LIS 9763

From city to city, I followed her. London. New York. Hong Kong. Witnesses give me fragmentary details, tiny snippets of where she might be absconding to next. Her V.I.L.E. allies cough up more information, but I know I’m running out of time. That’s when I get lucky. A bad pun clicks and I realize it can’t be Montreal or Istanbul she making for. She’s heading back to California, to the one city where she can disappear into the crowd. But I won’t lose her this time.

I know where you’re going, Carmen Sandiego, and you won’t slip through my fingers again. This time, you’re MINE.

I begin can’t tell you how much fun I had typing that. Of course I could probably have typed it a lot faster if I’d owned and played The Typing of the Dead when I was younger, instead of the really lame typing skills game that involved a top-down racing game we had when I was in grade school (when a lot of kids installed SimCity to play instead). I suppose, to be fair, TotD didn’t show up until around the time I transitioned into high school.

So what am I getting at? Well, not all educational games stink. In fact, the best educational games I’ve ever played are ones where the learning is built into the way a game is played, or even gained incidentally, instead of the being in your face like a teacher yelling YOU VIL NOW BE EDUCATED every third sentence. Education isn’t fun, but learning can be. When our group project post goes up, there’s a video of Will Wright (designer of SimCity and The Sims) presenting his most recent game, Spore, at the South by Southwest conference (SXSW). I spent almost an hour tracking that video down because what he says in the first five minutes about how video games can facilitate learning has stuck with me for over a year. Not only does he (obviously) get it, he ties it up in a neat little package that non-game-programmers and non-gamers can relate to.

This whole week we’ve been reading (mostly) academics expounding on the theoretical virtue of games as teaching tools. I agree, obviously, that potential exists for them, but let’s not kid ourselves that they’re a panacea. Different media are appropriate for different things. Could you imagine a Podcast of someone reading a list of all the books a library acquired in the last two weekzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
 

?

Sorry, I nodded off there for a minute.

Kay’s blogpost for this week has a really nice assessment of the three ways games have been used by libraries so far.

1. ”One is centred on providing games and gaming related events in the library.”
2. ”[A]nother is about having a presence on or providing library services in online game environments (such as Second Life)”
3. ”[T]he third is adding gaming elements to libraries and instruction”

“1” (as I see it) is half core library function, half promotional/community-building activity. Kay covers this extremely well in her post. “2” is something I’m still trying to think of a useful way to use (so I hope you find the time to do your second post, Kay!). “3” is what I find really interesting, and as Richard Van Eck notes, it also breaks down into several components:

1.”[T]he third is adding gaming elements to libraries and instruction”
A. Getting students to make the games.
B. Getting educators and/or designers build a game to spec.
C. Integrating off-the-shelf games into the classroom.

I've got a teeny, tiny amount of experience with A & B. A is a little easier than it used to be. Well, a lot, actually, but it's still a metric ****ton of work. For me, specifically, it was with the Neverwinter Nights (a computer roleplaying game adapting Dungeons & Dragons) toolset, which is a bloody impressive and well-supported tool with a healthy community to draw on.
 
None of that matters, because to run even basic scenarios takes hundreds of lines of dialogue, the scripting for variables to track decisions, then there's setting paths for things to move along, etc., etc., etc. It can be done, but the perverse part of creating games is that it makes the hard and slow part of tabletop gaming (and teaching)--that being the number crunching and dice rolling--and makes it go by seamlessly quick. The stuff that you can normally wing and improv (plot development, converstion, etc) takes FOREVER.
 
B: The Carmen Sandiego series falls under this category.
 
B is cost-prohibitive even when you go to studios specializing in learning software, and we'll just leave it at that.
 
C: Is were most of the examples the articles use come from.  Typing of the Dead, as a (professional) adaptation of House of the Dead (a light gun shooter), sort of falls in here.
 
C is where the main potential is for libraries, but not necessarily in the way the articles have been presenting. The big push for us is information literacy. Fundamentally, this is about recognizing the relative value of an information source--they are written to manipulate the reader into agreeing with a particular point of view. Even scientific papers are arguing the validity of their research (and there's an argument to be made that peer review is not what it used to be). It's about finding bias. Games take manipulation to the Nth degree, and they're generally a whole lot more approachable--so why not see if we can use games as they were never intended? There's a lot to be gained by paying attention to how a game is playing you.