…might just be based on the Nin­tendo Wii?

Check out Johnny Chung Lee’s Wii Projects and count how many times you find your­self say­ing “wow.” And if you own a Wii, see if you don’t want to try to doing all of these things your­self. I know I do.

Unin­tended con­se­quences are often the most inter­est­ing ones. As I watched these videos, I found myself think­ing about Allan Kleiman’s work at the Old Bridge Pub­lic Library, using the Wii to intro­duce seniors to tech­nol­ogy, won­der­ing if this type of setup would work bet­ter for those folks who have trou­ble using a com­puter mouse.

The head track­ing video is really inter­est­ing, too, as it might be a pre­cur­sor to a home ver­sion of The Cave. Imag­ine being able to walk into a book on your videogame con­sole (Hotel Dusk for the Wii, any­one?). 3D gam­ing — and the lit­era­cies that would come with it — might be much closer than we think.

I really want some time to play with this stuff! [Thanks, Clare!]

BookChase

“Bookchase® is exactly what it says — a chase with books.

Bookchase® is also the world’s first board game about books which comes with your own book­shelf, library card, book­shop, and your own set of tiny books to col­lect. First one to col­lect six books and head home wins! Sim­ple really.

Bookchase® is a fam­ily game which can also be played by adults and is designed for any­one from 5 years upwards. Never read a book? — you could still win. Read all the books in the world? You could still lose. Dare you take the Bookchase® challenge?…

You can get your books in lots of ways — by answer­ing ques­tions, vis­it­ing the Bookchase® shop or Library. Or per­haps it’s your birth­day and one of the other play­ers would like to give you one of their books as a present. You can even find books on the Bookchase® board. Be care­ful though, you might drop your book in the bath and be forced to leave it on Trea­sure Island to dry out! How­ever many play­ers start you can never be cer­tain who is going to win.” [via kim­booktu]

Check out the new Tame the Web on Word­Press, along with new URLs for RSS feeds. Be sure to resub­scribe.

Check out the new dis­cus­sion forums Rachel Singer Gor­don has started over on LISjobs.

“LISjobs.com, the largest free library career por­tal on the Inter­net, is pleased to announce the launch of its new online com­mu­nity for librar­i­ans. Devoted entirely to career devel­op­ment and job hunt­ing, these forums pro­vide a space for librar­i­ans, LIS stu­dents, library work­ers, and infor­ma­tion pro­fes­sion­als to dis­cuss pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment issues.”

The cur­rent forum top­ics cover LIS schools, jump­start­ing your career, pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment and par­tic­i­pa­tion, talk­ing tenure, pro­fes­sional writ­ing, and work/life balance.

In other news, Amer­i­can Libraries has started its own dis­cus­sion forum based on con­tent from the mag­a­zine and other ALA top­ics, so the LISjobs forums make a nice com­ple­ment. Together, these are two great places to con­nect with your col­leagues. Thanks for pro­vid­ing this ser­vice, Rachel.

The LTR update on gam­ing in libraries is just about done, and I’ve been read­ing some fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cles and books as back­ground for it. I’ve been want­ing to read Susan Gib­bons’ 2007 book The Aca­d­e­mic Library and the Net Gen Stu­dent and this gave me the excuse because there is a chap­ter devoted to online gam­ing. Gib­bons focuses solely on Mas­sive Mul­ti­player Online Role-playing Games (MMORPGs), which at first seems a lit­tle strange for an aca­d­e­mic librar­ian. How­ever, she explains what these games are, pro­vides a lit­tle his­tory about them, gives some infor­ma­tion about how Net­Gens use them, and then brain­storms some ideas for their rel­e­vance to aca­d­e­mic libraries. I’d argue it’s good read­ing for folks in *all* types of libraries.

Given some of the neg­a­tive com­ments I’ve got­ten here about gam­ing in libraries, includ­ing how it will devalue the MLS, I really enjoyed the fol­low­ing his­tory from Gibbons.

“In the late 1700s, par­ents were warned to pro­tect their chil­dren from the many dan­gers of free access to ‘romances, nov­els, and plays [which] poi­soned the mind and cor­rupted the morals of many a promis­ing youth’ (Rev­erend Enos Hitch­cock, Mem­oirs of the Blooms­grove Fam­ily, quoted in Standage 2006, 114). The early twen­ti­eth cen­tury wit­nessed the scourge of ‘mov­ing pic­tures’ because of which ‘God alone knows how many are lead­ing dis­solute lives’ (from The Annual Report of the New York Soci­ety for the Pre­sen­ta­tion of Cru­elty to Chil­dren, quoted in Standage 2006, 114). Or how about the evils of the tele­phone, which causes lazi­ness, the ten­dency for crime caused by read­ing comic books, or the sins of the waltz, with its “volup­tuous inter­twin­ing of the limbs, and close com­pres­sure of the bod­ies’ (from Times of Lon­don, 1816, quoted in Standage 2006, 114). The pat­tern is clear: the new form of enter­tain­ment of the younger gen­er­a­tion is mis­un­der­stood and por­trayed as the ‘scourge of soci­ety’ by the pre­ced­ing generations.

Brown sug­gests that many of us miss the impor­tance of online gam­ing because we focus too tightly on the game itself: ‘So don’t just think about the games themselves–the content–but about the knowl­edge ecolo­gies devel­op­ing around these games–the con­text’ (2002, 64). The knowl­edge ecolo­gies of online games include con­ver­sa­tions, read­ing, writ­ing, research, buy­ing and sell­ing, the for­ma­tion and dis­so­lu­tion of part­ner­ships and pacts, men­tor­ing, instruc­tion, and a host of other activ­i­ties. The games do lit­tle more than pro­vide a com­pelling and immer­sive plat­form for all of these social activ­i­ties to occur.” (p.34)

Gib­bons has clearly spent time study­ing and think­ing about about how the ref­er­ence desk could incor­po­rate some of the best fea­tures of MMORPGs (I’m hop­ing I have enough room in the LTR to include a men­tion of these provoca­tive ideas). She is clearly being proac­tive, rather than sim­ply reac­tive (espe­cially in a knee-jerk way).

If I’m going to be respon­si­ble for the end of the world because I advo­cate for gam­ing in libraries, it’s nice to know I’m in such good com­pany.