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How exciting! Well, here I am at OLA in a pre-conference about recorded books, which seems like as good a place as any to start.

Number one: as a society we are more mobile now than ever. And we have tools that help us stay connected while mobile, which adds to the vicious circle.

Number two: Audio books, like many wonderful and useful technologies, started as an adaptive technology – something to help “impaired” people enjoy books. But, like automatic doors in supermarkets, the application of the technology has now expanded beyond the design, because everyone is “impaired” in different ways, sometimes. For example, many people have no trouble opening a door for themselves most of the time. When they’re pushing a shopping cart full of groceries, they are temporarily impaired, and in need of the assistance the doors provide. Once the universal need was recognized, the technology advanced – so now there are those crazy revolving doors at the airport that you can just about drive your car through. Back to recorded books and being mobile – people still love their stories, but are finding less and less time to sit and read. Commuters and truckers discovered recorded books early on, sure, but now the young people are realizing that they can get these books and listen to them on their fancy mp3 devices. So all of a sudden audio books are being taken seriously as a method of publication – not just a side note, but as a main method of delivery. All kinds of people are becoming consumers of audio-books, even people who are not in any way “impaired,” either permanently or temporarily. They just like to listen to the books.

The future: People are taking recorded books more seriously, so more books are being recorded with better narrators, who are actually enjoyable to listen to for ten, twenty, even thirty hours. I know there have been attempts to publish books that are only available in an audio version – these are called “radio dramas,” and have been around for a while. The audio book version of a radio drama is a “full cast recording” which can sometimes be good, and sometimes not so much. I think that all these elements have the potential of spurring on greater interest in literature that originates as an audiobook, rather than just ends up as one.

Fast-forward to today and and the video game market for women leaves me somewhat depressed.  When we got our XBox in December I was prepared for some gender-inequality, but frankly it’s worse than I’d expected (and I should note I wasn’t totally out of the loop, I had been following news and blogs relating to video games — I guess I just had to experience it for myself).

First, let’s start with a discussion of my favorite game, Skate 2. My husband and I checked out the original Skate game from our local library.  I was instantly irked when I started the game because there were several avatar choices, but NOT A SINGLE FEMALE AVATAR!  I continued on anyway, and became hooked, but brewing under the surface was my constant annoyance with my male avatar.  Luckily, with the release of Skate 2 the creators of the game added the option of being a female (seriously, how hard was that??).

Okay, so that game was easy enough, just add a female, duh. But, anyone that knows anything about video games knows that most of them were made for men by men. So, what is the current state of video gaming for women and girls?  The market is recognizing there are women gamers out there, but there is still a long way to go (imho).

Here are some websites for women who game:

GamerchiX for Xbox

GamingAngels.com

ThumbBandits.com

And here are some interesting articles about women and gaming:

Women Video Gamers: Not Just Solitaire (PC World Canada)

Video Games — a girl thing? (CNet)

Why Women Should Play Video Games (Fast Company)

I could easily write a thesis on this topic, but I’m trying to keep it short, because this is a blog and all.  As I pondered this post over the last few days, I began wondering, “Could/should libraries that carry video games do something to encourage girls to game?”  In some ways this question is a complicated one, because so many parents who have children that spend a lot of time gaming are worried their “children’s brains will rot” or something along those lines…so convincing parents that their daughters should be playing video games might be an uphill battle…but what better way to get girls interested in technology and engineering?

Here’s a great blog post detailing a list of the Top 10 most influential educational video games of the 1980s.  I bet you didn’t even know all those words could be used together in the same sentence, but here is the proof.

I think the reason why educational video games were not popular was twofold - first, video games were evil, and therefore nothing good could come from playing them, so educational video games seemed like a total paradox to parents.  Second, kids weren’t interested in using video games to learn anything, at least not on purpose, so they avoided those games.

There’s been a pretty big shift in the general population regarding video games - the generation that grew up on video games is now coming into its own, and so video games are just a part of normal life.  On top of that, the Internet, mobile devices and consoles provide a wide variety of methods to experience video games that appeal to every age group.  That’s the key, I think - adults are much more interested in using the technology for continuing education than kids are, so now that its ok for adults to play video games, educational video games have a real place in the world.

Games For Health is a non-profit organization developed to explore the ‘good-for-you’ aspects of games, particularly as they apply in the health industry - so using games and game technology to help people recover from various conditions, etc.

At the forefront of this educational and beneficial gaming movement is Nintendo - many games available for the handheld DS are marketed as educational or beneficial to the users health in some way.

For example, Big Brain Academy and Brain Age are two titles that use lots of little, short games and puzzles to help you sharpen your mind, improve your coordination, and hone your memory.  Throughout Brain Age, your guide offers suggestions on how to keep your mind active, and how each task is improving your brain.  Many seniors have purchased DS’s pretty much just to play Brain Age, and have followed it with other similar games, as a way of keeping their minds active.

Personal Trainer: Math , My Word Coach and My French Coach are newer titles for the DS that are straight education - they exist solely to help you learn something.  All of a sudden video games are overstepping their boundaries - if they keep making titles like this, then libraries everywhere will be forced to collect video games whether they want to or not - if you purchase language learning CDs, Cassettes, DVDs, and CD-ROMs, why not DS cartridges?

Is My French Coach a game?  Sort of, sure.  But how about Personal Trainer: Cooking?  That’s an interactive cookbook available for the DS.  You choose from over 200 recipes, and it talks you through them.  You can use voice commands to move back and forth through the recipe, repeat a step, or elaborate on a step.  It also has a shopping list function so you can check to see what ingredients you already have, and which ones you need to buy.  That one’s not even a game at all.  It’s a cookbook in a new format.  Shouldn’t libraries be purchasing that?  If they purchase that, as a cookbook in a new format, would they be impelled to collect something like What’s Cooking? With Jamie Oliver - that one has recipes to follow in your real kitchen, but also modes where you can create your own recipes and try them out in a virtual test kitchen, as well as straight game modes where you practice making recipes for speed, etc.

Of course, interactive mystery novels are also appearing for the DS,  and though these aren’t ‘educational’ or “healthy” in traditional terms, they’re certainly non-traditional in terms of video games.  What they do is enforce the idea that the console is no longer just for games - there are many uses for it, to meet the needs of the wide variety of people who are using it.

Video games, it would seem, are only at the beginning of their evolution - like many major inventions of the past, they started as toys, novelties, and distractions, and now have found their way into many aspects of our lives, for the long term.  I just hope someone puts together a comprehensive and scholarly database of playable games sometime soon, with downloadable formats so i can play The Legend Of Zelda: Link To The Past on my Kindle while attending classes on the neuro-stimulus response of autonomic systems to interactive realtime electronic gameplay.  Or whatever.

In fall I wrote about Orisinal, and if you missed it then I’d definitely recommend checking it out now. Though you might find yourself creating a little internal competition in some of the games, I have a hard time feeling anything but mellow bouncing stars off a bubble or collecting flowers in a balloon-carried bottle.

Now if that all sounds like too much excitement then falling sand might be just the thing for you. Pretty much exactly what it sounds like, this game starts with four colors of falling pixels that you can manipulate with a few simple tools. I was concerned this might be stretching the definition of “game” just a little too far, but I was pleased to discover the first OED definition of “game” is “Amusement, delight, fun, mirth, sport.” While I won’t claim falling sand resulted in mirth or sport, I did find it surprisingly amusing, delightful, and fun. I will admit to being easily amused.

I don’t have a Playstation so Flower wasn’t on my radar at all until I saw this Slate.com article where the author claimed it was the only video game he’s played that makes him “feel relaxed, peaceful, and happy.” Wow. I’m hoping there’s a Wii version in the works, I’d like to try this game.

Finally, here’s the product that started me thinking about all this, a “mind-body game” called Wild Divine. Honestly I don’t know what to make of it, especially the nearly $300 hardware that “monitors your physical and emotional responses to stress.” Meditation is not something I have practiced, but I’m finding it tricky to reconcile the idea of meditation with the idea of trying to complete tasks or otherwise control what is happening on a screen at the same time. What do you think?

Our library used to have more in-person old-school analog gaming groups where people could meet and play a variety of games - chess, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Checkers, etc.  These programs have suffered from the economy as much as any program at any library, but I’d like to see more in-person interactive game programs coming back as soon as we are able, because it adds an element of community to the process of gaming, and helps to build community connections around common interests, interactions, and friendly competition.  Multi-player video games do that as well, but there are some interesting philosophical differences between side-by-side interaction (everyone facing the screen) and face to face interaction (facing your opponent/s across a game board.)

My super nerd dream for a library program would be the equivalent of a book group, but with games.  Wouldn’t that be fantastic?  You’d have to meet weekly to get enough experience with each month’s game choice, but that would be a lot of fun, especially if your library already has a weekly game time set aside for chess, etc.  With a little effort, you could easily pair a book with the game of the month - for example, you could play mah-jong one month, and read The Joy Luck Club.  The next month you could play Go and watch the movie Pi, or read the first volume of Hikaru No Go, or another book involving Go.  You could do Chess, or learn Canasta, or Whist (does anyone actually play that game?) or Backgammon, or Mancala, or any number of other games.  Alexander Pope’s poem The Rape Of the Lock at least partially involves people playing a French card game called Ombre.  It might be more difficult to play croquet and read Alice In Wonderland, but how cool would that be to set up a a croquet game at least once in the summer time, and play with people who are all interested in learning and talking about it?  For that matter, I’d like to learn how to play cricket, at least so I can understand just about any British novel written in the last century.

For more totally awesome, obscure, historically significant, possibly very difficult to locate games, there’s a great new book out called The Book Of Games: Strategy, Tactics, and History, by Jack Botermans  that has some really fantastic information in it.  But there are plenty of other books out there describing different card games, games to play on a checker board, etc.  With minimal expense, a program like this could get started, and if it proved popular and interesting, I think it could blossom into more interesting territory - ten or twelve decks of cards should be easy enough to come by, whereas ten or twelve sets of mah jong would be a bit of an expense unless you knew they were going to get used.  Why am I writing all of this here?  I should be making this into a proposal of some kind!

So, what does the literature say about gaming?

• An article by Neiburger (2007) insists that video games teach information literacy as gamers must continually read text, interpret it, decode information, etc. Neiburger (2007) also believes that video games help develop spatial reasoning, something that is necessary in today’s jobs. A study cited in his article found that surgeons who played video games for at least 3 hours a week performed 27% faster and made 37% fewer mistakes than surgeons who didn’t play video games. In addition, Neiburger’s research (2007) points out that simulation games are particularly useful education tools as they offer models of the real world that are far more “complex and of a grander scale” than can be offered in a lab or classroom setting.

• According to Branston (2006) “The power of video games to teach cannot be denied. Scholars in the field of game studies are well aware of the peripheral and accidental learning that goes on behind the scenes as a child, teenager, or adult engages in an interactive video game.”

• In a 2005 study 81% of online teen internet users (17 million teens) played online video games (Gibbons, 2007, p. 23).

• Despite the perception that videogames keep students from reading, some researchers such as James Paul Gee, note that video-gamers do a lot of reading while playing games. Gee writes that “when people learn to play video games, they are learning a new literacy, as well” (Gee, 2003, p. 13).

• The stereotype of the gamer as an anti-social teen male has proven to be untrue in extensive studies conducted by Nick Yee, a doctoral student at Stanford. Yee found the average age of MMORPG (massively multi-player online role-playing game) players is 31.7 years for women and 25.7 years for men and only about 25% of players of MMORPGs are teens (Gibbons, 2007, p. 25).

I am an academic librarian. Our library has not started collecting and circulating video games. However, since purchasing an XBox360 for personal use my husband and I have checked out many video games from our local public library. The Benton County library has a large video collection (thanks Andrew!) which means that we’ve been visiting more frequently and while we’re there we browse the shelves and check out more books!

I’m not sure if most/all public libraries collect video games, but I think they should! I can tell you that only a small handful of academic libraries collect video games: Art Institute of Washington, Franklin PIerce University, Indiana University, Indiana State University, Savannah College of Art & Design, Simon Frasier University, Stanford University, University of Illinois, University of Washington, and the University of Oregon. I believe more academic libraries will be adding video games to their collections as academic departments add gaming courses to their curriculum.

Thoughts?

image courtesy of flickr user peoplearestrange

Here’s some excuses:

• I hate the way I look on camera
• I’m in the witness protection program
• My voice sounds funny
• The camera adds ten pounds
• Why would anyone care what I have to say?
• Never in a million years, period.

If you’re one of these people, and everyone you work with is also one of these people, but for some reason you still want to make a video, or perhaps you’ve been delivered a mandate to make a video, then Slideshare might offer the alternative you’re looking for.  Most movie editors will allow you to use photos instead of video clips - take a series of photos, plug them into the movie maker, add a soundtrack of either music or narration (or both, if your movie maker allows two different soundtracks), adjust the amount of time each photo shows, add transitions, if you want (fade from one to the next, etc.), and voila you have yourself a movie.

Here’s something I’ve run into, though - when I tried doing this in the basic Windows Movie Maker, it crashed on me.  Repeatedly.  I’m pretty sure it had to do with the size of the photo files, but it might be that it just didn’t like me, and has a vendetta against me.  Sometimes it crashes when I try to make a video with too many clips, too.  When that happened, did i spend money on a better editor?  No!  I turned to another free solution, Slideshare!

Slideshare allows you to upload ppt slideshows to share with others.  You can leave it a slideshow if you want, or you can add an mp3 to it and make it a “slidecast.”  You can sync the slides to go with the music/narration - so that the slides change at appropriate moments in your narration.

Here’s one I made:  http://www.slideshare.net/crashsolo/car-repair-for-fvrl-members-presentation

I can see several good ways to use slideshare in libraryland:

• Presentations - if you deliver a presentation at a conference, a meeting, or wherever, you can post the slides to slideshare, and give people a link to go view them.  Slides by themselves don’t tell the story of the presentation, however, so you can record a version of you talk and synch it to the slides, creating a multimedia document of your presentation that others can view later.
• Tutorials - screenshots and photos can go a long way in instruction, and a voice over can finish it up.  I’ll admit my initial attempt at a car repair tutorial is pretty rough, but it was more for pitching the idea than for actual implementation.
• Events -  Staff, teens, etc. could collect photos, put them in an interesting order, add a musical soundtrack, and voila, you’ve got something interesting to watch that promotes library programs.  It might not have the splash of animoto, but it can be easier to control when the pictures appear, and when text appears, and for how long, etc.

One of the things I’ve struggled with with slideshare is that I can’t upload it to YouTube - something that would make it easier for me to work with.  However, it does have embed code so you can put it on a website or blog.  If my library were to make use of slideshare things like my car repair piece, we would just take the code and embed it where we thought it should go.

There are other slidecast/slideshow sharing sites out there, and I think the most recent version of powerpoint (the one I don’t yet have) allows you to turn your slideshow into a movie with sound.

Some other slideshow sites:

• Slideboom
• Slidesix
• Slide

Just because it’s easy and quick to make Animoto videos doesn’t mean the results are automatically good.  Case in point.  Here’s a little video I put together with some photos I had on my computer.   It was quick, it was easy, but it’s not at all compelling or coherent. It just doesn’t hang together. And it’s only 30 seconds. Imagine how awful it would be at 1 - 3 minutes.

It turns out that even very short videos need to be carefully crafted to tell a story, and it really helps to know what story you want to tell as you are collecting photos. In the Tips and Tricks section for adding images, Animoto gives me some insight into what went wrong with my first attempt:

“Animoto users often tell us they think differently about how they take images when they want to make an Animoto video. Instead of capturing individual moments, they try to capture a whole experience though a series of images. Instead of thinking like a photographer, they’re thinking like a director. They think about the story they want to share, and they use images to tell that story.”

That sounds a bit like the “long photos” Kate mentioned in her recent post.  My video combining rhododendrons, the library spaces (no people) and Maple Leaf Rag makes a disjointed thing that’s somewhat surreal, but not at all in a good way. Now that I look at it that way… no wonder! Well, it was the first try.

So, for my second attempt, I tried to take Animoto’s advice and snap photos while skiing that would tell a brief story about heading to the mountain, gearing up, getting tickets and taking some runs. The tempo of the music I chose influenced how many photos were required for a 30 second video, so a few of my photos were not used. It’s better than my library tour, but when I compare it to a sample snowboarding video on the Animoto site, mine pales a bit. Action shots of snowboarders in the air trump close-ups of somewhat sedate skiiers any day. We’ve gotta work on our jumps!

Animoto has been making a big splash lately. I hope you’ll play with Animoto, and share some of your creations with us at infodoodads.

I’m at a branch campus, 127 miles and two mountain passes away from most of my colleagues. While sometimes there’s no replacement for face-to-face communication, I’d spend half my life driving back and forth if it wasn’t for the Polycom.

I had big plans to talk about some of the research on video-mediated communication, but the book I requested last week was sent to the wrong campus and I’ve barely had a chance to flip through it so unfortunately I can’t draw on it too heavily. So far, though, most of the stuff I’ve looked at has mentioned the benefits of being able to pick up on all those non-verbal cues like nods, smiles, and even the more subtle cues, like eye contact. To be sure, video conferencing is a big step up from the speaker phone in this department, but in some ways the video phone still falls short in the non-verbal (and even verbal) cues department.

Notice the sort of bored look on my face, like I’m staring off at something totally unrelated to what might be happening on the screen?  That’s an unfortunate effect of having my camera off to the side of my monitor.  It used to sit on top, before I switched from a bulky CRT to a narrow LCD screen; back then my colleagues mostly saw the top of my head. It’s often not much better on the other end. In the room where we meet most frequently, the tables are arranged in a big square which means the camera that’s streaming what’s happening on that end mostly shows the empty space in the middle of the room, and the room where we have big important meetings and interviews has the camera way off to one side, though the microphone is inevitably right next to a paper-shuffler. There’s a slight sound delay, so I’m constantly interrupting people because I don’t realize they’ve started to speak (something I have enough trouble with in real life,) and bandwidth issues occasionally mean that neither the video nor the sound come through clearly, let alone in sync.

It might sound like I’m complaining, though I don’t mean to be; I appreciate the Polycom every time it saves me six hours in the car and I appreciate it almost as much when I have to spend 90 minutes trying to hear and be heard over the phone. My co-workers and I are fairly used to the quirks of our particular set-up and we can almost always make it work. I just think it’s interesting (and important) to acknowledge the limitations.