This article is from the first edition of The Video Game Librarian website I published between 2008 and 2010. It was originally written on December 30, 2008.
The votes are in and the 2008 Video Game Librarian Bookmark Awards have been handed out. The following games were chosen based on suggestions from The Video Game Librarian readers, review scores, innovation and overall impact on the video game community.
“Continue Reading” for this year’s selections. Continue reading
This article is from the first edition of The Video Game Librarian website I published between 2008 and 2010. It was originally written on November 7, 2008.
When it comes to scholarly research and preservation, video games are not usually at the top of the list for librarians. After books and music and movies and about a hundred other things, there’s not much attention left over for games. But some people out there are attempting to change that. One of those people is David Carter, a librarian at the newly opened University of Michigan Computer and Video Game Archive.
Michigan’s Game Archive is a “usable archive” that allows students and professors the chance to come in and sit down with a variety of video games, both retro and modern titles alike. The archive is currently in preview mode with shortened hours, but the big Grand Opening has been scheduled for November 17. I recently had a chance to talk to David about what the archive is doing, what their plans for the future are, the challenges of running a game archive and what people have been playing (you’ll be surprised).
So hit the “Continue Reading” link for the lengthy interview. Continue reading
This article is from the first edition of The Video Game Librarian website I published between 2008 and 2010. It was originally written on August 25, 2008.
Choosing what games to buy for your video game collection can sometimes be a tough task. Where do you start? Ideally, it would be great to be able to buy at least one copy of every game, but realistically, that’s just not possible. So here are ten highly recommended titles that belong in every Xbox 360 collection. They may be critically acclaimed, they may be sitting atop the sales charts or they may be cult classics that have been unjustly overlooked. But all of them are essentials.
The Xbox 360 is by far the console of choice when it comes to gamers in their twenties. And to satisfy this niche, developers have responded by putting the most realistic and action-packed titles on the Xbox 360 that they can. It also so happens that many of these titles happen to be rated M For Mature. So if you’re ready to take the plunge into the M-rating, here are ten essential M-rated titles for the Xbox 360.
Here are today’s additions to the Xbox 360 Core Collection: Continue reading
This article is from the first edition of The Video Game Librarian website I published between 2008 and 2010. It was originally written on August 16, 2008.
A post on the MTV Multiplayer Blog today attempts to answer one of the age old questions of video games: why doesn’t a game’s director get his name on the box?
It’s a good question as librarians routinely suggest books based on the author. Furthermore, with the game industry regularly comparing themselves to the movie industry, film’s “auteur theory” has never made the jump.
There could be any number of reasons for this. A book will usually only have one author and collaborations between two or more authors is rare. The auteur theory in film studies declares that the director is the final voice in the creation of a movie. So in these industries, the “creator” of a work is very clear cut and librarians can use that information to suggest other works that may be of interest to a patron.
The problem with games is that there’s no cut and dried creator of a game. Right now, two very different entities could be considered the “author” of a game. The first, which would tie in most closely with the writer of a book or the director of a movie is the game’s lead developer. Continue reading
This article is from the first edition of The Video Game Librarian website I published between 2008 and 2010. It was originally written on August 5, 2008.
Fantasy Football has nearly become a sport unto itself. For football fans, it’s the next best thing to actually watching football. And for some, being “involved” in the sport in this way is much better. So a fantasy football league would be a great community gathering event for a library of any size. But manually running a fantasy football league is tough work. Thankfully, Yahoo has a full set of tools available to create and run a league through their Yahoo Fantasy Sports section. They do all the work and the cost is next to nothing.
For a librarian on a tight programming budget, the fact that running a league through Yahoo Fantasy Football is free is the best part. The only costs might be a few prizes for the top players or the pizza and wings that would be a necessity at any “Draft Day” event.
Yahoo allows for the creation of Custom Leagues where nearly every setting is editable. Leagues can be created in the two most popular fantasy sports styles: “Head-To-Head” or “Points.” Definitions of nearly every term used in fantasy football (and details on how Yahoo’s system in particular works) can be found on Yahoo’s Help Pages.
The Fantasy Draft itself can be turned into a huge event with a few pizzas and wings and soda. To get the rest of the community involved, it would be easy to take a whiteboard and post the league standings somewhere in the library. Weekly league meetings could even be held (on Sunday afternoons of course and with a little football on a TV) to encourage people to stick with the league.
While a season-long fantasy football league is not a “traditional” library program (or even technically a “video game”), it definitely fits in with the idea that many librarians share that libraries should be community meeting places.
This article is from the first edition of The Video Game Librarian website I published between 2008 and 2010. It was originally written on June 6, 2008.
The question of whether or not it’s legal to use video games in a public program has come up in four places over the last several days: The School Library Journal, GamePolitics.com, Joystiq’s Law of the Game column and at the LibGaming Discussion Group.
Here’s what they had to say… Continue reading
This article is from the first edition of The Video Game Librarian website I published between 2008 and 2010. It was originally written on April 1, 2008.
Last Friday, Sandy Duncan, the former head of Xbox Europe was interviewed by That VideoGame Blog. During the conversation, Duncan was quoted as saying that game consoles will disappear in 5-10 years and that everything will be piped into your TV as “web services.” Here’s the full quote:
“I think dedicated games devices i.e. consoles (and handhelds) will die [out] in the next 5 to 10 years. The business model is very risky and the costs associated with creating new hardware are incredibly high. There is a definite “convergence” of other devices such as set top boxes. There’s hardly any technology difference between some hard disc video recorders and a an Xbox 360 for example. In fact in 5 to 10 years I don’t think you’ll have any box at all under your TV, most of this stuff will be “virtualized” as web services by your content provider.”
But don’t worry, the idea is absurd on its face, and I’ll tell you why. Consoles aren’t going anywhere, and you’d think a former Microsoft bigwig would know that. But then, you’d think the current bigwig of Sony would know that too… Continue reading
This article is from the original batch of Video Game Librarian articles I wrote for Gaming Target between 2005 and 2007. It was originally written on December 21, 2007.
The PlayStation 2, the current platform of choice for any library that focuses their game collection on a single console, will turn eight years old in 2008 and is likely at the end of its useful life. Sure, it’ll get a few more years of annual EA Sports updates, various bits of bargain software and games based on Saturday morning cartoons, but the days of games like God of War II coming to the PS2 are over.
So what’s a librarian to do if they want to keep their collection current? Why, move up to the next-generation of course. As a Media Librarian myself, this can be a tough choice, but with this guide we hope we can help any librarians out there make the right choice. The three consoles have been organized from best to worst, with the pros and cons listed for each so that the console that best fills your library’s personal needs can be chosen. Continue reading