Eureka!

I know I’m a little slow on the uptake, but late last week I finally managed to take a look at the presentation John Kirriemuir made on games and libraries. (Thanks, Rambling Librarian, for the pointer!) Very interesting indeed.

I think it’s time to make a confession: I love games (I think you may be sick of reading about my Favourite Games by now), but before this I never really got where/what the connection was between gaming and libraries. I could see why public libraries might want to offer consoles and places for interested patrons to indulge, but beyond that I couldn’t quite see what else there was. John covers some of the issues for public libraries: preservation of games, keeping kids quiet (!) in the library, getting people into the library, making games part of the collection, and providing access to “support materials”. For academic libraries I thought the connection was even more tenuous. John mentions the abuse of the library (or university) network.

It’s when the presentation starts looking at WoW that it all started to click for me. John quotes Constance Steinkuehler and suggests that games like WoW provide an environment in which these issues are encountered:

• Socially & materially distributed cognition.
• Collaborative problem solving, multiple problem spaces.
• Coordination of people, (virtual) tools, artifacts, & text.
• Constellation of literacy practices across multimedia, multimodal ‘attentional spaces’ (Lemke).
• Empirical model building (exploits, mods).
• Negotiation of meaning & values within community.
• Authoring of identities within & beyond the community.

I hadn’t thought of the WoW interface as being particularly complicated or particularly powerful, but now that I think of it, I guess it is. And yet, players master these interfaces – by themselves (WoW doesn’t usually intervene beyond providing newbie areas for people to begin in) – and not only do they master these interfaces, they create and share ‘mods’ (modifications) that other players can download, to improve play or provide more information. Really makes me think about our library website and our catalogue and why we think those new to our university need “classes” to learn about these tools – and not only that, they sometimes need a lot of ongoing support. Our website is definitely not intuitive at all!

And I hadn’t thought of the fact that a gamer:

1. Expects instant, relevant results.
2. Able to multi-task (e-juggling).
3. Interrogates a wide array of information source and media (see “circulating support material”)…
4. …consequently, is “beyond Google” in terms of information retrieval tools.
5. Is usually a net-user; many game players often blog.
6. Can find information/knowledge that is not in obvious places.
7. Comfortable with complex online systems; does not differentiate between “online” and “offline”.
8. Comfortable with peripherals and unconventional data entry hardware.
9. Comfortable with online talk/chat systems.
10. No problem with spending colossal amounts of time online … so long as it is rewarding.

And who needs “experts”? I’m just thinking of all the games I’ve ever played where it is the players who help each other out by collating vast amounts of information and making it available to others – all the quest walkthroughs, maps and general ‘world’ information, and information on items. EQAtlas. Allakhazam. Thotbot. WoWWiki.

Oh, and I’ve been chatting with Sirexkat about Second Life. Like Woody I still remain to be convinced that it’s a happening place. Terra Nova‘s been talking about Second Life, too, this morning (funny how that happens). Looks like I’m not the only one who can’t find stuff to do there. Why is it so popular with librarians?? Come play WoW! (M suggests I should set myself up as a librarian in Stormwind, instead 😉 )

So all my hours spent playing games have not been a waste of time, after all! 🙂

Listening to: Speedstar, Triple J Like A Version, There is a light that never goes out.