There’s an inter­est­ing post on Future-making Seri­ous Games titled Retro Remakes Com­pe­ti­tion: Seri­ous Gam­ing For Acces­si­bil­ity that includes a call for “entrants to cre­ate acces­si­ble updated coun­ter­parts of real or imag­ined arcade games from the 1920’s to date.” This is a topic I hadn’t really con­sid­ered before, and I’ve been learn­ing more about it as I’ve been plan­ning the pro­gram for the 2008 ALA Tech­Source Gam­ing, Learn­ing, and Libraries Sym­po­sium. There’s that say­ing that you know you’re old when you insist that your generation’s music is bet­ter than that of the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion, right? Well, I apply that to videogames, too — my favorites will prob­a­bly always be the ones I grew up with (although Mario Kart Wii and Boom Blox are pretty great), so I love the idea of mak­ing retro games acces­si­ble for everyone.

All of which is also a segue to note that we have a ses­sion ded­i­cated to Inte­grat­ing Non-Visual Access Into A Library’s Gam­ing Expe­ri­ence at the Sym­po­sium, as well as some other unique con­tent I don’t think you’ll get any­where else. Here are just a few of those types of ses­sions that I’m really look­ing for­ward to attending:

• Gen­der and Gam­ing
  “Beth Gall­away shares an overview of research and sta­tis­tics on gen­der and gam­ing; Ph D can­di­date Beth King dis­cusses how World of War­craft devel­ops lit­er­acy skills and cre­ates com­mu­nity for teen boys and how The Sims devel­ops lit­er­acy skills and cre­ates com­mu­nity for teen girls; librar­ian Ali­son Angell facil­i­tates a dis­cus­sion on gen­der and gam­ing and teases out poten­tial best prac­tices for libraries seek­ing to serve each gen­der to their best ability.”
• H4cking ur Library for the Gam­ing Indus­try
  “This ses­sion will present col­lec­tion devel­op­ment and pro­mo­tional ideas for cre­at­ing a mate­ri­als col­lec­tion that sup­ports users inter­ested in the gam­ing indus­try as a rapidly grow­ing career choice, includ­ing a look at how gam­ing is cross-pollinating with sev­eral other indus­tries, includ­ing movies and music.”
• Sub­ject Access to Videogames: Beyond LCSH
  “The Library of Con­gress Sub­ject Head­ings are use­ful for non­fic­tion print mate­ri­als, but the options for sub­ject access to video games are lim­ited. Learn how to pro­vide improved access to your library’s video game col­lec­tion based on your community’s needs with locally-developed genre and sub­ject headings.”
• What Every Librar­ian Needs to Know about Videogames and the Law
  “This ses­sion will cover two top­ics that I know a lot of peo­ple in the indus­try have ques­tions about: video games in the library and machin­ima, movies made using ren­dered engines. First, the ques­tion of what to do about hav­ing a video game tour­na­ment in the library will be addressed. The dis­cus­sion will include spe­cific dis­cus­sion on the legal­ity of the tour­na­ment, the pos­si­ble penal­ties, and the reme­dies to make a tour­na­ment in the library com­pli­ant with both copy­right law and the End User License Agree­ment for the games played.

  Sec­ond, as more and more groups wish to offer machin­ima con­tests, we will dis­cuss the basics of the law as it relates to machin­ima. The ses­sion will cover both the con­cerns for the movie mak­ers and the con­test host. By the end of the ses­sion, all those in atten­dance should be armed with the knowl­edge they need to take on some of these new, inno­v­a­tive pro­grams at their own facility.”

If you have ques­tions about these kinds of top­ics, then GLLS2008 is where you want to be to get them answered. Reg­is­ter today!

I’ve had my Kin­dle ebook reader for just about four months now, and as I sus­pected, the amount of book read­ing I’m doing is going up. I know two books doesn’t sound like a lot and some peo­ple read that in a week, but for me, this is a big dif­fer­ence. Before the Kin­dle, I think I’d fin­ished two books in two years, both when I was away on vaca­tion. And even though most peo­ple may read books more dur­ing the sum­mer, I tend to read fewer, as I’m work­ing and play­ing out­side a lot more. In fact, dur­ing the sum­mer I tend to start mul­ti­ple books and fin­ish none of them.

But the Kin­dle is chang­ing this, mainly because I’m using my daily com­mute and other travel times to inte­grate read­ing books back into my rou­tine. I’m read­ing less online and more on the Kin­dle. I’ve tried car­ry­ing books back and forth, but the awk­ward­ness and weight just hasn’t worked well for me. Plus, I like options, so I like to alter­nate between books and mag­a­zines, which just adds to the weight. On the Kin­dle, I have fic­tion, non­fic­tion, and Newsweek, so I always have some­thing to match my mood. And when I needed (okay, wanted) a new title last week, I was able to add it to the Kin­dle in about one minute. I do take advan­tage of free ebooks, too. It’s like hav­ing the stack of read­ing mate­r­ial that nor­mally piles up by the bed with me all the time.

I espe­cially like hav­ing Newsweek automag­i­cally appear on the device at the begin­ning of each week. I stopped sub­scrib­ing to the print ver­sion years ago because I couldn’t keep up with it, but for the grand total of $18 per year, I can get this eco-friendly, text-only ver­sion every week. I do miss the pic­tures, but I read it much faster and more often now. In fact, hav­ing a weekly cur­rent events mag­a­zine on the Kin­dle is chang­ing my expec­ta­tions of what I should be able to do with an ezine. I’ve found myself rou­tinely dis­ap­pointed that I can’t email snip­pets to friends directly from my high­lights on the device. It makes no sense to me that some­thing that has a key­board and is already on the celullar net­work can’t do this, but I’m sure this will change in the future. I cer­tainly expect it to.

Over­all, I’m really enjoy­ing car­ry­ing around a library of cur­rent read­ing with me, but there are a few things I really dis­like about the Kin­dle. The biggest issue is the place­ment of the nav­i­ga­tion but­tons. It’s just too damn easy to acci­den­tally hit the “next page” or “pre­vi­ous page” but­tons. And there have been a few times I’ve missed hav­ing a back­lit screen, although the clar­ity of the screen in the sun is still one of the biggest advan­tages. There’s a slight flicker of the screen when I “turn pages,” but I’ve got­ten used to it pretty quickly. My one con­cern is how well I’ll be able to find text I “high­lighted” six months or a year from now. Only time will tell.

I’m torn about the pro­pri­etary nature of the device, even as I want more con­tent for it. A few of the titles I’ve thought about buy­ing recently didn’t have Kin­dle ver­sions, so I didn’t get them. That’s not to say I didn’t order other titles as phys­i­cal items since they’d work bet­ter in that for­mat any­way. And luck­ily, a lot of the new titles I want to read are avail­able for the Kin­dle, whereas they’re not avail­able in other ebook for­mats. Still, I would much rather do with­out the DRM, and I’d still hap­pily pay for my ebooks (“Dear Pub­lish­ers and Amazon…”).

I’m ticked that I can’t check out Kin­dle titles from my library, but then I don’t use my library much for print books, either (par­tially due to the weight fac­tors I men­tioned ear­lier, but also because of some arcane poli­cies they have on new titles).

So over­all, I give the Kin­dle a B+. Rumor has it that some of the prob­lems will be fixed in ver­sion 2, although I doubt I’ll upgrade. For my needs (and YMMV), the rev­o­lu­tion­ary con­tent deliv­ery sys­tem (titles just mag­i­cally appear) and the con­ve­nience far out­weigh the annoy­ances. I can really sense the future of on-demand con­tent with this device, and I think we’re only a few years away from a viable sys­tem that lets the user pick and choose gran­u­lar con­tent from dis­parate resources that can be down­loaded from the cloud to a mobile device instantaneously.

Once in a while I miss the paper, but I’m look­ing for­ward to tak­ing the Kin­dle with me on inter­na­tional trips, and I hope it makes it that much eas­ier for me to read mul­ti­ple titles while away. I also hope to delve into some of the hacks to make my Kin­dle do more, but I haven’t had time for that yet. I’ll report back again at the begin­ning of the year to see if I’m still happy with the device and if my book read­ing is still increasing.