• National Library Unconference Day ’11. What IS an unconference, you ask? Try out this video by Allen McGinley & I talking about our recent Remixing Libraries unconference, and check back often for more info. We’ll be posting how-to guides, videos, and tips on how to run a great unconference.
  

When?

• Save the date: May 2nd, 2011, 1pm EST. More info to follow this month.

Where?

• At your library for a staff development day. Or an unconference for a regional library cooperative. Maybe something hosted at a state library? Or hosted by your state or regional library association. A great place to hold an uncon for National Library Unconference Day ’11 is at an LIS school. It’s totally up to you!

Why?

• The sage-on-the-stage lecture presentation style of a traditional conference is losing relevance in our world of immediate communication. At an unconference, the participants are the experts, and ideas grow organically. I’ve watched this video over and over, and this is exactly the type of motivating event that the speaker is talking about!

Who?

We’ll be streaming a free keynote session to all participating librarians, libraries and library organizations. Our confirmed speakers so far include:

• Michael Stephens, Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Dominican University in River Forest, Illinois and founder of http://tametheweb.com/.
• Jaime Hammond, Reference and Serials Librarian at Naugatuck Valley Community College in Waterbury, CT., library-as-space advocate and chair of the ALA’s Emerging Leaders IG Steering Committee.
• Allen McGinley, Department Head in the Piscataway NJ Public Library, National Library Unconference Day ’11 organizer, Gaming for Children With Special Needs advocate, and leader of 8bitlibrary.com‘s #makeithappen initiative.
• JP Porcaro, aka me, founder of 8bitlibrary.com, Virtual Services librarian at New Jersey City University, and world’s self-described expert on Pokemon & libraries.
• Justin Hoenke, founder of 8BitLibrary.com, Teen Librarian at the Portland (ME) Public Library, contributor over at Tame The Web.
• Eli Neiburger, librarian in the Ann Arbor MI District Library, author of Gamers…in the Library?! The Why, What, and How of Videogame Tournaments for All Ages, Library Renewal board member, and Patron Saint of 8bitlibrary.com.

How?

• Soon enough, we’ll have a link up for you to sign up your unconference to receive the FREE keynote lightning talks webinar. For now, mark your calendars, organize your group, and get ready to change the world. Once you sign up, we’re imaging you’d use a computer + a projector to screen the keynote to your local participants, then you’d get to your individual unconference. We’ll have a constant digital conversation on Twitter via hashtag #libuncon. And we’re hoping people share what they learned and accomplished via blog posts and youtube videos!

MARK THOSE CALENDARS NOW, and #makeithappen! signed, JP & the 8bitlibrary.com team.

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!

The ACRL 2011 Social!
Thursday March 31st at 07:00pm – 01 April at 02:00am
The Field House. 1150 Filbert St., Philadelphia, PA.

RSVP on The Facebooks!

If you tell the bartender you are w ACRL, they are hooking us up with drink specials: $3 domestic beer, $4 wine, and $5 mixed drinks from 7 to 10pm. see you there, invite your friends, tweet it http://fb.me/Eotuk6cx

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

File this under “We don’t have all the answers.”

And, of course, librarians across the country are wrestling with this same question, albeit for other forms of media. How can we distribute digital music when iTunes (& to a lesser extent, Amazon and the like) have already taken away our ability to do that? While there are some very expensive (and, in my opinion, very clunky and not-iTunes-like) vendor-controlled options such as Overdrive, Naxos Music, & Freegal, this is just a “patch” that we have while we, as a library community, decide to either get serious about digital distribution or continue to tread water.

A current trending topic of concern in libraries is eBook distribution. How can we loan an eBook on an eBook reader if that content is closed and controlled by a large corporation?

Along that “we don’t have all the answers” line, I decided to go to an expert on the topic, Mr. Libraryman Michael Porter. He has wrestled with the larger distribution issue, just as we are on the smaller (albiet still gigantic) issue of game content distribution. So I asked him,

• How do you feel libraries will be distributing digital media in 2015?

He gave this well-reasoned response:

I imagine two most likely scenarios with little gray in between the potential outcomes.  For both, the lynchpin is either succeeding or failing to develop a new electronic content access and distribution infrastructure via libraries.  If we can develop that new infrastructure and make it a truly effective, competitive, well used and well liked place for people to get what they want, when they want it, in the format they want it *through the library*, then our future will be more secure and on-target than ever before.  If we fail to do this though, libraries will fade in use, funding and relevance.  This would eventually lead to the demise of the library as the hub of content access and community engagement and turn many of those functions over to for profit business and institutions that have mission statement tied to profit rather than the health and wisdom of the community and country they serve.

This is a call to action for all of us. We shouldn’t just wait for a vendor to develop a platform for us. We shouldn’t let something as simple as a library’s ability to loan a book be taken away by corporations in the digital age. We need to raise this issue. If we want libraries to continue to exist, we need to let go of our comfort and get on the front lines of this issue.

So there is no confusion, I am not anti-corporation, per se. Corporations can be our partners in it the future. And, so my last words will be positive, we can do it.

Thanks go out to Michael Porter from us at 8bitlibrary.com. Check out his Library 101 project, if you haven’t yet.

Some of my favorite librarians, the ones with an eye on how information is communicated in our digital age, have told us to get on twitter. We are.  They’ve told us to get on facebook, and you can now logon to 8bitlibrary.com with your facebook name. You can fan us on facebook. They’ve told us that the mobile web is growing, so we’ve set up 8bitlibrary.com to work beautifully on an Android OS or iPhone mobile browser.

What are we missing? We are trying to continue to move forward. What are you doing that we aren’t? Librarians in the 2010-2020 decade need to be asking that question: what are our users doing that we aren’t yet doing?

Libraries, for the sake of our very existence, need to stay relevant. Not only for advocacy efforts, but for our future place in the information landscape of those we serve. Sure, 8bitlibrary.com is about “gaming in schools and libraries”. But we what we really care about is keeping the library and educational (information) communities in the same place as those we serve.

So, what now?

Also, I would love those of you surfing this site via the mobile web to give us a shout-out, via our comment box, from your phone.

Signed,

JP & the whole 8bitlibrary.com team.

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. :)

Here are some youngins at a Pokemon card trade-off at Wilmette Public Library in Wilmette, Illinois.

Some older folks playing Pokemon at St. Joseph County Public Library in South Bend, Indiana.

Here is an eye catching awesome advertisement flyer for a Pokemon Rumble program at the Lester Public Library in Two Rivers, Wisconsin.

Here we have a fun display of Pokemon manga at the Ridgedale Library in Monnetonka, Minnesota.

Some adults playing Pokemon Monopoly.

Here we have Gaming-in-Libraries guru and author of Gamers…in the Library?! The Why, What, and How of Videogame Tournaments for All Ages, Eli Neiburger, running a Pokemon event. Pulled off the American Library Association Flickr account!

Is your school or library including Pokemon? Let me know! jp@porcaro.info

Justin has really been killing it on here with his great posts on gaming programs, and I felt inspired to share an experience of my own.

In 2005, in my previous job as head of a public library children’s department, I had the opportunity to try out something that I suggest every public library at least try for a month, if not implement permanently. If you own a console, take out/open your TV, turn on the TV&console, and let your library users play the games all day. Whenever you are open.

A pretty diverse group, chillen at the Gaming Station

The concept is simple: you allow books to be read and checked out all day. You allow your computers to be used all day. Same goes with other media; newspapers, magazines, etc… Your library spent a small but good amount of money on the console and the games, let your library users play with them! It doesn’t only have to be for programs. Similarly, open gaming doesn’t mean that you still won’t get a chance to run programs!

My experiences were very positive. I had multiple age groups constantly collaborating and sharing information in a way that is unique to the gaming medium. Users who would have in other circumstances had no reason to even speak to each other at the library are now sharing tips and becoming friends (oh, and hopefully talking trash on each other, :-p).

Open gaming also fosters a new way for libraries to include multiple age groups in activities. Public libraries traditionally segregate people based on age (“Children’s Room”, “Teen Room”, “Adult/Reference room”, in NJ we have a growing amount of libraries with “Senior Rooms” thanks to the work of Allen Kleiman et al.). I don’t think that there is anything wrong with age segregation in libraries; it HAS worked and CONTINUES to work for libraries. But there’s also nothing wrong with mixing everyone together, and in my experience with open gaming, this is THE BEST WAY to get every age group engaging / sharing information & experiences together.

In an open gaming situation (vs a set-times-for-gaming situation), I’ve found that parents/teens/seniors who otherwise wouldn’t  have picked up a game are now having fun “playing” with kids/teens/parents/grandparents/babies. It’s really an amazing, unique-to-libraries experience to see a two-year-old kid playing video games with their grandparent and an 8-year-old kid they’ve never met. Where else could you see that same 8-year-old become friends with a 15-year-old? Or a 20-something couple walk in the library for a book and end up sharing a really good time with a bunch of teenagers they’ve never met before? And in a school library situation, you’ll see teachers and students engaging in a way they’ve probably never engaged before, and students will build friendships with students they may have never even met before.

Libraries aren’t only about information, they are also about valuable human experiences, and gaming is the best of both worlds: a modern information media as well as an all-ages platform for fun  interaction.

You’ll notice I didn’t go over any “problems” you may run in to. It’s 2010 now and the idea of open gaming probably isn’t as “new” as it was in 2005, so I think it’ll probably be easier for you to try something like this in your library. There’s always 1,000,000 reasons not to do something; don’t let those reasons stop you from trying this. Let me know your experiences if you do this in your school / library!