information. games.

Focus shifts. My time spent gaming has been waning for a couple of months. I finally plugged my way to the end of STALKER: Clear Sky. I liked the game and love spending time in that universe, but I didn’t find a lot to write about, either about the game or about my experience playing it. What I liked about Clear Sky was a continuation of what entranced me with Shadow of Chernyobl and what makes me anticipate Call of Pripyat. There isn’t a lot new to say there. If anyone wants to know why I love the STALKER game mechanic and the narrative universe that surrounds the zone, let me know in the comments.

Otherwise, I don’t have either time or much desire to play games. I have a huge backlog of titles to play. Dragon Age: Origins for whatever reason, hasn’t captivated me yet. It is beautiful and big, but it isn’t the right game for me to play right now. Mass Effect 2 is coming and there are still some big titles from last year that I’ve missed, but my mind isn’t on games and I don’t think that will change in the next month or so. Plus, one of my two cards (4850s) I use in a crossfire setup just died and I won’t be replacing it soon.

Still, I do have some ideas that I want to work out and my mind is active. What this means is that for the time being, this blog is going to be more about information than about games. Expect more thoughts about the future of information and the role of libraries in that future.

This weekend at ALA Midwinter in Boston has been rich with thought, conversation, and ideas. The richest conversations came outside of the conference and committee structure, as usual. The value that I get out of national library conferences is usually weighted towards personal networking over programmed content. (Note: regional and local conferences are quite the opposite, even if I have more connections with colleagues at those.) Usually, I’ve credited ALA with creating the context for these conversations about librarianship and the future of information. After this weekend, I’m less inclined to think so. Following the tweet streams of great library folks like @kgs @alncornish @tadawes @0rb and too many others to list fully has convinced me that there are vital conversations about the future taking place here. They just haven’t taken place in my hearing.

So I’m going to try and work out some thoughts about the future of libraries and the future of information. I imagine I’ll write about games again, but not until something catches my imagination again and I have time to focus on what makes it fascinating.

I just upgraded informationgames to the latest version of the WordPress software. It is silly easy to keep up on the WordPress maintainance, yet somehow the minimal effort of downloading and transferring the new files up to the server is a rewarding task. It falls into a similar category to changing my own oil, nothing really to be proud of, but satisfying on a visceral level.

I ask myself this question because after doing a lot of work (soon to be published!) on Portal I found myself in a bit of a lull when it comes to being reflective about my gaming experiences or doing games analysis. It might just be an understandable reaction to being done with an intensive project. It might also be a reflection of my gaming practices. I haven’t been playing much and when I have I’ve been doing LOTRO quests with my partner. This is a lot of fun, but I’ve always felt that I don’t really play MMO games “correctly”. I’m not really interested in making friends or playing with others, I’ve used LOTRO basically as a chance to role play with a few select friends. The MMO phenomenon is such that there is interest in research about these games, but I can’t really tie what researchers or librarians are interested in with the way I like to amuse myself in the game world. As a consequence, I haven’t really come across any new parallels between what instruction librarians and game developers do or found any new perspectives on how teachers can use gaming culture to connect with students.

I did have my students read Gerald Graff’s essay Hidden Intellectualism (versions of this essay that can be found in his books Clueless in Academe and They Say, I Say) and it reaffirmed my conviction that teachers who can get their gaming students to recognize the critical thinking that goes into their gameplay for what it is will have an great opportunity to transfer those skills to academic work. I think this is important, but there isn’t anything new about games in this particular line of thinking.

So maybe I need to look at another approach. I’ve been analyzing the structure of games and how successful tutorials are designed. I’ve avoided, up to now, looking at narrative or storytelling in games. However, with the games I have lined up to play next: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky, Fallout 3, and The Witcher: Enhanced Edition narrative, interaction, and storytelling/creating are some of the things these games do best. I’m just not certain how that ties in with library instruction.

Another thought is ethics in games. This is another subject I’ve shied away from partially because the public discourse on the subject is banal and partially because I’m having trouble articulating my ethical framework these days. Still, I was invited to a departmental party the other day and had a brief, but interesting conversation with a digital ethics instructor who wanted to use Manhunt 2 as his example of ethics in games. I really struggled to find a way to communicate why I could think of almost nothing interesting to say about that particular game and ethics. (The game simulates a snuff-film reality show.) I settled on explaining that it just isn’t a good game by any measure and he might want to look at a higher quality example of a game, such as Bioshock, when talking about ethics in games.

Thinking about this conversation, I realized that I’m not so much annoyed by the way we talk about gaming ethics as I’m annoyed by the way we talk about ethics in general. Listening to what a person or group has decided is good/bad is not interesting. Listing to how a person or group sets ethical priorities is interesting. Why is it that as a culture we don’t seem to be able to do more than express our indignation and outrage at either the deplorable actions portrayed in Grand Theft Auto IV and/or the censors who want to legislate a lowest-common-denominator groupthink by restricting games that don’t reinforce the values of the existing cultural hegemony? Surely we can do better.

What do you all, my valued readers, think? What is interesting about games? I’m not so much asking what makes you want to play a particular game, I’m asking what makes you want to talk or think about games.

Which means that a new semester has started here on campus. It also means the release of AAA titles from the major game developers. I have zero time to game these days and the time I steal from more important obligations to play games has all been sucked up by LOTRO. That is fine by me, since N. has picked up the game as well, so gaming-time has become time spent hanging out w/ my partner. On the other hand, I have NO IDEA what I’m going to do when long awaited titles like S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky, Fallout 3, and Left4Dead, come out.

I have a post about the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. that has been sitting around in draft form for months, I’ll try to get it ready for y’all, but I loved that game for so many reasons, I can’t believe I’m not foaming at the mouth for an update to the world of the zone. As for the other games, I suppose I should explain why I  have been anticipating them so highly. Fallout 3 looks great, I loved the originals when they were new, but unlike most of the fanboys, I’m not so worried that they will stray from the original formula as I am afraid that the original formula is a lot more appealing to the late 1990′s version of myself than the 2008 version. Left4Dead: valve and zombies, what is not to love? My only concern is that it is so skill-based that I won’t have the time to become good enough to help my team-mates. Team Fortress 2 was great, but it was more fun the more I learned how to integrate my tactics w/ my team. There is zero chance that I’ll be able to play L4D as much as I played TF2 when it came out, and I think the learning curve in L4D will be steeper.

Sorry content has been so non-existent lately, hopefully more will be coming soon. Until then, Certis has started a great conversation on the upcoming release schedule on Gamers with Jobs, and Chad at Library Voice has an interesting new conversation today on libraries collecting games.

Thanks to m3mo, I just noticed that many of the conference presentation materials have now been posted at:
http://loexofthewest2008.blogspot.com/

Mine aren’t up yet, but they are available here. I imagine that the HTML format of the Zoho Show slideware I used may toss a spanner in the works. Still, there is a lot of good content available there already with perhaps more to come.