By:
On:
In: Academia, digitalhumanities, education, eliterature, games, innovation, materiality, play, presentations, Research & Projects, serendipity

University of Florida Event on October 4, 2011, 6pm: Jane McGonigal: Author and world-renowned gaming expert Jane McGonigal, PhD, is an expert on alternate reality games and a renowned game developer. She is the New York Times bestselling author of Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. She has appeared at TED, the New Yorker, and the Web 2.0 summit, among others. Business Week has named her “one of the top 10 innovators to watch.” Watch Jane McGonigal on the Colbert Report. Text above from the Bob Graham Center for Public Service and available directly from theRead More →

By:
On:
In: cfp, games, pedagogy, scholarship

The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy is a new journal with a first issue expected in September 2011. The journal is open access and, according to the website: The mission of The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy is to promote open scholarly discourse around critical and creative uses of digital technology in teaching, learning, and research. Educational institutions have often embraced instrumentalist conceptions and market-driven implementations of technology that overdetermine its uses in academic environments. Such approaches underestimate the need for critical engagement with the integration of technological tools into pedagogical practice. The JITP will endeavor to counter these trends by recentering questionsRead More →

By:
On:
In: games, UF, UFDC, video, web 2.0

UF students, faculty, and staff are invited to the Library Tech Expo, hosted by the InfoCommons @ West, which will take place on Wednesday, August 27, from 10-2 in the InfoCommons @ West (3rd floor of LW).  We will be showcasing various tech trends offered by our libraries, including Bioactive (a library video game), InfoZombies and other library YouTube videos, RefWorks, Ask-a-Librarian, and much more!  We will also be offering Guitar Hero during this time for students to play while they view our new tech trends.  Snacks will be provided.Read More →

By:
On:
In: conference, design, games, Library, presentations, visualization

On Monday morning, Val Davis (from the University of Florida Marston Science Library) and I presented on “Bioactive: A Library Game” (currently online here) that several UF librarians made as an alternative to the standard 40 minute library intro tutorial to increase student engagement with the actual work of learning about using library resources. Bioactive was originally designed in Inform and it’s now moved to a web quest design, which is an even greater simplificiation from the earlier text-based Inform format. The simplicity of the design is for sustainability and ease of maintenance, but it’s more importantly used to ensure that the interface doesn’t getRead More →

By:
On:
In: cfp, games

The second annual ALA TechSource Gaming, Learning, and Libraries Symposium will take place on November 2-4, 2008, in Oak Brook, IL (a western suburb of Chicago). The website has preliminary information about registration, the location, keynote speakers, and the Call for Presenters. The call is for all libraries doing innovative work with gaming and games studies in relation to libraries. The deadline is June 15, 2008, and they’ll respond by July 1–this sounds like a great conference, with an upcoming deadline, so don’t miss it!Read More →

By:
On:
In: Collection Items, Digital Library, games, geocaching, objects, play

Augment or alternative reality games combine the digital and the physical to create innovative and interactive games. Notable examples could include geocaching games, and games where players decode information on websites to find information on other websites, call or email the “decrypted” phone numbers or email addresses, or any one of many other activities based on the information learned from the digital site. The real play of ARGs comes through in the back-and-forth from digital to non-digital and in the gaming communities these types of games create. While I’m familiar with ARGs from game studies, it seems like some library and archival materials almost invokeRead More →

By:
On:
In: Digital Library, games, Library, play

UF’s Libraries are testing different methods and uses of the library-buildings as third spaces (the not home and not work, where you go for social time and a break from the confines of home&work). This Thursday we’re testing Guitar Hero in Library West (third floor from 12-2pm). We’ve also set up a game section of our website for events like this and for game-like approaches to traditional library services. It’s fun for us to hone our skills and develop new ones through connecting games and the library, and games are an easy way to break traditional assumptions on what should and should not be inRead More →

By:
On:
In: Collection Items, Digital Library, games, Library

Looking for a few more Monopoly game images led me to vast railroad images, so the archives I’ve seen might be better for a railroad style game first or alongside a Monopoly style game. These are just some of the great Florida railroad images. A railroad game based on Florida would have so many possibilities because of the abundance of archival materials, so the question would be how to structure it. Most railroad games are strategy, building different railroads to make money or to defeat rival businesses. To really use the historical materials, a railroad game set in Florida would need to follow the history,Read More →

By:
On:
In: Collection Items, Digital Library, games, Library

Monopoly is a great game for gaming history and for game studies because of its history as the Landlord’s Game which protested ultra-capitalism and because of its structure–a simple theme that changes in appearance with fairly standard rules, but also house rules (often related to landing on Free Parking). An interesting project would be to try and reconstruct a typical Monopoly game using historical objects. The image with this post could be a great starting point for a new Florida Monopoly based on historical Florida images. The game could be a simple re-skinning. Computer skins refer to the interface or object appearance, so Firefox canRead More →