Parent of gamer asks his son to honor the Geneva Conventions – Boing Boing Last week, I had lunch with my friend, Hugh Spencer, a writer and designer of museum and public educational exhibitions. He told me an amazing story about his son and games, and I asked him to write it up for Boing [...]

Mass Effect – Video Games – New York Times In an interview on Friday, Ms. Lawrence said that since the controversy over her remarks erupted she had watched someone play the game for about two and a half hours. “I recognize that I misspoke,” she said. “I really regret saying that, and now that I’ve [...]

LibrarianInBlack: Getting staff to understand libraries and Second Life Kathryn Greenhill has created a fabulous presentation, available on Slideshare, about the role of libraries and librarians in the Second Life online game environment. Greenhill does a great job of explaining what Second Life is and how libraries can choose to fit in to this overall [...]

Gaming in the Library Much is happening in the world of gaming right now, and it’s not just a lot of teenage boys sitting in the basement staring at a screen for hours on end. No, gaming has tremendous potential for libraries to reach out to new users, offer new services, and help complement efforts [...]

Is Second Life a brave new world? – 05 Mar 2007 – IT Week You may recall the early days of the web: geeks ruled and it was full of nonsense. Anyone trying to engage with that world found it strange and intimidating. It contained a lot of good stuff, but it wasn’t easy to [...]

In The Truth About Violent Youth and Video Games – Game Revolution, Duke Ferris did research at the U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Statistics and found that violence among youth has actually dropped since the advent of video games. According to his stats, in 2004 youth homicide was at the lowest levels ever recorded. [...]

Pop Goes the Library: Good News on Gaming Very interesting links.

Boing Boing: Gamers are as good as bilinguals at solving mental problems Gamers are as good as bilinguals at solving mental problems Video gamers may have the same mental agility as bilingual people — an ability to swap out one task and bring another online quickly, which is useful in multitasking and is linked to [...]

COMM 3344-1 :: Games for the web Below, you will find term papers written by undergraduate students in the class “Games for the Web: Ethnography of Massively Multiplayer On-line Games.” These students used a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods to explore sociological issues associated with massively multiplayer virtual worlds. Each student in the [...]

The Shifted Librarian: What I Took Away from the GLS Conference The most obvious, glaring thing is that librarians (in general) have absolutely no clue about what is going on in this area. Academia is only now starting to do more than just study it, but it’s not even on our radar. I’ve noted before [...]