
Information transaction costs – copy, transport, translate, collocate, index, arrange, transcode, search/find, etc. As a general trend, these are decreasing. Now you make money through these processes. As a result, you get things like Napster, other P2P, Flickr, Blogs, Open Source, etc.
These near-zero transaction costs drive consumers away from libraries. Gasser points out that he himself never goes to the stacks as an academic. He uses ILL to deliver books to his mailbox, and gets journal articles online.
Near-zero transaction costs also means that organizations want to use them to profit from every customer touch.
Video clips of a venus fly trap flash up on the screen. “We put game candy in the trap, and when the patron walks in we close the book around them.” This maintains the symbolic status quo of the Box of Books model, but does not advance at all.

Historically, libraries have dealt with high/low culture conflicts. Fiction vs Non Fiction, paperbacks vs. hardbacks in preservation, picturebooks for kids, AV/media, Toys, Internet access, Console Games? Online Games? There’s tremendous uncertainty in each of these new developments. That’s why we need conferences like this one to make sense of the new.

Model 2: Knowledge Model – Critical role of innovation for society.
Migrate new knowledge and experience into practice. How is society going to get to the new? Libraries are venues of community and cultural innovation. We’re in a shift from a consumption orientation to a production orientation, but a very small percent of the population are going to jump into this shift. Shouldn’t the library help filter the bleeding edge for the general population? View games as a ubiquitous cultural phenomenon. It is a reflection of an emerging culture, and a foundation of cultural mythology and transmission. “It’s a mix of culture. It’s not just the games themselves.”
Learning is viewed as gaining membership in a community. Moving from an outsider’s perspective to an active participant. Libraries should become a member of the community of gamers.

Issues with the Knowledge Model for libraries:
Games are an open system, and constantly evolving.
Interactions are unplanned and can be shocking/surprising.
Cultural Conflict – Grand Theft Auto, anybody?
Involving outside worlds – being mobile, outside and playing games in the world.
This flexibility fundamentally clashes with a library’s desire for stability and assured quality.

Model 3: I Model. What could a library be?
Library as ‘extended placeness’ (virtual spaces)
(“Web 2.0” was mentioned and I could hear sighs of approval from behind me)
Screenshot of Guild Wars Information Environment – first reaction: “It’s too much!” On a deeper look, it organizes and clarifies many different classes of information necessary to play the game.
Some faculty at the University of Illinois are holding meetings in-game of Second Life! They bought an island and are working on transforming it into their own information repository.
A video clip is being shown of an environment called “Cave”, where the user uses a joystick to literally walk through a book! I wish I could convey in words how cool this is – it really has to be seen, I’ll try to find the clip online. A virtual avatar is leading the user around a virtual city, teaching him how to information-seek. It is all very abstract, but I can see some potential for a refined version of this. Such a simulation can so complex that a structured guidance is necessary to make any sense of it.

Fundamental to the I Model is hooking libraries into “worlds of immersion, global interactive environments, to exploit the changes in transaction costs”. The Civilization series even has its own library in the in-game society. In this case it teaches players how to better play the game. Provide service in venues where we don’t usually go.

One of the questions from an attendee brought up an interesting comparison: Services like gametap, bringing out the ‘out of circulation’ older games, are like the classic movie stations on TV.

Another question resulted in a discussion of libraries as a center for cultural assimilation and bringing in those who are not early adopters, from all walks of life, together in a conversation. Gaming programs can facilitate this.

Yet another question resulted in a discussion of new resources in library collections. Why can’t a library give an opportunity to try new software before buying it?

I’m sitting near the back, surrounded by other bloggers. We’re huddled around 1 power strip. Kathryn Deiss is opening the symposium, calling it “ahead of the wave”. The back of the room is lined with video game systems, and just about every seat is full! Poster sessions on topics like video game piracy line the entrance hallway.

This is my first experiment with live blogging. Here we go!