information. games.

You may notice some increased posting traffic here at informationgames for a while. I’ve been teaching certain aspects of WordPress and so have been reminded that my site architecture needs some work. This led me to look into my drafts folder and I discovered that the drafts folder is where hot new ideas go to become cold and dead. I’m hoping to resurrect the ones that show potential. So if you see a bunch of new posts coming from informationgames, it isn’t that I’m suddenly a prolific writer, it is more that I’ve been writing all along, just stopping before the posts were ready for publication.

I was asked recently to write a response piece to an article written by one of my CMDC colleagues John Barber. John is a Richard Brautigan scholar and has recently proposed creating a digital archive in the spirit of the library described in Brautigan’s The Abortion: an historical romance. My response focused on three questions. What was the essential nature of Brautigan’s library? Is this a sound model for a contemporary digital archive? Is John’s proposed archive both in keeping with Brautigan’s model and a practical solution for today’s archival needs? Our pieces will be published in a upcoming issue of Hyperrhiz.
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“If you want to have game rooms and pingpong tables and God knows what — poker parties — fine, do it, but don’t pretend it has anything to do with libraries” – Michael Gorman

The L.A. Times recently published a story about the future of libraries. It contained the sorts of things you would expect to find. A comment about the relevance of libraries in the age of Google? Check. Discussion about the relevance of libraries after information goes digital? Check. Michael Gorman antagonizing his fellow librarians by using his status as a former president of the American Library Association to advance a narrow and anachronistic definition of what a library is? Check. So what is new here? Is it really worth re-hashing the Blog People incident all over again? At first, I had a hard time finding the energy to care. Library bloggers at 8-Bit Library and Agnostic, Maybe offered up spirited defenses of the place of games in library collections, does more really need to be said? This is a blog, so of course something more is going to be said, whether it needs to or no.
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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.

As I’ve been thinking and writing about games, one of the most significant points I’ve stumbled upon is that having a method for analyzing aspects of games is just as important as having a method in other, more familiar, forms of analysis. I’m a fan of multiple playings of a game in order to experience the game from multiple viewpoints. Play to learn the game mechanic and narrative environment. Play to compete or win. Play to understand the teaching model or the story’s structure. This approach has helped me learn from and about games.

This spring, I taught a class on research and information architecture. Teaching the same group of students twice a week for 15 weeks is very different from teaching a similar number of classroom hours distributed among different students each time. I got busy and involved in the class. I didn’t have a lot of time to play games so I took a break from reflective gaming and went back to escapist gaming. I played the lasted Tomb Raider game, but didn’t think about it much (other than wondering what it meant that I chose to outfit Ms. Croft in cargo-pants rather than the available short-shorts option.)

This summer, I had more time to devote to gaming so I dove into some games that I’d missed. I played Mass Effect. I played STALKER: Clear Sky. Both are excellent additions to the growing category of sandbox games. There is a wealth to explore there: questions to ask about the role of the author, user-generated narrative, player choice, linearity, the birth of a new storytelling medium, the limits of technology vs. the limits of imagination, etc.

Right now, I don’t want to answer these questions. Hell, I don’t even want to look at them through the lens of semi-formal analysis. I do want to enjoy them from the context of a player who enjoys a game environment that is rich in things to think about. I’m sure I’ll feel the need to revisit some of these questions from the point of view of a commentator or theorist at some point in the future. For now though, I think I’ll remain a player of games and be content.

I still would like to use information. games. as an outlet / bully pulpit. I just imagine that I’ll be writing more about information than games. Currently I’ve been reading Everything is Miscellaneous, Here Comes Everybody, and The Wealth of Networks. Each of these is an attempt to make sense of our society’s evolving relationship with communication and information. This is where my head is at, so I assume this is what I’ll be writing about. So it may well be that the librarian part of my persona will be more prominent than the gamer part.

Or it may not. Any attempt to describe or understand our relationship with networks of information has to be able to be applied to gamers. Gamers are ahead of society as a whole when it comes to using and integrating emerging information trends. We make a good test group for theories. So I would imagine that if this new area of research pans out, I’ll find a way to test it out on communities of gamers.