It won’t come as a surprise that libraries are getting into gaming, whether to support game studies by making games available as they do books, or using games to teach information literacy. I came across na nice conference video report by Tom Peters of the American Libraries Association (ALA) TechSource Gaming, Learning, and Libraries Symposium in 2007. I like how the video report is edited. It is a bit short of content, but it shows the atmosphere and people.
I’m less convinced by games to teach library and information skills. Here are some I’ve found:
Quarantined: Axl Wise and the Information Outbreak is from Arizona State and lets you play a student, Axl, who works for the student newspaper and who has to figure out why the university is quarantined. It seems rather a lot of irrelevant puzzles for a little bit of simulating searching for information, but could be fun enough.
I’ll Get It and Within Range are two games from Carnegie Mellon, neither of which are much fun, but that may not be the point.
I’ve been talking with Kevin Kee at Brock about the logic of serious games or educational games. I’m tempted to say that games can’t by definition be both playful and serious. I gave a paper to that effect at Playing the Gallery, but Kevin is convincing me that games are sophisticated enough a phenomenon that there can be all sorts of planned learning. I think the National Film Board The Cyber-Terrorism Crisis site (which Kevin was involved in) might be a good example of a playful web site for learning, though parts of it are no longer working. I’m certainly convinced that designing games can be serious work through which learning happens. I also accept that there are things one learns through playing like “problem solving”. I just find games created to teach certain skills, like how to file books, are neither games nor particularly good at teaching.
Stay tuned, Kevin and I are writing a dialogue where I will get to be a curmudgeon on this issue.