I just got back from the 2009 OLNW conference. I love this event. The people and content are always strong and the focus on technology in libraries makes it a very focused single-day event. This time, I did not present on games and learning in libraries and it was a nice change of pace. My colleague Lorena and I gave a little talk on teaching Zotero (a citation manager plugin for FireFox). I enjoyed our talk and working with Lorena (of course!). I recommend OLNW for any librarian who has a bit of the geek in their personality.
Anne-Marie & Rachel gave an interesting and personal talk about how Twitter & other social tech are influencing civic engagement. The conversation was interesting and engaging, plus I think the metaphors really worked. Next, I attended Anna Johnson's 2, 4, 6, GREAT: Handouts they'll appreciate. If it hadn't been Anna, I don't think the presentation title would have lured me in the door. That would have been a HUGE mistake. This was the high point of the conference content-wise. Anna combined Edward Tufte's printed handout design methodologies with a ready-made workflow for a library's instruction program. Chapeau, Anna, Chapeau. Next I attended a nice little bit on a collaboration at Clark College. Clark is our friendly neighbor and parter in educating Clark County students. I was a bit pre-occupied with my upcoming session, so what I really took away from this one is that I'm jealous of librarians who have faculty hungry for partnerships. The last event of the one-day conference was my presentation on Zotero w/ Lorena O'English. I'm pleased with how it went. I did forget to use my favorite metaphor and neglected to say "jiggery-pokery" but it did go fairly smoothly.
This is an insanely stessful and busy time for me at work. I've got my third-year review (part of the tenure process) pending and I'm presening three times in six weeks. This means that my gaming has been strickly limited to playing LOTRO w/ N. and mostly with mundane MMORPG tasks such as collecting resources and grinding my crafting skills higher. There is hope for some new blog content coming up, however. First, I have an idea to write about Alasdair MacIntyre's virtue theory of ethics in relation to games. He uses chess to explain how virtue theory works, and I think most gamers would recognize what he's talking about, even though he uses a different vocabulary. We often hear of politicians or business leaders "gaming the system" or following the letter of the rules to achieve ends that are outside the spirit of the rules. Gamers have a word for that, we call it an "exploit", and in a good game it quickly leads to the exploit in question being "nerfed" or weakened to balance game-play. That is a conversation I'd like to explore further.
Also, Henry Jenkins mentioned a fork in game studies academics. He classifies us as either ludologists or finding a game's central meaning in game-play mechanics or narratologists who find meaning in the story being unfolded/invented by the player(s). You'll find this kind conversation every day on gaming blogs, but I find the application of labels to the taxonomy of gamers to be interesting.
Finally, I started playing Tomb Raider: Underworld this weekend. I bought the game a while ago on Steam, mainly because I'd never played a Lara Croft game and J.P. Gee has interesting things to say about some of the series. I'm really enjoying it, but I'm not sure how far I'll go. I'm using an Xbox 360 controller and finding the control scheme and third-person viewpoint to be very different from the keyboard and mouse WASD control I'm used to. Still, it seems new and fresh to me and I'm sure I'll have things I want to say about it after I play a bit further into the story.