I hope to get back to post­ing more about gam­ing in libraries soon, but until then, this is going to be a quick link round-up because there’s so much going on, it’s get­ting dif­fi­cult for me to track it all. In fact, at work, I’m prob­a­bly going to have to get a third white­board just to track all of the part­ner­ships around gam­ing that are form­ing for us. I hope to write more about those as they firm up, but for now I’ll just note my grat­i­tude to the Ver­i­zon Foun­da­tion for the large grant they’ve given ALA to explore gam­ing, lit­er­acy, and libraries and build a toolkit for libraries that want to imple­ment spe­cific out­comes for gam­ing ser­vices. When the press release goes up for Annual (where we’ll receive one of those giant, car­toony checks that I’m def­i­nitely get­ting my pic­ture taken with), I’ll post a link to it here.

And that’s just the begin­ning. We have sev­eral gam­ing ini­tia­tives planned, and while I’ll be writ­ing more about them soon, you can hear a pre­view by lis­ten­ing to the newly-posted episode 3 of the Games and Libraries pod­cast. It’s all mov­ing very quickly, but I’ll try to post more fre­quently about it here.

In the mean­time, here are some links to some good arti­cles and posts about gaming.

• Leadership’s Online Labs
  “Tens of mil­lions of peo­ple are hon­ing their lead­er­ship skills in mul­ti­player online games. The tools and tech­niques they’re using will change how lead­ers func­tion tomorrow—and could make them more effec­tive today.” [Har­vard Busi­ness Review]
   
• Game Time With Mis­ter Raroo: ‘Games In The Mod­ern Pub­lic Library’
  “The paper’s intended audi­ence is indi­vid­u­als who know lit­tle to noth­ing about video games and have no idea how or why games can be an impor­tant part of any pub­lic library’s col­lec­tion. The bulk of seri­ous gamers will no doubt find infor­ma­tion in many parts of the paper that is com­mon knowl­edge to most game enthu­si­asts, most notably sta­tis­tics about the aver­age gamer and a dis­cus­sion of the pop­u­lar per­cep­tion of vio­lence in videogames.” [Game­Set­Watch, thanks, Alice!]
   
• Media-gam-arama
  “For­tu­nately, we’ve done an about face at our school in rela­tion to games — yes, I believe we’re still hav­ing some fil­ter prob­lems with a few game sites, but even so, the idea of engag­ing stu­dents with games has been inte­grated through­out the school’s cur­ricu­lum. While gam­ing, we see stu­dents engaged in coöper­a­tive learn­ing sit­u­a­tions, devel­op­ing social skills, prob­lem solv­ing, deci­sion mak­ing, and hav­ing loads of fun. Our school has had Scrab­ble tour­na­ments, the 6th grade had its own March Mad­ness extrav­a­ganza, we own Webkinz for the school — one per grade level, PE classes use Dance, Dance, Rev­o­lu­tion, Uno, the music depart­ment uses Gui­tar Hero, we have had a Chess Club, and class sets of card decks can be found through­out the school. Our library stu­dent work sta­tions have book­marked, sev­eral game sites for stu­dent use and I’ve made it a passtime to con­tinue search­ing for great stu­dent games, espe­cially those with edu­ca­tional con­tent.” [Book Bag Blog]
   
• What Games Have to Teach Us
  “Some snap­shots from British schools and col­leges: Joy Thomp­son used a busi­ness sim­u­la­tion game to teach maths to year 5 and 6 chil­dren with spe­cial needs. Tim Rylands used Myst with the same age group to encour­age lit­er­acy, speech and writ­ing. Mar­tyn Thomp­son pro­vided dance mat games for indoor and lunchtime PE us, and Stephen Fes­sey used School Tycoon, with 10 and 11 year olds, to develop their spa­tial think­ing, fis­cal skills, numer­acy and social aware­ness.” [The Guardian]
   
• Mak­ing ILL a Game
  “We are explor­ing turn­ing ILL into a game. The basic mechanic will give libraries points for send­ing and receiv­ing inter­li­brary loans, with bonus points for prompt deliv­ery and ontime returns. A leader­board (com­pe­ti­tion dri­ves a LOT more than you might want to admit!) might prompt librar­i­ans to become more involved in resource shar­ing.” [School Library Jour­nal]
   
• Read­ers Should Get Game-literate
  “The mak­ers of Bioshock, released last year and designed by Ken Levine, have prob­a­bly come closer to real art than any­one else so far. Bioshock is a ter­ri­ble name: any sen­si­ble per­son would expect the idi­otic. Instead, they get a game based around Promethean myths and the work of Ayn Rand, set in an aban­doned art-deco Atlantis. It’s out­stand­ing, and about two-thirds of the way through makes a bril­liant point about free­dom of deci­sion that could not be deliv­ered using any other art form.” [Guardian Books Blog]