Gaming Post
Youth culture is a curious and fleeting thing--one day you're totally hep and the cat's pajamas, and then suddenly before you even know it you're entirely out-of-touch, utterly alone and unable to impress subordinates with your archaic talk of rolling for initiative and the Dewey decimal system. Then you become a librarian. . . .
Hey Librarians: Less Book Clubs, More LAN Parties
posted by Degolar @ 5:13 PM
5 Comments:
AMEN! I helped create 40+ addicts at LAN parties while in college and Pitt and it was 72 hours of talking, gaming, and socializing. Talking intermixed with free-for-alls and tournaments.
We talked about movies, girls, food, school, politics, why that weird kid in the corner was making a wall of Moutain Dew cans...you name, it was discussed.
And as for security (which would be our whining problem), don't let them to the 'net. Have once PC to download patches/updates/maps, and flash drive them to the PCs. It's not that hard to create a server to host games as long as you know what's going to be played.
So many thoughts, so little space.
The link to an article and those comments were interesting to me. One said something like it's not the playing of the games, but the technology that should be emphasized. We should make our stuff intuitive so with a little playing around, they can figure it out. We are about access after all. But I often don't want to play around, I want to get what I need and just ask someone how to do it. Also, there are many learning styles, as you know, and playing around is only one of them. And just ask my co-workers, I'm all about "teaching" them to do things for themselves. Even though I am in the YS world, I deal with the adults (parents) as much as the kids and you use a different lingo with each.
This is so not a gaming post. But if you must, sure, have your gaming related programing, they are one part of our (YA) patron base, but not all.
Youth culture is a fleeting thing, we may always be playing catch-up. So now, maybe more than ever, we need to look at what we want our core services to be and how we can adapt their delivery to the constant changes in culture.
I find it amusing that he has a link to the Suicide Girls Website. Totally awesome.
The thing about this article that makes the most sense to me is the idea that playing video games is a similar process to using the library/researching. I remember a library school lesson about how difficult it is to phrase reference questions because you need help finding something, but you don't know what that something is. How do you ask for something you don't know? It's most often a process of trial and error. You start with what you know and try to figure out the unknown from there. Gamers usually work in much the same fashion. They are playing in a new game universe and often have to figure out what the rules are and how everything works. It's the same trial and error learning.
As a school librarian, that was the hardest thing to teach the students, that there is not a step-by-step process to follow or a single, straightforward answer. Research requires piecing things together and drawing your own conclusions. If the younger are already used to thinking this way because they've gamed, then it seems a natural connection to make in helping them learn to use the library.
Ultimately, though, I had to link the article because of the opening paragraph. That's an awesome phrase " . . . archaic talk of rolling for initiative and the Dewey decimal system. Then you become a librarian."
And of course I'll link to the Suicide Girls if they have interesting things to say. No prudishness allowed here.
One of the things I expected to learn in library school, and it seemed implied that I would by the titles of some of the classes, was that there is a way to phrase the perfect search. I never did. It made me feel like a failure. What I finally did learn on my own is that you do develop instincts for how to do it as you do more of it. I never thought of it as a gaming process, just a process. And after working with real librarians, I learned they don't have the perfect search skills either so maybe I could do this job after all.
Thinking about it, I often use the phrase "You just have to play with it" often when showing someone, of any age, the catalog and/or databases.
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