Archive for Library Gaming

Gaming with Librarians: Creating Community Sites

// June 21st, 2010 // No Comments » // Library Gaming

I wanted to setup a small corporation homepage for the gaming group involved in Gaming with Librarians and speficially wanted to use it as an opportunity to see what the state of free site or hosting set-ups were. It really seems like WordPress are the only folks out there who are doing something useful.

I started by trying to setup a site under Google, hoping to take advantage of things like Google Docs and other things to coordinate the group and ease play. The sites and google apps section are geared mostly toward business and pay customers and in the end I just thought the features offered for publish use were a big old fail. So I took a trip on over to WordPress, registered a new ID for the Eve Corp and got a small site up and running in about an hour.

Thus the Archival Quality LLC site was born, not bad at all for about an hours work graphic included.

Another big benefit I see from going with wordpress is that not only can you choose from several reasonable themes but by default they supply you with a mobile skin for the site. I fired it up on my iPhone today it was fantastic. So with a minimum of effort I have a corp site complete with mobile integration. We have come a long way in just a few short years as a profession.

Gaming with Librarians: Corp Formed!

// June 18th, 2010 // No Comments » // Library Gaming

I setup a player Corporation in Eve Online last night for the Gaming With Librarians project and settled on the name ‘Archival Quality LLC’

I’m banging out a group description below for use in forums and such.

Archival Quality LLC

CEO: Aynder
Location: Sinq Liason: Auberulle V – TransStellar Shipping Storage (Gallente Space)

A player run corporation in Eve Online for Librarians, Academics, Educators and Scholars interested in participating in an online gaming community. We’re a casual friendly corporation and friendly to new players who enjoy exploring, discussing and working together.

In Game

We have a fluid structure centered on fun and working together primarily through Mining, Missioning and Marketing. As a new corporation we’re focused on establishing early goals and working toward achieving them. Our current goals are to purchase a set of blueprints for basic ships to supply our members and gather the resources needed to produce them in enough supply to keep everyone flying comfortably.

As an organization of learners we encourage all members to explore and educate themselves in any role and will be providing opportunities to try out different positions within the corporation. We also intend to pursue a range of activities to give a high level of exposure to a variety of skills to all our members and help them uncover the most enjoyable and rewarding experiences out there.

As a community focused group we strive to be a good members of the galaxy and ask that all members maintain a positive status with Concord and are able to travel to 1.0 system. We do not discourage pvp at all but ask that members refrain from pirating, attacking the defenseless or innocent and otherwise refrain from random and wanton attacks.

Out of Game

As lifelong learners this corporation is there to provide people with similar interests an opportunity to experience one of the deepest online gaming experiences available. We encourage members to share and discuss their experiences, talk about it’s application for universities, libraries and schools and discuss what kind of impact we see from gaming on the players.

Gaming with Librarians, First Missed Lesson

// June 16th, 2010 // No Comments » // Library Gaming

Received a reply in the key of sweet irony to my suggestion of forming a Librarian and Academics based Eve Corp already.

A quick reply came across from someone of the I-better-than-that-and-do-far-superior-things-with-my-time persuasion and couldn’t help reveling on the sweet irony of it for a moment.

One of the reasons gaming communities and particularly online gaming communities are so prolific and productive is that it inherently filters toward a “community of the involved”. It’s a subculture of participation, which I think can be in contrast to the subcultures in some libraries where it’s more about them participating with you than you participating with them. Many things follow on from this participating, it’s also a meritocracy and not a hierarchy, it’s a culture of cooperation and not regulation but all those things come after simply finding people willing to participate and get involved.

In my opinion Libraries are at their best when involved with users as a community, when they embark on an intellectual endeavor together and not when trying to lead (or force) people through one.

Other than that there have been a few feelers back on the topic that were positive, some great pointers and a bit of interesting discussion as well from various corners of the Library Gaming community. First step is for folks to try the game out and see if it’s for them and we’ll go from there. I’ll keep blogging about it as things develop.

Gaming with Librarians

// June 15th, 2010 // No Comments » // Library Gaming

With so much being discussed about Academics and Librarians getting into the gaming space I thought I’d try to open the door and posted the following in the LibGaming Google Group and at my local library. If this starts to get any traction I’ll be blogging about the experiences a bit and waxing philosophic about it. We’ll see where it goes.

As an avid gamer I often listen to discussions about the benefits of gaming directed by non-gaming presenters and the seeming desire to explore what can be learned from gaming at contrast with the level of participation from librarians and academics.

I thought I’d explore if there was any interest in forming an Online Gaming Guild for librarian, academics and basically anyone fitting the list on the front of [the LibGaming] Google group. The idea would be to give an environment to experience online gaming with a group of people there to explore as well, to have an opportunity to try out the activities you hear so much about and have a discussion about the skills being
learned and leveraged, community interactions and so forth while doing it.

So I wanted to check to see if there was any interest in forming an Eve Online Corporation (http://www.eveonline.com/) with the groups audience as the target audience? Eve provides a wide variety of experiences and game-play as deep as a player wants to go without insisting they get incredibly deep if they don’t want to. Having played Eve Online myself for years and been in several corporations I’m always impressed at a 20 something who runs a Player corporation and leverages advanced Sig Sigma techniques without even knowing they do.

Indeed my gaming experience and experience running or participating in various in game guilds has shaped my own management skills significantly.

Anyway is there any interest in something like this?