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8bitlibrary.com is now located at 8bitlibrary.com

2 months ago

by JP in #libgaming chat, #libuncon, #makeithappen, 8Bit Contributor Andrea Davis, 8Bit Contributor Beth Gallaway, 8Bit Contributor Bob Keith, 8Bit Contributor Brandon Robbins, 8Bit Contributor Buffy Hamilton, 8bit Contributor Chris Murray, 8Bit Contributor Craig Anderson, 8Bit Contributor Dianna Leighton, 8Bit Contributor Doug Baldwin, 8Bit Contributor Erin Mischak, 8Bit Contributor Jodie Borgerding, 8Bit Contributor Julie Jurgens, 8Bit Contributor Kurt Schulitz, 8Bit Contributor Laverne Mann, 8Bit Contributor Toby Greenwalt, 8Bit Contributor Tom Bruno, 8Bit Contributor Val Forrestal, 8BitLibrarian Allen McGinley, 8BitLibrarian JP Porcaro, 8BitLibrarian Justin Hoenke, adult, advocacy, ALA DANCE PARTY, Android apps, child, collection development, display, drinkup, event, family, friend, Game On! Program, goodbye sweet prince, iPhone Apps, IRL (in real life), link, list, literacy, marketing, meetup, mobile, news, Pax East 2010, photography, programming, Project Brand Yourself A Librarian, review, Storytelling, SXSW, teen, The First Day of the Fourth Month, Video, web 2.0

HEY 8BITLIBRARIANS,

So, you are reading this on the OLD 8bitlibrary.com. 8bitlibrary.com no longer redirects here (to blog.8bitlibrary.com). Here’s JP’s “farewell” post to the blog…but first, some nostalgia…

In 2009, JP Porcaro and Justin Hoenke met for drinks and found out they were both ALA Emerging Leaders for the upcoming year. Our bromance continued with daily IM chats until Justin one day said:

Let’s start a librarygarden of gaming.

So, we did. We really started taking off and getting hits when Justin made a joke on twitter:

Let’s all get library tattoos.

And I was like, YEA LET’S DO IT. And that’s how this whole thing happened…Justin & I would brainstorm crazy ideas, and if they were just crazy enough to work, i’d #makeithappen. So we started Project Brand Yourself a Librarian, librarians shared it like crazy, and a bunch of librarians got tattoos.

So from the very start, within weeks, we strayed from the original “library garden of gaming” idea.

We came up with other crazy ideas and made them happen:

ALA DANCE PARTY (and other parties like the NJLA ones and the ACRL Social)
#TeamRock8
The Adventures of Flat Justin
Think Tank (which grew into ALA Think Tank, facebook’s largest active group of international ideas-sharing for librarians)
Cranky Kong, librarianship’s oldest blogger.

We also had lots of fabulous contributors, almost all the top names in the field of “gaming in libraries” either wrote for us or were considered part of the team.

And then we shifted from crazy ideas to more traditional ones:

We ran the petition to start a the ALA Comic Book & Graphic Novel Member Interest Group, and with the help of everyone who sent in an online signature, we made it happen at ALA Mid Winter 2011.
We ran National Unconference Day ’11, a hybrid online & in-person conference. We had fabulous lightning talks at it by Michael Stephens, Jaime Hammond, and Eli Neiberger.
We became the largest active source for game reviews for librarians, and eventually lead the charge to make GameRT a reality.
We hosted Retro Gaming Days all over New Jersey.
Got involved in Buy India a Library.
Launched #makeithappen and inspired MIH.
Launched #libgaming (which has since died, sad sad…)
We ran webinars.

In our heyday, we were getting about 4000 clicks a day (which is BIG for library blogs), and alexa.com had us listed as one of the highest trafficked library blogs. The only blogs that were getting higher traffic at the time were the ‘official’ ones; the LJ, SLJ and some of ALA ones…

Lots of success here in a short period of time, maybe moreso than any other library blog. So why did we let blog.8bitlibrary.com “die”?

All of our contributors are doing other things.

We all got busy. 8bitlibrary lead us to publication deals, speaking gigs, new jobs, and new leadership opportunities. Now that GameRT exists, we have a more formal place to do our gaming-in-libraries work.

Blogging is boring.

We should have figured out from day 1 that blogging was not what we were about. We were a successful BRAND, but never a good BLOG. All of the successes I listed had more to do with 8bitlibrary as a brand, and less to do with blog.8bitlibrary.com.

WordPress sucks.

The blog was constantly marred by slow load times, login problems for contributors, and errors on the user and contributor end. Anyone who was a frequent contributor knows what I mean when i say “500 Internal Server Error”

We have better places to “publish”

Blogging is NOT publishing. We’ll get some game reviews actually published via GameRT hopefully soon!

SO WHERE DOES THAT LEAVE 8BITLIBRARY?!

When Justin posted this on the new 8bitlibrary.com, people FREAKED out (they though we were killing everything, the facebook page, the twitter, the tumblr (which is now the main site) and the blog) and I had to write this.

Where we’re left without the blog is where we always belonged: as the party people of librarianship. So we’re still gonna do all the stuff we used to do, like ALA DANCE PARTY, Project Brand Yourself a Librarian, and all the Think Tanks and subsequent parties…but we won’t have to worry about keeping up this illusion that we’re a “professional” library blog.

We’re still here.

#partyhard and #makeithappen,

#makeithappen out with the old in witht he tumblr when we come to party we will party hard

Gaming Can Make a Better World – Believe!

8 months ago

by Doug in 8Bit Contributor Doug Baldwin, literacy, Video

In gathering my resources for my presentation at NJLA Conference this year, I came across this awesome TED talk given by Jane McGonical, Director of Game Research and Developement at the Institute for the Future. She was one of the designers who worked on “I Love Bees“, the alternate reality game (ARG) to promote Halo 2, as well working on an independent basis to create ARGs designed to use game play “for good”.

BTW, she is also like my new gaming idol! (Don’t worry JP, you still definitely in the top ten!)

Anyway, she discussed the concept of connecting gaming and gameplay to real world problem solving. You can watch for yourself below, but she draws some very insightful and meanigful connections between the values, emotions, and experiences of the gamer and how those assets can be bridged to the real world in truly revolutionary ways. Put it this way, when she argues that if we want to solve the worlds problems we HAVE to spend more time gaming… she got my attention. That is a huge statement.

Hope you all find it as inspiring as I did and continue to remember that gaming has been, and continues to be, a much more rich, complex, and meaningful experience than stereotype and popular culture convey.

What type of media belongs in a library? (or, Who Are We?)

1 year ago

by JP in #makeithappen, 8BitLibrarian Allen McGinley, 8BitLibrarian JP Porcaro, adult, advocacy, child, collection development, event, link, programming, teen, Video

I’ve been getting alot of questions lately: “what IS 8bitlibrary“?

6 months ago i would have said “it’s the gaming-in-libraries blog”! And I’m not, 6 months later, saying that statement is wrong. But we’re about a bigger issue, and that is: “we’re the #makeithappen blog“.

In libraries, #makeithappen is a taking new exciting ideas and seeing them through to the end. It’s the blog about all the really cool new stuff people are actually doing in libraries.

I had the opportunity to watch the Joaquim Phoenix movie I’m Still Here thanks to the Netflix instant queue. It was a great documentary about Joachim trying to become a Hip-Hop star. I won’t give spoilers, but the end, to say the least, “leaves you wondering”.

Tonight, again because of the Netflix Instant Queue on Xbox, I got to see the 1998 documentary Wrestling with Shadows, which ultimately chronicles the end of Bret Hitman Hart’s WWF career, with the Montreal Screwjob being the crux of the story. Everyone KNOWS wrestling is scripted, and the movie takes you through the process of how wrestling IS scripted. However, the end of the movie is the story of a script gone wrong, where the person who was supposed to win was “screwed”. In the 90s wrestling era, this was a defining moment of “OMG, wrestling can be REAL sometimes!!!”.

When the movie started, I felt that the fact that a documentary was being recorded at the convenient moment when the ultimate wrestling “real” outcome (vs the usual fake wrestling) was proof that even at the time wrestling was “real”, it was also an elaborate hoax.

I suggested to my wife that this would be a great program for a library (like a book discussion, but with movies instead of books). Show both movies and have people discuss the fictional and the factual elements of both, and maybe try to decide which told a better fictional but factual story.

My wife said “this doesn’t belong in libraries“. There’s lots of dicks, boobs, balls, sex, and drug use in the Joachim movie after all, and the wrestling movie was full of violence: everything we love to censor.

I thought back to all the books I have read since becoming a librarian. Lots worse violence. Way more sex and drug use. Much more graphic violence. They are making a MOVIE out of The Perks of Being a Wallflower, after all! As an aside, that book was set right in the same historical period as the Montreal Screwjob.

I said to myself: WHY is it ok to have certain forms of “inappropriate” expression in books but not movies? Why do we treat some forms of media as sacred, and other forms as dirty?

This, of course, is also what 8bitlibrary.com is about. We believe that storytelling media shouldn’t be judged just because it is presented in a certain media format and not another.

And so, I ask, how have libraries dealt with “controversial” content in one form of media that is less-controversial in other forms? We already know that some library board in the middle of nowhere decided to ban their library from showing the Michael Moore movie Sicko just because they didn’t agree with the argument the movie made. I’m sure they already own books that make similar arguments, and no one cares. Cranky Kong, Donkey Kong’s grandfather, would probably applaud their ban.

So, should libraries ban content in some formats and not others? And, do you feel like 8bitlibrary.com is just a “gaming blog”, or do you feel like we talk about gaming so much because we are touching on an issue that is really relevant to current libraries?

I wrote an article in January 2011′s School Library Journal along with 8bitlibrary.com contributor Beth Gallaway on the USA Supreme Court Case on First Amendment Rights and how they apply to video game content (vs, say, the same content in a Bugs Bunny cartoon). Same issue, different media format.

I would really love to get a convo going, either here, on twitter, or on facebook, about what you think!!!

Thanks for reading, true believers.

#makeithappen!

#makeithappen advocacy basics books collection development Communication content drugs game content gaming LibrarianJP libraries library explosion link literacy media movies philosophy programming public library rock and roll sex tweeps twitter video games

here are video for you to watch

1 year ago

by JP in #makeithappen, 8BitLibrarian JP Porcaro, link, Video

Some videos:

Game Night X at Jackson Library in the University of North Carolina – Greensboro. (already dead link, bummer)

Some guy singing about reading books. I HATE library videos about books, but he steals books from a 7 year old kid’s birthday party, so i’m posting this for the LULLZ.

Here’s Green Day playing at a high school in 1990. The song is about a boy who has a crush on this girl who he met (i’m assuming) in the Library, since the title of the song is “At the Library”.

green day library videos youtube

Sly Stone on our human need for approval.

1 year ago

by JP in #makeithappen, 8BitLibrarian JP Porcaro, advocacy, link, Video

How many times have you not done something that could have been great because you felt the need for approval first?

What we’d like to do is sing a song together. Now you see, what usually happens is you get a group of people that might sing, and for some reasons that are not unknown anymore, they won’t do it. Most of us need approval. Most of us need to get approval from our neighbors before we can actually let it “all hang down”, ya dig? Now what is happening here is we gonna try to do a sing along. Now alotta people don’t like to do it because they feel that it might be “old-fashioned”. But you must dig that it is not a fashion in the first place, it is a feeling. And if it was good in the past, it is still good. We would like to sing a song called “Higher”, and if we could get everybody to join in, we’d appreciate it.

What i’d like you to do is say “higher” and throw the peace sign up; it’ll do you no harm. Still again, some people feel that they shouldn’t because there are situations where you need approval to get in on something that could do you some good. Heh, yea…

Now if you throw the peace sign up and say higher, get everybody to do it…. There’s a whole lot of people here, and a whole lot of people might not want to do it, because they could somehow get around it; they feel that there are enough people around to make up for it. And on, and on, etcetera, etcetera, zzrawr! We’re gonna try “Higher” again, if we could get everybody to join in we’d appreciate it. It’ll do you no harm.

#makeithappen getting higher make it happen mih music sly and the family stone woodstock

Banned Books Week ’10 Machinima

1 year ago

by JP in advocacy, event, link, marketing, news, Video

As 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

advocacy ala art Communication freedom of expression Halo 3 link Machinima media

Mario Learns a Lesson

1 year ago

by HiMissJulie in adult, child, link, literacy, Video

“bit and run” — Mario’s Ladder from Cory Godbey on Vimeo.

I saw this on Topless Robot today. Corey Godbey, if you don’t know, is an amazing artist who curated a collection of Where the Wild Things Are inspired art entitled “Terrible Yellow Eyes.” He’s also illustrated many folk and fairy tales. His work and interests are a lovely intersection of gaming, art, and storytelling, which is a wonderful model for libraries to follow.