JAB­BAR­roy
Orig­i­nally uploaded by ALA — The Amer­i­can Library Association

You can see more pic­tures from Mid­win­ter on the main ALA Flickr account, includ­ing my sec­ond favorite photo.

In doing research for my LTR, I came across some sites for spe­cific gam­ing audi­ences, so I thought I’d share them here, just to give a sense of how per­vasve gam­ing truly has become. I was so pressed for space in the new for­mat that unfor­tu­nately, none of these made it into the final manuscript.

• Hide and Seek — “Hide and Seek is a ver­sion of the pop­u­lar real world game. In this game, one player has to hide in a MSN Vir­tual Earth map and the other one has to find him. To make it eas­ier to find the other player can ask some ques­tions with Yes/No answer. If the player who is hid­den in the map doesn’t know the answer, he can use MSN Search in the same game to search the Web.”
• ClickGamer — “Clickgamer is the world’s fastest grow­ing mobile games D2C por­tal for a vari­ety of hand held devices includ­ing Win­dows Mobile, Sym­bian Smart­phone, PALM, J2ME, RIM Black­berry, iPod and PSP. We stock only the best games and deliver them directly to the customer’s mobile phone and/or PC and MAC.“

  Tan­gent for Aaron: I can buy Liner­ider for my Treo!

• Les­bian Gamers — “Les­bian Gamers is about one thing les­bians that play video games. There are loads of les­bian gamers out there and that’s why we’ve started les­bian gamers.com. We’ll be cov­er­ing sto­ries of inter­est to les­bian gamers. All done with a lit­tle twist of tongue in cheek humor.”
• Gamer Dad — “Wel­come to the Gamer­Dad com­mu­nity and web­site! What you’ll find here is a mix of main­stream par­ents who are gen­er­ally clue­less about games and look­ing for help and hard­core gamers who have started fam­i­lies with­out putting aside the gamepad and their favorite geek pur­suits. There’s noth­ing wrong with that! The aver­age video gamer is now 29 years old (accord­ing to the Enter­tain­ment Soft­ware Asso­ci­a­tion) and, lets face it, if you’ve never played a video game, this stuff is hard to fig­ure out.“

  I was already quite famil­iar with this site, but I want to high­light it because it’s so use­ful, espe­cially for non-gamer par­ents and librar­i­ans. They’ve also just debunked the 2007 Medi­a­wise Videogame Report Card, some­thing that needed doing that I just didn’t have the time to do when it came out. Resources avail­able here include a videogame review archive and a blog to help you stay cur­rent. Don’t be fooled by the title, as there are gamer­moms here, too.

• Lit­er­a­ture Inspired Games data­base from MobyGames — “Games based off works of lit­er­a­ture, pre­vi­ously pub­lished, and char­ac­ters from those works. This can include nov­els and short sto­ries, pub­lished in books, mag­a­zines, in e-books or even online as text.“

  These are com­puter– and console-based games, both mod­ern and clas­sic. This one came from a reader, although now I can’t find how the per­son noti­fied me about it. If this was you, thanks!

• Sec­ond Life Games — “The Sec­ond Life Games blog started out being strictly about games in the vir­tual world of Sec­ond Life. It’s grown a bit. We get art shows, dip a bit into Web 2.0 stuff, and even take a look at Alter­nate Real­ity Games. Basi­cally, if it’s an unusual way to play, I fea­ture it here. Oh, and we love indy game creators.“

  At a din­ner dur­ing Mid­win­ter, a few of us involved in a new ALA grant (more details about that com­ing soon) debated whether Sec­ond Life is a game or not. As a result, the dis­cus­sion turned to “what is a game,” which is an ongo­ing con­ver­sa­tion within our group. This site, how­ever, is the mid­dle ground.