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.