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ALA Comic Book & Graphic Novel Member Initiative Group: We did it, yo.
32 years ago
File this under #makeithappen.
We did it, yo.
As you know, 8bitlibrary.com (along with Robin Brenner of noflyingnotights.com) headed up a campaign to create an ALA Comic Book & Graphic Novel Member Initiative Group which would serve to unite all of the different “factions” within the Graphic-Novels-in-Libraries world.
Thanks to all of your help and support in getting the word out, we got all the signatures we needed and on Sunday January 9th 2011, the ALA’s Committee on Organization voted to make this group “official” in the ALA! John Chrastka of the ALA said I could announce the creation as “effective March 15th, 2011” so him, Robin & I, along with our ALA staff liaison Tina Coleman, could work out the deets.
I’ll add everyone who signed already into a list of people who want info on the group. If you didn’t sign but wanna be part of the group, just click here and send me an email using that form letting me know you want to be part of the group! Our first official meeting will be at ALA Annual 2011 in New Orleans, so please come out to that (as if you needed another reason to come to NOLA).
This is what happens when you cross comic books and @JustinLibrarian.
SO, what’s next for 8bitlibrary.com‘s #makeithappen initiative? At the ALA Mid-Winter meeting of the Games & Gaming MIG (which was attended by Brandon & I of team 8bit as well as a few members of the Emerging Leaders group on Video Games me & Justin are mentoring), we pretty much decided we’re going to move forward and turn the MIG into The ALA Games & Gaming Round Table. We’ll obviously keep you in the loop.
And one last thing: I’m running for ALA Council. You know I’m all about “make it happen” so I’d love if you gave me & my running mates a “thumbs up”:
Fighting Fire with Free Speech: Protest Book Burning on 9/11
36In what is emerging as a series on “why I became a librarian”, here’s my next blog post. I started out this series, not realizing at first what it would become, by talking about the ALA Office of Intellectual Freedom’s Banned Books Week Machinima contest. As it turned out, there was a short depiction of book burning, in a video game, included in that post:
Denying people the right to freedom of speech via the burning of media is a pretty anti-American act. Libraries are constantly facing struggles in making sure that information, even information some people want to censor, is available to all.
That brings us to my 2nd post on “why I became a librarian”, and I credited a group of musicians as influencing my future career. You know who is another group of musicians who influenced many people? The Beatles. (this post happens to come on the 1-year anniversary of the release of the first Beatles video game)
How did they deal with this American opposition to their British music? They took the true ideals of America, staging protests and standing up for what is right:
And that brings us back to this post. In the most un-American way possible to remember 9/11, a pastor in Florida will burn copies of the Qu’ran.
In Chicago, the ALA will be staging a protest to this act.
Fighting Fire with Free Speech: ALA Will Protest Book Burning with 9/11 Qur’an Reading
“The librarians of America will not stand by and let ignorance rule,” says ALA Executive Director Keith Michael Fiels. “For every would-be book burner, there are thousands of readers who will speak out for the freedom to peaceably assemble and read whatever they choose.”
Book burning is the most insidious form of book banning, and just as the American Library Association is preparing to celebrate the freedom to read during Banned Books Week, along comes one Rev. Terry Jones of the 50-member Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida. The good reverend’s idea of world outreach is to commemorate the 9/11 terrorist attacks of 2001 with a public burning of the Qur’an, the Muslim holy book.The mind-boggling logic behind Jones’s plan has attracted the attention of Muslims and media around the world, and this morning, news sources reported that Gen. David Petraeus had personally pleaded with the reverend to restrain himself because of the potential for retaliatory violence against U.S. troops and citizens overseas that the book burning could provoke.
Meanwhile, the American Library Association and librarians across the country will move the Qur’an to the top of the Banned Books Week agenda. (Leading the way by modeling tolerance, an Oklahoma public library has been hosting an exhibit of artwork inspired by Muslim tradition.)
“Free people read freely,” says Barbara Jones, director of the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom. “That is a fundamental principle of the American Constitution and a basic mission of public libraries. We don’t burn books, we read them.”
Whether or not the Rev. Jones (who is no relation to ALA’s OIF director) proceeds with his plan, librarians and library advocates will assemble on the steps of the American Library Association headquarters in Chicago this Saturday at 1 p.m. for a public reading from the Qur’an to counteract the burning in Gainesville, and Banned Books Week will launch on September 25 with readings from the Qur’an.
Link to the ALA’s full post on the topic.
PLEASE HELP US HELP THE ALA SPREAD THE WORD BY TWEETING THIS LINK:
http://bit.ly/dgkn2t
This is why we became librarians, folks. Let’s stand up for Freedom of Speech.
Banned Books Week ’10 Machinima
3As the video game medium grows in cultural importance, it is natural that game players will want to use these communication tools (are they REALLY games?) in creative ways. A good friend of 8bitlibrary.com, filmmaker Justin Strawhand, released a documentary in 2006 titled (appropriately) 8 bit. The trailer for the movie, interestingly enough, includes a shot of an artist who used a video game to depict “book burning”, see if you can catch it about 1 minute in:
The largest movement towards “using video games as to make art” is called Machinima. When you make a Machinima, you record video game characters as your “actors”, the video game is your “set”, and you are the director. Machinima is so popular that the PR campaign for the upcoming game Halo: Reach include humorous machinima commercials using Halo as the tool to make the commercials. Here’s an example of machinima:
And that brings us to the American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom’s contest:
Banned Books Week 2010: Second Life Machinima Contest
Calling all filmmakers! As part of our celebration of Banned Books Week (BBW) in Second Life this year, we’re inviting everyone to take part in our Banned Books Week Machinima Contest. Machinima is filmmaking within a real-time, 3-D virtual environment like Second Life.
Your inspiration for your machinima entry should be “Think For Yourself and Let Others Do the Same,” the theme for this year’s BBW campaign. Submissions will be accepted between August 22 and September 25, 2010. Participants can enter as many videos as they’d like. The grand prize winner will receive 10,000 Lindens; a BBW 2010 T-shirt; and their video featured on the OIF Blog and in AL Direct. For more information about the contest, including rules and specifications, please click here. For further questions regarding the contest, please contact Tina Coleman (AKA, Kay Tairov in Second Life) via e-mail at ccoleman@ala.org.
You know 8bitlibrary.com will be participating! We will for sure be taking that little clip of a “video game book burning” as inspiration.
Please help us help the OIF spread the word about the contest by tweeting this link: http://bit.ly/deMZui
Librarians (*will be*) taking SXSW by Storm..
12 years ago
…with your awesome assistance…
We in the library <yawn> conference land can gain to learn from the unique panel proposal process at play over at SXSW, sure it takes some coordination and work, but man – does it ever get the community involved, and get people riled up for the conference MONTHS in advance.
Case in point: “They stopped coming?”: Librarians Don’t Cry They Re-View panel proposal
We don’t need to replay all the library X.0 cliches, but we can roughly agree that there are plenty of amazing and radical things about libraries that the public/industry/internet has forgotten about – or at least has slid out of the radar. So here’s an example of taking action in a variety of ways, including cross-pollinating info-related conferences/festivals on the kick-ass-librarian’s agenda. And being good information inseminators, we can bring back the good components to put into play within our own field.
So, go on, take a look at the proposal above – give it a vote if you like it, and toss in a comment about what you’d hope to see, and how you’d like to get involved (they don’t call it INTERACTIVE for nothing). While you’re there, poke around and see what other panel proposals strike your fancy….then we can start ruminating about getting a similar process going within libraryland conferences too – hmmm?
Sooooooo we did get a bit sassy with the write up. If you need some help deciphering, this may help: dating acronyms
Joystiq
12 years ago
Another resource for us gamin’ librarians: Joystiq
- Gaming news, Reviews of games
Walkthroughs to play games
Podcasts
Videos
Screenshots
From Joystiq’s About page: But don’t think that lighthearted jabs and an irreverent tone signals the end of serious business: Joystiq strives to maintain accuracy, to dig deeper, to do away with meaningless PR prattle, to gracefully decline luxury popcorn machines (like in the movie theater!), and to ask the awkward questions, all for you.
The Joystiq Network also includes:
Big Download: A fast and free downloads engine coupled with PC gaming news
Massively: Your best source for all the latest news on what’s happening in MMOs
WoW.com: Extensive coverage of the most popular online role-playing game ever, World of Warcraft
Retro Gaming Day press release…
42 years ago
I got really excited when I got an email with an 8bitlibrary.com Retro Gaming Day press release in it! Big shouts to our own MaMcGinley & RedheadFangirl for setting this all up. Hope to see some of our readers at the event:
Saturday, September 11, 12 – 4 PM
The 8bitlibrary.com Retro Gaming Day
The first ever Retro Game Day will be conveniently located in central NJ at Piscataway Public Library! Cool panel speakers on retro games, and open play on old school platforms like SNES, Gameboy, Xbox! From Pac-Man to Mario to World of Warcraft, learn and play with the 8bitlibrary.com bloggers and librarians. See you there!
For more information, visit us at http://blog.8bitlibrary.com/retro or email questions to Laverne at lmann@lmxac.org.
Location:
Piscataway Public Library
Kennedy Branch
500 Hoes Ln, Piscataway, NJ
May I See Your RealID? (Part II)
12 years ago
As I commented in my previous post, (here) World of Warcraft’s new BattleNet RealID system allows for players to communicate with their fellow gamers all across the spectrum of “realms/servers”. All you have to do is log in to your BattleNet account, and all of your virtual friends will know that you are online.
The purpose of this is to turn World of Warcraft into a type of game-based social network. If players create a single RealID username for themselves, they don’t have to remember several different character names for each of their friends. Much like Facebook or Friendster or MySpace, your identity is strictly that; it’s who you ARE. You could even include your RealID on your business card if you don’t mind having your business associates find you in the PvP arenas! ;)
Image stolen from worldofwarcraft.com screenshot gallery. (then modified by me)
Many World of Warcraft players were greatly pleased by this new ID system. It allowed players to keep track of their friends online, and provided a way for characters to communicate across servers. There are, a few unfortunate consequences to having this kind of immediate accessibility.
At first, it was Blizzard’s plan to require the player to sign-in with their RealID on the Official World of Warcraft forums. This would allow people to recognize each other as they posted on the message boards. This was generally accepted as a BAD idea. Although many people are very civil and well-intentioned on the official forums, many others enjoy venting their grievances with great passion and reckless abandon. Having a RealID that could be used to trace the commenter back to the player, could have very negative consequences for some. The anonymity in WoW is what allows some players to express themselves in a more unrestrained fashion.
From Penny Arcade, 7/9/10
So while some argue that the RealID system is a useful tool for preventing abuse on the forums, still others have argued that this is a privacy issue. Some users can even discern issues related to the Freedom of Speech and the expectation of privacy in this system. Shouldn’t players be free to speak what’s on their mind, regardless of the content? While we all hate trolls (no no, not this kind) and griefers, but don’t they have the right to spew their venom online too?
As it turns out, this a moot point. Not only has Blizzard kindly capitulated to the message board trolls, (your RealID name is not shown on the Forums now) they’ve also taken steps to ensure that the player is reasonably safeguarded from their personal information.
From the BattleNet FAQ: http://us.battle.net/realid/faq.html
Only the people that you add to your RealID friends list can see your name, and they ONLY see your name. They can’t track you down in that magical land we call “Real Life” unless you personally give them the information that they’d need to do that. Parents are also able to safeguard their children’s identities by using the BattleNet parental controls to lock their wee ones out of this feature. (as well as control the amount of time the kidlings spend on online, and other such things.
So while there was a brief blizzar– … er, snowstorm, of controversy surrounding the RealID system, it turns out to be much ado about little. Of course, the potential for drama is still there. There are doubtlessly still players who secretly play characters of an opposite faction from their regular Guild for a little good-natured competitive ganking, right?
... or does that kind of thing just happen in fictional web series?
… and of course, there are certainly those who can probably track down their fellow gamers no matter how carefully you cover your tracks. But the question is, where do we draw the line between privacy and socialization. Do we necessarily want anyone else to be able to put a real-life name to our virtual identities? Does anyone really NEED to know that the sexy warlock Lachrymae of the Lordaeron Undercity is really just some pathetic librarian in a lame fedora? Am I personally willing to sacrifice privacy just to be able to find my friends online?
Perhaps World of Warcraft is a safe haven. Maybe the protections and security there are solid. But what about the other social media? Are we TOO connected? Can someone trace my Nintendo Mii back to … Me? How much of my identity is my virtual identity? Am I more Craig, or more Lachrymae, or more whatever you’d call my XBox Live avatar? It’s been said that privacy is dead in our modern culture. That young people are not concerned with privacy, they want the spotlight. Thousands of self-indulgent YouTube videos would seem to bear this out, but the truth is more complicated, isn’t it?
Are we too involved? Have social media completely ensnared us in a web of connections that we can’t escape? How much of you is online for anyone to see? I’m looking for answers from YOU, faithful reader. Could I track you down in real life from your Facebook profile like some creepy stalker guy? What is YOUR Real ID? ;)
The 8bitlibrary.com Retro Gaming Festival
32 years ago
On September 11th, 2010, the East Coast’s contingent of the 8bitlibrary.com Crew will be hosting our first ever Retro Gaming Festival at the Kennedy Branch of the Piscataway NJ Public Library.
While we are still in the planning stages, we will sure to be having nostalgic game demos from some of our favorite video game consoles of all time, high-score competitions, discussions (including 8bitlibrary‘s own RedheadFangirl speaking on being a girl gamer from the 80s-today), D&D and Magic the Gathering Tournies, and “modern classics” like Guitar Hero 1.
What would you like to see at an event like that? Have you run a similar event and would like to share your favorite stories? Are you interested in making the trek out to Central Jersey and attending the event? Leave a comment in the box!
(and for out-of-towners serious about coming to the event, let’s work together on travel & housing arragements to hopefully make it possible for you)
8bitlibrary around town
4Hey all, wanted to share some updates with you about what our contributors are doing in libraries and beyond:
- Justin Hoenke was on Good Day Maine last week promoting the new Portland ME Public Library’s Teen library program. You can watch the video here.
- JP Porcaro just wrote an article for School Library Journal titled The Pokemon Generation which you you can read in its entirety here.
- Craig Anderson‘s 8bitlibrary.com article titled Why Nobody Plays Second Life has lead to a two-part guest post on the Library Journal “Games, Gamers & Gaming” blog. You can read Nobody Plays Second Life (part one) and Nobody Plays Second Life (part two) at those respective links.
- Today is 8bitlibrary.com contributor, 2010 Library Journal Mover & Shaker and creator of #andypoll Andy Woodworth‘s birthday. Happy Birthday, dude!
- We’d like to welcome some new contributors: Eli Neiburger, author of Gamers…in the Library?! The Why, What, and How of Videogame Tournaments for All Ages, High School Librarian Buffy Hamilton, of the Unquiet Library, Brandon Robbins, who has already posted lots of great video game reviews here on the 8bitlibrary, Harvard University librarian Tom Bruno (aka @oodja on twitter), and Stevens Institute of Technology librarian Valerie Forrestal. Welcome to everyone and glad to have you aboard.
- RedheadFangirl Laverne Mann got to meet graphic novel superstar writers the Luna Brothers. How cool is that?!
Hope everyone has a fun week! JP
But is it ART??
33 years ago
So there’s been some press recently on the concept of video games as a form of “art”.
This debate was inspired by recent comments made by film critic Roger Ebert, who claims that not only are video games not art, but that by their very nature they cannot be art. Ebert cites a TED talk given by the lovely lovely Kellee Santiago, who inverts the film critic’s argument by saying that not only will video games one day become art, but that they already are … art.
Roger Ebert’s comments have ignited many responses from people in the game community, including such luminaries as Yahtzee Croshaw and Gabe and Tycho of Penny Arcade. (see below)
At the heels of this online debate, comes the news that the US Supreme Court is scheduled to hear a case this Fall involving the First Amendment protections of violent video games.
This is not the first time that video games have come under scrutiny for issues relating to free speech. It seems like only yesterday that the ultra-violent video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas came under fire for a secret modification that incorporated a fully nude sex scene into the game. The double standard did not go unnoticed by the media. Here was a game that allowed your character to steal cars, murder cops, and beat prostitutes with a baseball bat. But one scene of completely consensual sex was enough to get the moral guardians in a tizzy. More recently, the game: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 became the target of controversy for the inclusion of a mission that allows the player to commit an act of international terrorism on some unsuspecting Russian civilians. (warning, contains really disturbing imagery)
Whether or not video games should be considered “art” is only part of the question. The broader questions are: “Where do video games fall with regard to First Amendment protections?”, and: “Why does it seem that people automatically assume that the only people who play video games are 4 – 12 years old?”. Recent (and even not so recent) studies have already shown us that the average gamer is actually between the ages of 25 – 30, yet public opinion still seems to link “video games” with “kid stuff”. This is why violence in video games has become such a First Amendment issue. Not because they are more violent than your basic Tarantino flick, or that they are more sexually explicit than a Friday-late-night Cinemax movie, but because they’re games; and most people still parse “games” as: “child’s play”.
So where do libraries make the distinction? As self-proclaimed First Amendment warriors, we as librarians have an obligation to preserve the availability of certain materials that others may find objectionable. Yet if we’re hosting game nights for young teens, we might not necessarily want them to orchestrate a terrorist attack on Russian civilians in our children’s section. So how do we reconcile these issues? We can start by recognizing that the medium of video games does not necessarily define the audience; and that not everything with a health bar is family friendly kid stuff. Librarians will defend to the death our right to provide the public with Mapplethorpe, Salinger, and Anne Frank, but that doesn’t mean that we intershelve them with the Doctor Seuss books. ;)
Personally, I would defend video games, even violent ones, as an art form, but only under a very broad definition. Ordinarily, I think of art as something to be enjoyed passively, rather than interactively. In video games, the observer guides the action, and becomes an accomplice in the creation of the art. This does not make video games any less valid than the more discrete forms of art. A masterfully executed level of Tomb Raider can be every bit as beautiful as a perfect game of chess, a Baryshnikov fouetté jeté, a Salvador Dali painting, or a Hendrix solo. But I feel that the interactivity of video games places them into a different sphere of aesthetic appreciation. It is a hybrid of visual art and performance art that defines the participant as collaborator. For this reason, I feel that video games as art form deserve every protection that our Constitution provides. I eagerly wait the foundation of entire galleries devoted to the art of the video game.
Maybe we can get some eccentric billionaire to give us a grant. :)