PAX: Bring Your Daughter to Play Day

For those of you who were wondering why half the people riding the MBTA this past weekend were dressed up as costumed characters, Boston just hosted the Penny Arcade Expo, aka PAX East, one of the largest gaming conventions in the country (Anime Boston was also in town, which accounts for the other half!). Ever since this popular Seattle-based con established a beachhead here on the East Coast a few years ago PAX East has grown by leaps and bounds every year, such that its attendance actually now rivals its parent event, drawing gamers from all over New England and beyond for three days of video game demos, tabletop action, and general over-the-top geeky mayhem.

Last year I had planned on bringing my daughter to PAX for the Saturday of that expo, but when a kid from her class invited her to a roller-skating birthday party on the same day I naturally lost on the face-off- video games may be fun, but no eight-year old kid turns down an afternoon at the roller rink! This year there were no scheduling conflicts, however, so I was finally able to introduce my little girl to a glimpse of gaming Nirvana... and it was good!

Although I was really nervous as to whether my daughter would enjoy herself or run away screaming, she in fact had a blast, and is already looking forward to next year's PAX East. Just in case any other gamer parents out there are wondering how to bring their children to an event as big and overwhelming as PAX and actually have a positive experience, here are a few things that in retrospect I think I managed to do right:

1. Scout out the con beforehand. If you're planning on bringing the kids, don't take them on the first day that you go. Give yourself a day to get a lay of the land and gather as much intel as you can so you're not wandering around blindly with children in tow. Figure out where the concessions are, which bathrooms are closest/most convenient, and map the easiest ways to get from Point A to Point B so you don't wear out little gamer feet in the process of shlepping back and forth across a cavernous, crowded convention center. This is also your opportunity to do the things that you want to (e.g., play some ultraviolent video games, indulge in a marathon session of Settlers of Catan, get that obligatory picture with Lollipop Chainsaw), because when you come back with your kids you should

2. Do what your children want to do. This should be a no-brainer, but if you want your kids to have a positive con experience let them set the pace and call the shots. Especially if they've never been to something like PAX, expect them to spend a goodly deal of time walking around slack-jawed and in awe of the expo floor. Let them bounce around like pinballs, gathering swag and taking pictures of cosplayers. If they want to play Mario Kart 7 for hours on end, be a good sport and let them do just that. Remember that little gamers will not be nearly as interested as you are in standing in line for yet another exclusive preview demo, nor will they be happy about steep learning curves mastering unfamiliar platforms- look for short lines and familiar (or at least intuitive) games if you want to maximize your fun. That being said, be sure to

3. Keep a list of "kid-friendly" activities on hand. Although PAX doesn't really have kids events per se, there are a lot of things going on that will be just as entertaining to your children as it will be for you. For example, a friend of mine working the con told me about a free mini-painting event that was perfect for my craft-minded daughter. We also spent an inordinate amount of time at the LEGO vendor, who allowed you to assemble your own minifigs at the price of one dollar per part- as my daughter is absolutely obsessed with LEGO, this to me was well worth the price! I also knew that she would enjoy watching the PopCap zombies dance, so I made sure we caught one of their routines in the lobby. This may sound a bit counter-intuitive, but the more you plan in advance, the more serendipitous your kids' convention will seem, and the more rewarding everyone's time will be as a result.

4. Finally, HAVE FUN! This is about showing your kids all that is good about gaming. Play your cards right and you will have a delightfully absurd, geek-positive, and memorable family experience and lay the groundwork for many happy returns.

Make It Happen 2012: Day 6 and 7

Okay, so nothing really happened on Day 6. But given the week I'd had up to that point, perhaps a down day was inevitable. Four-day workweeks are always a struggle, but four-day workweeks following a week and half of vacation? It's almost a miracle in and of itself that any of us got to 5pm this Friday.

Day 7 was all about making new habits. Although my wife, daughter, and I were all in dire need of a down day, we made sure we got out and exercised nevertheless while the beautiful weather held, taking a walk and clambering all over the rocks of Stage Fort Park. I also decided to cook a vegetarian dinner, making some gazpacho and grilling some eggplant. Although I don't think my wife and I will ever be able to give up eating meat and seafood entirely, it's nice to prepare a meal that Andriana can share with us from start to finish- she even helped make the gazpacho! For the evening's entertainment we turned off the T.V. and played Ticket to Ride, which turned out to be a lot more fun than reruns on Nickelodeon.

Make It Happen 2012: Day 4

A few months ago I wrote a blog post for Speak Out With Your Geek Out in which I described the fantasy world that my best friend and I have been creatively inhabiting on an on-again, off-again basis for more than twenty years. The world of Varo, which had begun as just a dot on a hastily drawn map, grew over time into a living, breathing metropolis of a million souls that became the setting for several Dungeons & Dragons campaigns and the inspiration for three novels and eleven short stories. My friend and I had attempted twice to turn Varo into a published gaming world, but on both occasions real life managed to conspire against us, either pulling us in separate directions as we left college or pushing us towards the increasing responsibilities of career, marriage, and family. Each time was a learning experience but ultimately a disappointment, and after we gave up on the second attempt I don't think either of us ever thought we'd try and give it another go.

Well, guess what? It seems that we're getting the band back together. Not only do my friend and I have our heads screwed on a lot better than during our previous attempts, but after starting a new D&D campaign in the same setting we have way more publishable material than we've ever had before, including lots and lots of homebrewed charts and rules variants to transform any generic fantasy RPG system into the gritty crossbow noir world of Varo. We also have all of the Varonian fiction I've written since the last try, which we intend to draw upon heavily for source material and flavor text (while linking out to purchasable ebook copies of said works), as well as ongoing dispatches and other occasional fiction which will help introduce newcomers to this universe from varying first-person perspectives. My best friend has already been successfully managing his wife's e-commerce site for her knitting efforts, so he's able to leverage his experience there into coding a fitting online portal for our creation.

Here's to hoping, in the spirit of Make It Happen, that the third time's a charm! If anything has changed between our previous efforts and this new attempt, it's that I think we're more realistic about our expectations. While it would be great to make some money, this is more about sharing what we've created with our fellow RPG travelers, as we've discovered that the more we open up this world to others the more we find ourselves inspired in turn. At any rate, I will be sure to post a link to the web portal as soon as we have some content online...

I'm going to go back there someday

(NOTE: This is my extraordinarily belated contribution to Speak Out With Your Geek Out, weeklong celebration of our geeky hobbies and/or obsessions that I learned about from fellow library blogger Jessica Olin. I had meant to have this post finished in time, but sometimes my words take on a life of their own... which I suppose is the theme of this post!)

It all began with a dot and four letters on a hand-drawn map: VARO.

The year was 1989, and I was in between my junior and senior years at high school. Back then summers meant one thing: unlimited time to play Dungeons and Dragons, and I took advantage of this opportunity to run my most ambitious campaign to date. Unlike previous games I had Dungeon Mastered, which were all set in fantasy worlds that had been created by the role-playing game's designers, this would be a universe entirely of my own creation. The players' home base would be a port town on the edge of the world's arctic circle, and I had already scrawled a map of the adjacent coastline roughly the size of New England hinting at all of the exciting places the adventurers could go to seek their fortune: the haunted dwarven ruins of Ironhold to the east, the bustling river city Cherindal to the south, and of course the frozen wastes surrounding the Northern Citadel, which guarded ominously against an unnamed threat (shades of George R.R. Martin two years before his Game of Thrones).

Surely this would be enough to keep my players busy, but no sooner had they reached these far-flung locales than they demanded to know what lay beyond. For example, this "Great Sea" they had been sailing on-- how far did it stretch? Hastily I drew a larger-scale map depicting the body of water's westernmost shore. The blank coastline looked lonely, however, so I placed a city where one might expect one, and named it "Varo" without giving it much additional thought. After all, it was three thousand miles away...

"Varo?" one of my players asked dubiously as he inspected the new map. "What's that?"

I stammered as I thought on my feet: "Umm, it's a city of merchant princes. Yeah. Their trade galleys can be found all over the Great Sea."

This seemed enough to mollify him. "Cool!"

I'd like to say there was something more to it, as might befit the founding legend of a great city- but alas, Varo was born without the divine fanfare or inexplicable fratricide that seems to accompany the establishment of cities in Graeco-Roman antiquity. And yet a seed had been planted nevertheless, although it wasn't for a year and a half later that it would germinate and sprout into something real. It was the Fall of my freshman year at MIT and I had just discovered that my new housemate and soon-to-be best friend was also a big-time D&D geek. As often occurs when this sort of thing happens, we immediately began swapping old campaign stories (your local VFW Post hasn't got anything on a veteran Dungeon Master!).

In an attempt to impress my new friend, for some reason I started talking about Varo. Never mind that I hadn't run so much as a session in that city situated on the far-flung shore of my own imagination-- I had recently been doing some undergraduate research for an archaeology professor studying early Renaissance Venice, and as I spoke about this city of merchant princes I found myself drawing heavily on my recent background readings to invest this fantasy locale with life.

Varo was like Venice, of course, but there had to be a twist. I can still remember that moment, standing in the kitchen of German House, when my ability to produce extemporaneous creative bullshit went into hyperdrive. It was like Venice, but it was bigger. Much bigger. A million souls living in decrepit high-rise insulae like in Ancient Rome along fetid canals suddenly sprang into existence, but why were they there? Because Varo, like Venice, was the center of commerce for the civilized world, but unlike Venice it had never lost its position of preeminence. Yes. But how had they maintained their dominance? Drawing upon Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, I imagined that the Varonians had found a way to use mathematics to predict the future and rig the world's markets in their favor, with the result that history itself had ground to a halt.

In just moments Varo had gone from just a name on a map to a dreary postmodern fantasy metropolis that was basically cyberpunk with crossbows (I'd later settle on "crossbow noir"). Great Houses vied with one another for supremacy over the information economy while the City itself bled the world dry. The more I padded out this dystopia, the more I fell in love with it... and so did my friend.

"So when do I get a chance to play in this world?" he asked.

Over the next two years my friend and I explored the City of Varo. I'd never DM'ed a solo campaign before, but this was a game world that seemed to beg for a unique first-person perspective. My friend had rolled up a bounty hunter character who was equal parts Blade Runner and Philip Marlowe, and I responded by crafting mystery after mystery for the fantasy gumshoe to solve, all the while fleshing out more and more of the setting. This was Varo's formative period, and even though we didn't run more than a couple of dozen sessions the City had burned itself indelibly into our imaginations, so much so that we were able to run one adventure while driving cross-country from Pittsburgh to Washington State, sans books, dice, or notes, guided only by our shared memory of a place which didn't exist.

Somewhere along the way my friend and I got it into our heads to publish Varo as its own fantasy roleplaying game. If either of us hadn't been so preoccupied with washing out of MIT and figuring out what that meant in the Grand Scheme of Things, we might very well have pulled something off. As it stood we did manage to flesh out both the mores and mechanics of this parallel universe, so that even as it defied any attempts to be published it continued to gain life nevertheless. Like that game Katamari Damacy, where a little ball sticks to everything it touches until it rolls itself into a giant agglomeration of everything, so too did Varo absorb every piece of culture I encountered- every book I read, fiction or nonfiction, every T.V. show or movie I watched. It eventually reached a point where I no longer had to consciously add to this world- it added to itself constantly, relentlessly, shamelessly.

Varo was alive.

My best friend decided to find his fortune on the other side of the continent, during which time we managed to continue via email the solo adventures of his bounty hunter, who had left the City and gone traveling himself. At the time I don't think I had appreciated the irony, but there it was. Not only was our hero travelling the wilderness in true Joseph Campbell fashion but the entire world was following him. In what sort of cosmos had we situated our fantasy dystopia? Through a couple of novella's worth of email correspondence my friend and I attempted to figure this out.

It may have continued this way indefinitely if not for my wife, who enters the story at this point. To say that I had misgivings about sharing this fantasy world with others would be something of an understatement. Playing D&D was one thing, even running it as a Dungeon Master was another, but this particular brand of world-building had become an all-consuming endeavor. How would I even begin to explain this to someone with absolutely no frame of reference? But I was in love, so I did my best to try, telling the creation story of Varo to her on our first long-distance drive from Boston to New Jersey. Instead of driving her away screaming, not only was she absolutely fascinated despite being neither a gamer nor a fantasy or sci-fi geek (I managed to change the latter in the fullness of time, although I don't think she'll ever be a gamer ((fortunately our daughter is more after my own heart in this regard!)), but she challenged me to try again to publish.

This time I wrote. Okay, my friend and I did make another college try at publishing which actually resulted in a (albeit rough) first draft of a sourcebook, but at the same time I set my mind to exploring the world of Varo through my fiction. I had just started writing again in earnest after about ten years of writer's block, and once I'd gotten half a dozen short stories under my belt I felt it was finally time to attempt a novel. The protagonist of this tale would be a young chef, as the idea would be to describe my fantasy setting primarily through its food. "Confessions of a Gourmand," I'd call it, and over the next three years I would struggle to bring this novel out of my imagination and onto paper, all the while investing Varo with yet another dimension.

After Confessions was complete I promised myself I would give genre fiction a break, but with the challenge of NaNoWriMo 2006 just around the corner I left my then work-in-progress- a novel about my time at MIT that I was tentatively titling "Sex, Drugs, and Acapella"- and returned to Varo to write The Librarian's Tale, which viewed my fantasy setting through the eyes of the City's chief rival, Iskandalon, the City of Letters to Varo's Republic of Numbers. I was astonished at how easily the words came over the space of a month, such that I had a fully-formed novel by the end of that November. Surely I had written Varo out of my system by now, or so I had reasoned, but the truth was that I was only getting started.

Varonian Nights came into existence in the Winter of 2008, breaking another writing dry spell that had coincided with my first year as a professional librarian, when all thought of creative output had been squelched by simply trying not to get fired. When at last the chaos of my new job had settled into something a little more manageable, I decided the best way to jump back into my writing would be a new short story- this time one that was set in Varo. I think I was inspired by my friend Jason, who was currently getting his MFA in Creative Writing and had a class project for which he was writing a fantasy novel that consisted of several interrelated short stories. Whatever the impetus, "Red Legion," aka Varonian Nights #1, was short, action-packed, and exactly what I'd needed to recharge my imagination. No sooner had I finished it than I'd immediately launched into the next tale, envisioning an anthology of eleven short stories when all was said and done which I finished earlier this year.

However, in the middle of this collection I decided to give NaNoWriMo yet another go (in November 2009), in part to see whether I still had it in me, but also because I had a story idea that I just couldn't resist telling- i.e., a new mystery for my co-conspirator's bounty hunter protagonist to solve. The result was a novella I called "Eight," which is still quite raw and is still in need of a third act, but it was fascinating to return to the perspective of the character which had quite literally started it all. Not only had this individual grown up, but so had the City and the entire world around him, such that returning to his point of view felt like I had almost come full circle.

Almost, but not quite...

The summer before last my best friend and I decided to attend GenCon in grand fashion- instead of flying out, we would drive to Indianapolis and back, making a proper road trip of it. Along the way we talked of little else than Varo, as I brought him up to speed with Varonian Nights and Eight and he filled me in on various mechanics problems that he'd been working on in his spare time. For just as I would default to imagining another corner of this fantasy world whenever my brain had a spare cycle, he would open up his notebook and start hacking his own set of homebrewed rules which accurately captured how to adventure in a place like the City. We could both sense that a new creative critical mass had been achieved, so I suppose it was only inevitable when roaring past the soybean fields of the Midwest, my friend asked me:

"So when do I get to play in this world again?"

I've been running a successful D&D campaign ever since, which is now in its 2nd year. This is not a solo adventure, however, but a game that we opened to an entire table of old friends and new. Now we are sharing this world we have built with some of the best gamers I know, and it only becomes a richer and more dynamic place with every session. My friend and I joke that the City has become so real to us that we fully expect to end up there when old age finally takes its toll and we lose our marbles, hence the title of this post (bonus points if you got the Muppet Movie reference). Personally, I could think of no better afterlife than this alternate reality I have labored over for pretty much my entire adult life. I wonder if this is how Tolkien or Asimov felt?

The PAX Empire Strikes Back

Well, that didn't take long- in just its second year, PAX East has overtaken the original Seattle-based Penny Arcade Expo in attendance, with almost 70,000 games braving the crowds at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center last weekend.  I was originally planning to go with my daughter, but when she got an invite to her best friend's birthday party I knew I was going to have to attend solo (PROTIP:  No matter how geeky your child is, nothing beats the roller rink!).  

Here's my PAX East photo album!

PAX Postscript!

Hey, remember when I editorialized that PAX East was way too big for its Hynes Convention Center britches? Apparently I wasn't the only one who noticed this- according to Boston.com, PAX East 2011 and 2012 will be held at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center in the Seaport District. I'm already looking forward to it!

It's funny- when ALA Midwinter came to town this past January I was not pleased in the slightest that it was going to be taking place at the BCEC and not at the Hynes. But after spending the past few days elbow to elbow with tens of thousands of gamers, the prospect of the larger venue's wide open spaces (and infinitely superior wi-fi) make me appreciate the new convention center for what it is.

PAX East Day Three- The Play's The Thing

I was originally not planning to return to PAX on Sunday, as various family obligations seemed to rule out a third day at the conference. Having been given a last-minute pass on all of the above, however (just in case there's any doubt, which there isn't, my wife rules!), I caught the early train into Boston so that I could take advantage of my media badge. I'd hit the Exhibit Floor an hour early, perhaps sign up for a demonstration of the new Dark Sun setting for 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons, and just squeeze as much game time as I could out of the final day of PAX East. After all, that's what brought us all here in the first place, right?

Although I had god intelligence that media badges have allowed early access to the game floor on previous days, I was very disappointed to find that security was barring those of us with yellow passes from getting into the Exhibit Halls until general admission at 10am. That being said, those of us representing the Fourth Estate did have first dibs on whatever it was we wanted to see by virtue of already being at the doors when said doors opened, and so I strategically positioned myself opposite the one vendor demo I absolutely, positively wanted to get my hands on before the gamer hordes turned every line into an hour-plus long queue:

That's right, folks. I made a beeline for Rockstar Games' Red Dead Redemption, their much-anticipated Western epic built on the Great Theft Auto engine. I am a huge fan of Westerns, and have always waited for a videogame that did the genre the justice it deserves. Just looking at the giant LCD screens showing previews of gameplay to passersby you could tell that if nothing else, this game was a cinematic tour de force. The Old West is rendered in loving detail, all the way down to the dust and the tumbleweeds, and just like GTA you are given the freedom you want to explore this virtual world by foot, by horse, or even by rail, from the Southwestern U.S. circa 1900 down into Old Mexico.

I'm not going to attempt to review Red Dead Redemption since our media walkthrough was fairly scripted and each of us only had a precious few minutes at the controls-- though I did have the stick long enough to jump my horse off a cliff and kill the protagonist! -- but the game got me to thinking about the intersection of virtual worlds and education. While educational games often fall flat with the gaming public, one can see in a game like Red Dead Redemption real potential for teaching gamers about the Old West. While the historical details are admittedly mixed and matched and the level of violence is what you'd expect from Rockstar's studios, immersive virtual worlds such as Red Dead Redemption are getting so good that the INCIDENTAL educational value they contain rivals the content being produced in games or simulations designed explicitly for educational purposes (like Second Life's Deadwood).

Think about this for another second, because when I made this realization it totally blew my mind: the gaming industry is now capable of bringing to bear so much creative power when designing an historical FPS that they can't help but produce something that has some absolute educational merit. And assuming that Red Dead Redemption will be a huge seller (something the buzz seems to suggest and the demo seems to validate), this may very well open the floodgates for other similarly-conceived projects. We have already witnesses the success of early Renaissance Italy as a setting in the very popular Assassin's Creed series- the historical backdrop to these games is becoming less and less wallpaper and more and more interactive virtual history.

Granted, because the primary purpose of these games is not educational one must always be wary of the liberties that will be taken by designers with actual historical details and events, but as the whole of history becomes the fodder for games like this with ever more granularity how long will it be before gamers derive their primary knowledge of history through games such as Assassin's Creed, Red Dead Redemption, and their successors instead of through other forms of media? I can definitely see, for example, a college history professor asking his students to play a game like this and compare its depictions of the Old West with accounts from primary sources, or for communications or literature faculty to ask their students what role historical appropriation plays in modern media. The mind truly boggles.

Alas, because I was getting the media tour of Red Dead Redemption I missed my chance to sign up for the Dark Sun demo, but I promise I will contribute some thoughts and reviews about pen and paper role-playing games such as D&D in future posts at 8bitlibrary.com! What I'd like to close my Day Three Recap, however, is a look back at old school gaming, thanks to the Retro Arcade Lounge provided by the folks at ACAM- the American Classic Arcade Museum, located in Weirs Beach, New Hampshire. ACAM brought a subset of their vast collection of arcade games from the 20th century, including Frogger, Space Invaders, Sinistar, Donkey Kong 3, Food Fight, and the laserdisc interactive fantasy cartoon Dragon's Lair (which incidentally I dumped who knows how many hundreds of dollars into back when I was a kid in order to "solve" on the Ocean City Boardwalk in New Jersey!).

While we talk about how librarians can incorporate games into their collections and the classroom, the founders of ACAM have gone and actually created a playable library of classic arcade games. As an all-80's soundtrack blared and ACAM staff members kept feeding a bottomless supply of quarters into the machines so that we could all enjoy as many free plays as our hearts desired, I realized in between my attempts to destroy the Sinistar (whose evil floating head still managed to quicken my pulse even all these years when I saw it appear on screen again) and try to remember all of the winning moves to Dragon's Lair that this is as much about having fun as it is about preserving an important era in American history for posterity or study.

The play's the thing, after all.

PAX East Day One

I'm pleased to announce that I will be joining folks at 8bitlibrary.com this weekend to provide coverage at the PAX East Conference! It's both an honor and pleasure to be working with JP Porcaro and Justin Hoenke, so I shall endeavor to be worthy of my post.

Day One (Friday): Wil Wheaton was right.

Clearly the news that Wil Wheaton was going to be offering the keynote to the PAX East conference here in Boston was a Big Thing (tm). Not only is the child actor turned successful writer turned adult actor a heck of a speaker, but he's also a hopeless gaming nerd who never met a d20 he didn't like. So even though I was originally not planning to attend PAX, when I heard that Wil would be kicking off the festivities I realized that I'd be a fool not to go, if nothing else than for the keynote.

My initiative (so to speak) was rewarded mightily. For not only did I manage to meet up with a couple of local librarian gamers with whom I correspond regularly on Twitter- @calzone and @jmgold, who were gracious enough to let me tag along with them for most of yesterday afternoon as we waited in line for our opportunity to witness Ensign Crusher to take the con- but I also got to experience first-hand the crazy arena-rock reception that Wil Wheaton received when he did appear on stage to the blaring tune of MC Frontalot's "Your Friend Wil (Don't Be A Dick)".

Wil assumed the podium with an axe to grind, and he ground it well- time and time again the enemies of gamers have attempted to smear and/or marginalize them, but despite the best efforts of these "concerned citizens" and social critics gamers have demonstrated that not only are they not dangerous deviants, but that gaming culture has proven to be a powerful lens through which gamers have focused their creativity and imagination in an unprecedented manner. From Atari 2600's Adventure to Dragon Age: Origins, from the "Red Box" Basic Dungeons & Dragons set to 4th Edition D&D, Burning Wheel, and Dogs in the Vineyard, gaming has always challenged players not just to passively consume their entertainment but to immerse themselves and fully participate in it.

We are only just beginning to understand the ramifications of this tectonic shift as we move from what Laurence Lessig terms "R/O (Read Only) culture" back to the "R/W (Read/Write) culture" that our ancestors took for granted before the rise of mass-produced content that was awkward to share, difficult to copy, and of dubious legality to modify or remix. While digitization has rendered all but the aforementioned legal limitations virtually obsolete, Wil reminded us that this R/W culture did not begin in the ginormous antiquated servers of DARPAnet but in the wood-paneled basements of a generation of tabletop gamers, who were ripping, mixing and burning a new participatory creativity right there on their formica tabletops with painted lead figurines and funny dice.

So what does all of this have to do with libraries? Wil Wheaton's anecdote about his free day captures it perfectly- finding himself with 12 whole hours where he was left to his own devices, Wil had originally planned to fill this half-day unencumbered with family responsibilities with a marathon re-watching of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy on DVD when he found himself inexplicably drawn to spending his free time playing the new FRPG Dragon Age: Origins instead. Why would he, an admittedly devout Tolkien enthusiast, do this? His answer: "Because I already know how it ends." Faced with the choice of passively consuming a masterpiece of the fantasy genre and actively participating in his own epic quest, Wil chose the latter, and so does an ever-increasing percentage of our population. Whether or not these people choose to identify themselves as "gamers" or not is irrelevant. A new media literacy is evolving right here and right now, and if we are only just beginning to make sense of this in general popular discourse can you imagine how behind we are with this as librarians?

As an academic librarian I have seen questionable choices made with regards to popular literature and new media such as music, movies, and game. Some libraries made early snap decisions that these latter-day items would always be ancillary to their research collections, acquired either begrudgingly or not at all. To be fair there is a new generation of bibliographers who understand that with the rise of interdisciplinary studies and the serious study of popular culture one must be prepared to collect anything-- my favorite example as an Interlibrary Loan librarian is our acquisition of the Death of Superman comic book for a senior faculty member who professed never to have read a comic in his entire life! How long until that same patron or someone like him returns to us looking for a playable copy of the Legend of Zelda or Activision's Pitfall!?

R/W culture has only just begun its Renaissance, and it won't be long before academics train their research on the origins of this movement when gamers helped a generation wrestle the means of cultural production from the titans of Big Content and start telling their own stories by playing- in this regard we can't start collecting games soon enough. But it's not just about collection for academic posterity. To borrow from Wil's keynote, games have become a "default setting" of our cultural discourse, as sure as have books, music, television, and movies. As digitization accelerates our still-nascent R/W sensibilities it will not be long before games become *the* default setting for our culture.

Are we ready for this as librarians? Ready or not, the Wil Wheatons of the earth are here in force.

Break out the black dice

Gary Gygax has passed on to that Great Gaming Table in the Sky.


We'll miss you, big guy...

(And Order of the Stick gets the win for Best Gygax Tribute!)

((Xkcd gets the best runner-up))

Virtual guilt

So lately I've been noticing that I feel surprisingly guilty whenever I neglect my myriad virtual lives, whether it's keeping up the blog here (or at the Library Ass, and don't get me started about the other ones), chatting and gaming with my old Jersey friends on our shared private message board, or maintaining my digital homestead on Second Life. These presences being as important to me as many of my "real world" roles and responsibilities, it's difficult at times to figure out how to balance one's various incarnations. In my free time do I blog, explore Second Life, update the game pages, or do I behave selfishly and spend those moments with my family or on my own pursuits such as fishing or - God forbid - writing?

Each virtual self is an essential part of the larger whole. Here at the Jersey Exile I can touch base with everyone I know and countless others who stumble upon this blog through a Google search for something else; at the Library Ass I can think out loud about the big picture of librarianship and how I fit into it. While the private board with my friends can even to me seem like a colossal waste of time, it's become my only lifeline with my childhood, and in between running a bunch of online roleplaying games the old crew and I all manage to find common ground even after long having since gone our separate ways.

But it is Second Life that I've been wrestling with the most these days, as I've come to realize that not only is it an extension of real life more than it is a game or simulation or whatever you may think it is, but it's also a harbinger of what's coming next. As "metaverses" such as SL come of age, it is inevitable that they will intersect with social networking in ways that are far more fluid than they are right now, such that the Web 3.0 will be a mashup of metaverse and metacommentary. People who get this are already exploring the potential of these online worlds, as even if Second Life isn't quite ready to supplant Everything That Has Come Before chances are that the thing which comes after SL and all of these embyronic metaverses will.

(Facebook is a fascinating example of where all of this is converging, especially as the ubiquitous social network takes on additional dimensions such as virtual commerce and file sharing. Already kids in South Korea are overwhelmingly hooked on Cyworld, a combination of a MySpace/Facebook social network with a 2-D metaverse that some people are calling a "2.5" application.)

But there's also a personal dimension to my exploration of Second Life. I don't know whether it's the fact that avatars can look and act so real, but personal relationships formed in SL feel more like real relationships than the other virtual acquaintances that I've made on other parts of the Web. Moreover, I've also noticed that even people I know in real life behave differently when I encounter them in Second Life - not so much in an escapist sense, mind you, but as if people there get on some deep and meaningful level that there's something altogether new and exciting about this universe that exists both parallel and perpendicular to our own at the same time.

I don't know where my virtual lives are all going, whether they will diverge or intersect or do a little of both, but I do know that I ignore them increasingly at my own peril!