tl-dr

We here at tl-dr are pretty relaxed about what types of games we talk about. It’s more about the experience and the ways information and games interact (which gives us a wide variety of things to talk about, which is nice). I talk quite a bit about the hardcore gamer side of things, Diane does as well, with a lot more library/information science thrown in, Erik rounds it out with some RP and game design; and then we have some great guest authors like Scott who write about that strange concept known as gamification.

I bring this all up because today I want to try and tie them all together somewhat. I want to bring all of those topics under the same roof and show that they all matter to every population of gamers, librarians, gamificationers (It’s a word… I swear!), and even a little to the nudists…ok maybe not, that’s more Erik’s thing.

The Hardcore Gamers and the Librarians

A bit of a cheesy example, but the Library of Congress is actively collecting video games (as well as the Smithsonian), but the interesting thing to note about that is they are trying to  preserve these games for posterity. They have a pretty rigid collection policy, but the preservation of games is a pretty big deal.

I’m an Archivist by trade (among other things), and collecting old media is pretty difficult. Just think of this example:

Do you want to play those old Atari games that were awesome? Others probably do too!

…too bad almost no one has an Atari anymore.

Emulators you say? Not quite the same experience as using the original Atari controller, if you ask me.

So, the hardware preservation is just as important as the software. Check out Extra Credits, they had a good episode about this.

Short but sweet: librarians are trying to preserve the history of gamers, so there are more links than you think!

Games, Gamification, and Librarians

Google just came out with a wonderful new game (maybe not so new? New to me), and I think it’ll be pretty popular because everyone loves trivia. The different with this trivia is that you’re allowed to use Google. And compete against your friends.

Here’s where the librarian part comes in: Librarians love to search for stuff, and they love trivia. A generalization, I know, but a pretty true one. Why you ask?

Before Google (and during Google, and after Google), Librarians will be the ones that can find the information for you. Sure, everyone can find stuff on Google, but a good research librarian will find it faster, and will be able to comb the deep pockets of the Internet that Google can’t touch. Try it sometime, go to a public library and test their skills.

Which brings me to gamification.

Currently in library/information school (yes, librarians have to have a Master’s Degree), the art of searching is taught by understanding the systems and resources and then practicing it a bunch. Why not add a gamification layer to that? Like…perhaps…this Google game? My reference class would have been SO MUCH BETTER if we would have used this game instead of the assignments we did. We could have all done it as a class. Oh man, it would have been AWESOME!

I highly recommend any professor or student who reads this to try using this game in a LIS class; the students will love it more than you will imagine (and you probably will too!). Competing against a professor always makes it more fun.

tl-dr

Librarians are taking care of games, because they like games too. If you don’t believe that, try playing this game against one and see how you do!

Ding! You’ve Leveled Up! Please see your local librarian for training. Or an ass whooping at A Google A Day. 

Welcome to (the aftermath of) CAIS/ACSI 2012!

The Canadian Association for Information Science/L’Association canadienne des sciences de l’information held its annual conference at Wilfrid Laurier University as part of Canada’s yearly Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences on May 31-June 2. I wanted to write a post about it because there was exciting game research reports goin’ on – including a study of MMO gamers that I did with Caroline Whippey!

Wilfrid Laurier University is in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Most people don’t know that Waterloo is home to two universities as well as Research in Motion, makers of the Blackberry. In case you were curious, here’s what RIM’s headquarters looks like from the car, in the rain, across the intersection:

I stayed in Bricker Residence Hall on the Laurier campus, in a tiny room with a crappy bed that reminded my back that it’s not 18 years old anymore:

All in all, it was a very nice conference, if exhausting. Based on a flattering nomination from the president, I was elected vice president/president-elect of the organization! Despite my apparent popularity, I celebrated my undeniable introversion by spending Friday evening alone, except for a hilarious discussion I had with a group of guys in the mall’s music store about whether minds are magical. (Since my main in WoW is a mage, I obviously argued yes.)

Speaking of WoW – on to games research!

Other people’s games research at CAIS

There were three posters about games at CAIS. While I’d love to see more in future years, I was glad we had this much representation.

1. Caroline Whippey and Sarah Camm had a poster exploring what we use text for in video games. This question is interesting to me because I’m interested in the exact opposite: the stuff that isn’t text in video games. But in the end, we need the text, the graphics, the sounds, the music… all of it creates an immersive experience that feeds our overactive gamer brains and creates the non-linear spaces that I blogged about a few weeks ago. If we didn’t have 2000 types of inc media in our games, we’d feel bored and unstimulated, and we’d log to watch old Monty Python skits or something.

2. Andy Keenan, a PhD student in information science at the University of Toronto, presented his plans to do research on the effectiveness of gamification techniques outside of games. He wants to see whether incorporating things like points and badges into heating/cooling systems will make people conserve energy. I think we gamify our lives all the time… for example, if you promise yourself an hour in game after you finish your work for the day, isn’t that gamification?

3. Matthew Bouchard, also a PhD student in information science at the University of Toronto, is studying the concept of affordances in video game design. He’s using some of the simpler MMOs that you can play on your phone/do not use intense graphics as a case study in how game elements can be presented more simply. As someone with an extensive background in usability consulting and teaching, this is a topic I could rant about for hours. How does a new WoW player know that a yellow exclamation mark over an NPC’s head means you have to pick up a quest from them? If you’re new to a class, how does the tiny icon on your action bar remind you of what each ability does? Fascinating stuff.

I wish all three of these projects the best of luck.

My research at CAIS

Well, it’s not exclusively my research; it also belongs to Caroline, who worked with me as a research assistant this spring to complete the study. It’s part of my line of research into understanding what types of online resources would be best to help people access mental health information and support. You can listen to our presentation, and follow along with the slides, using the embedded items below. In case you want to tell us apart: Caroline spoke first, and I spoke second.

Play Part 1
Play Part 2
Play Part 3
Play Part 4
Play Part 5
Play Part 6

This presentation was an awesome, thought-provoking experience. Caroline wore a Horde t-shirt and I wore an Epic Purple Shirt; it was the first time I’ve ever worn a t-shirt for a professional presentation. At this conference, you are given 30 minutes for your talk, but you’re supposed to present for 20 minutes and leave 10 minutes for questions. I think we talked for 28 minutes and left 2 minutes for questions… but that was my fault.

I found that as I discussed the context and the results, I felt a need to provide extensive explanation. MMO gaming is such a specific context, and so foreign to the uninitiated. How do you tell a group of people that study participants enjoy a wide range of activities in game: from PvP, to crafting, to questing, to RP; when they don’t know what any of it means? This leads to the one question I was able to take at the end of the talk: they wondered if we are pushing a political agenda by studying gamers when we are gamers ourselves. You can hear my response to her question on the recording in Part 6 above, but essentially I said that (1) you have to at least understand gamers, if not BE a gamer, to study us/them effectively and (2) all of our results are 100% supported by responses from our interview participants. Can you imagine if a non-gamer tried to study gamers? We wouldn’t want to share anything, because they wouldn’t understand what we said, and we would feel like we were being studied under a microscope (or at least I would feel that way).

Despite the bewildered look on many audience members’ faces, I received many compliments on the talk throughout the conference. Andy and Matt (mentioned above) were, of course, completely on board with the work. I don’t expect that I’ll ever be able to convert every academic I meet into a gamer with my research, but I do hope that they will learn that games is a rich area for research in many fields.

Oh, and gamers are not violent, unemployed misfits. We’re quite the opposite, actually.

tl-dr

Fun, education, and games research were to be had at CAIS 2012… and I’m now the veep!

Ding! You’ve leveled up! Please see your local librarian for training.

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I’ve talked before about the negative side of video games: addiction and violence. I want to lighten it up a bit and talk about why video games are great and amazing. (Spoiler alert: yeah, they really can be good for ya)

I’m going to start this off with a link to an article from Cracked, and give a short list of the cool things that have come out of video games. They are all over the board, and all really cool. I’ll just leave them as a list, and you can read the details over there.

6) Multiple lives have been saved through community and friendships built on the internet.

5) A guy saved a life with his FPS Medic Training. (How cool is that?!)

4) A kid somehow fended off a moose thanks to World of Warcraft. (He must have been a Druid)

3) A web browser game helps explore the universe.

2) Video games help stroke victims recover.

1) Video games are creating a race of master surgeons. (That’s right. You better start screening your surgeon to see what his/her genre of preference is)

What other cool things have been done? I’m glad you asked.

In sports, football in this case, games are being used in non-impact, non-exercise training sessions to improve the mental agility of the athletes, which then improves their physical agility because of the added response time. I’d love to see this take off more; it has applications all over the place in sports, beyond just mental agility training. Take it as far as strategy and tactics for actual play situations, or dealing with pressure during games, and there could be a powerful training tool there. (I like to think that playing Mario Tennis on the N64 helped me out in my days of playing college tennis)

Good news for all you FPS fans out there! Playing FPS’s can help improve your eyesight.  So make sure you take two video games and call me in the morning. 

ur brain. make it better.

It’s a good thing that the Moose hero kid plays World of Warcraft, because he’s going to have an easier time of it when he’s older. It actually helps with improved focus and spatial recognition.

What about for mental illnesses like PTSD? Video games have you covered there too.

Relaxation time!

While video games may not help you get in shape, they are a great way to relieve stress. Both by playing them, and by watching others play. (Like this guy!)

tl-dr

Video games are great for living a happy life. And they get you all the girls (and guys too)!

Ding! You’ve leveled up! Please see your local librarian for training.

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Todd has worked in the games industry for quite a long time, starting as a Beta Tester waaay back in the olden days of 1996. He then moved on to Silicon Knights where he was a Designer and a Lead Designer working on projects such as Eternal Darkness, Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes, and early production of Too Human, and has also been a Senior Producer on various projects for the Nintendo Wii and DS platforms. Currently he is playing Black Sabbath songs backwards to see if any of them make him go “light side” in Star Wars: The Old Republic and so far … no, none of them have.

I can’t count the number of times someone, in a social situation, has made that comment to me when I would tell them make I make games for a living. Yes, making video games can be fun, but it is also a business … BIG business. It’s not all fun and games when you are working in an industry that generates $1.7 Billion in Canada and $25 billion in the U.S. . That’s a lot of money, so you can imagine why game companies can be fun to work at, but also take things very seriously.

Other than playing the game you are working on, there are many other tasks that are required to get the game from concept to completion … and I don’t mean fragging your co-workers (Although that can be fun at times). One important task that is required is research. Regardless of whether you are doing a small mobile game or a major AAA console game, you still have to do some degree of research.

TARGET AUDIENCE

One of the initial things that need to be researched is to determine who your target audience is. Often you are creating a client’s vision of the game instead of what you want to make, so your idea of beheading zombies might not be appropriate if the client’s target audience is 6-12 year olds.

Research into your target audience is as simple as looking at competitive products such as reviews, trailers, and gameplay footage. The best way is to actually play through some of the competitive products on the market that are in the same age group. Bet you never thought all that time becoming a champion Halo player would have you end up playing Barbie’s next adventure and Mickey’s clubhouse, did you?  Playing games from competing developers is the best form of research for your current project.

REALISM

Now you are ready to research the realism of your project. Whether you plan a cartoonish or ultra realistic look, you still need to research the overall art direction of the game and create a series of concepts that define the look that best fits the feel and time period you want to achieve. A cartoony game such as “Castle Crashers” still shows time period accuracy where the knights have cylindrical helmets and accurate weapons (e.g. claymore, lance). Yes, the game has weapons that are more humourous such as an ‘apple peeler’ weapon, but this still fits into the whimsical overall feel of the game. A game like this doesn’t get into minute details, so research for this is as simple as going to the library to look through historical books or looking up information on the internet.

When ultra realistic games are researched, there is much more attention to detail. Games like Call of Duty and Assassin’s Creed had an enormous amount of research done to ensure the accuracy in the time period. The “Assassin’s Creed” series has been researched in the areas of fashion, architecture, technology, and social/political/religious contexts. When Ubisoft was making the game they actually sent people to Rome to do more intricate research into the layout of the city, and they also had an Historian working with them to go over historical accuracy. What you see in the game is what Rome was like in that time period. Of course, the developers take some liberties in order to generate interest in the game and to accommodate gameplay elements.

These are examples of the architectural research that was done for “Assassin’s Creed II”.

Left: in-game image … Right: actual building

Games in the “Call of Duty” series required research into World War 2 technology, military uniforms, weapons, geography, politics, and tactics to ensure its accuracy in depicting events from WWII, such as the D-Day invasion. In their most recent games, the developer met and worked with U.S. Marines to get pictures of current equipment that they use, witnessing equipment (like tanks) in use to see how they operate and react, and going through breaching operations.

In games like these, if players take the time to look around a bit and absorb all this information, they can learn a lot about the Crusades and Renaissance periods and about the happenings during World War events.

GAMEPLAY

No I am not going to forget about gameplay. I believe the best research that can be done for gameplay is to look at the existing research done for each scenario. Often, gameplay ideas come from looking at your environment as well as art assets that have been created. I was working on Eternal Darkness when the design team was brainstorming how to incorporate a chapter page for the player to find. I noticed we had a stained glass window in the level and suggested we incorporate into the stained glass. It would take too much work (at the time) to do that, so we decided to just make the glass breakable and have it hiding behind the window. So simply researching through your own project can produce gameplay ideas. Research other games to get ideas, and don’t stick to the same genre that you are working on. Good designers play various genres because you never know when an idea from one genre can translate into another.

TAKE TIME TO LOOK AROUND

So next time you decide to jump into a game because you have the itch to frag and gib a few newbies, take a few moments to do your own research and have a look around at the environment and in your inventory. All the research that was done to create many of the games we play is accurate to the smallest detail and can really teach a lot about what society was like in that particular time period. Some may be saying, “I want to kill some online players! I don’t want to waste time looking around!” But if you think about the fact that Game Designers can be very devious (I know I was), and they like to hide things around the game that blend in with the environment which are actually useable items you can take advantage of. Think of the look in your opponent’s eyes when you beat them using something they didn’t expect. All because you did a little research.

 tl;dr

Explore, have a look around … you never know what you will discover.

Ding! You’ve Leveled Up! Please see your local librarian for training.

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I know the first thought most people will have reading this: “What does a middle class white male with a Master’s Degree know about racism and diversity?” And you would partially be right; I do not have a lot of experience with racism first hand. I have not had to deal with racism as an integral part of my life. But you would also be wrong, though not in the way you expected.

Peggy McIntosh wrote a great essay talking about white privilege, and it hits very close to home.

I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege. So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is like to have white privilege. I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets which I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks.

It is a very true statement, and applies to the video game community in a heavy way. It was something I never really noticed for a very long time, because I was taught not to recognize white privilege; which in this instance was all the white influence in video games.

Well, I am standing up right now and demanding better diversity within video games.

Not because of a “holier than thou” cause.

Not because I want to see everyone equally represented (even though I do).

Not because it will increase the player base of gamers in the world, and promote inclusivity (but it will).

Not because I want to see people with different skin colors in games (one sided diversity).

 To me, it’s never been about that, at all… It’s not about fairness, it’s not video game affirmative action. It’s about actually pushing our medium to make better games, to tell better stories in our games.

That’s what I’m talking about. Sure, diversity is the right thing to do for many moral reasons, and reasons of equality, but everyone can get behind the idea of better stories within games. There are thousands, if not millions, of narratives and ideas that can still be told in the video game world; let’s open up and find out what those are.

Create a discourse and move the world forward. Unpack your knapsack.

The inherent racism of developers

“But Jacob!” you say, “I don’t see this racism you’re talking about. Games have ideas ranging from historical settings all over the globe, to the completely fantastical!” You would be partially correct. The answer is not a simple one though, so bear with me.

One of the biggest issues I see with racism and diversity within games is not the people within games, but the developers and designers of games. As I stated before, it is not conscious racism, it is not the racism associated with the pre-1960s in the U.S. (Separate But Equal), and the civil right’s protests. It is racism that is blind in one eye, and partially uneducated. I will show you an example of what I am talking about. (quick note: I am not calling developers racist, I am trying to point out a subconscious pattern of thinking that [almost] all of us have)

Can you see it? The inherent racism here is not in the actual design in this picture. I think it is great that designers are looking to other cultures for aesthetic design. The problem is that of all the characters and everything else that exists within this game (in this case, World of Warcraft), there is not one person in the game that is Asian. Even the “Humans” within the game do not have an option to have Asian features. (Pandarens do not count, give me a break) Explain to me how you can import this amount of Asian culture into a game, and ignore the people? Sure, it may seem like a minor thing, but who cares about sitting in the front or back of the bus? I think that this subtle concept is what Peggy McIntosh is talking about with her essay.

Here is the counter argument that is going to come up right away: “But WoW is a fantasy world, and has all kinds of races that aren’t even human!”

Sure, but they are all still inherently white. Or, if not, they are stereotypical of another race or culture in an almost offensive way. “But that is ok! It is just a video game!” Wrong. That just perpetuates the cycle and nothing gets better. Diversity (especially sexual diversity), is very lacking in WoW and other games.

Why are dwarves stereotypical Scotsmen that drink too much, with a Scottish accents and kilts?

Why are trolls stereotypical “Jamaicans”, with their Voo-Doo and accents?

I cannot count the number of times goblins have been called the “Jersey Shore” of WoW, especially with their starting zone.

2 out of those 3 examples are even racist to a sub-culture of white people. It is racism within the white race (which in itself is a generalization).

If you want a quick video to get an idea of what I’m talking about, here’s a great one from the Extra Credits crew at Penny-Arcade. Or go read a book about it (Chapter 4).

Now, I realize that all of the traits of these races are a part of WoW lore, and I am not suggesting they change right now, I am just pointing out the inherent biases that a predominantly white video game community has when trying to create diverse games and story lines. It is actually good game design considering the current gaming demographics; it has been proven that people like to play games that reinforce their self image. The problem is, if we (the gaming community) are only reinforcing the self-image of one select group of people, we are excluding everyone else. If the gaming industry would like to keep growing, that means different gaming populations. Which means diversity. Plus, we want to be inclusive here, amirite?

It is not something that will change overnight, but it needs to be talked about and discussed. It needs to be in the light of day, and it needs to be improved upon. Big props for the community at Guild Wars 2 and their Blog Carnival on Diversity. This is a great step, and more of the communities should be doing things like it.

Here is another example of a game moving the racial dialogue forward. The new Assassin’s Creed game (3) will feature a minority hero; a Native American that belongs/belonged to the Mowhawk/Kanien’kehá:ka. I am sure there will be some things about the portrayal that will be completely accurate and racially sensitive. Other things in the game will probably be on the opposite end of the spectrum. But, they are moving the conversation forward. Taking risks, expanding story possiblities, and reaching out to new audiences. Good for them. I will be buying this game just to see the story and how it works (even though I love AC 1 and only played 10 minutes of AC 2 because of boredom, this story change has guaranteed my purchase of AC3).

Racism within games

This needs to be mentioned briefly, but I will not pay much attention to it because it detracts from my main point; the racism within the community of gaming. The players themselves are the worst offenders, but that is a post for another day because it touches on many larger issues.

(Aside: If you are one of those people that shouts hurtful/racist things online or in games, calling people “f*g” or “n*gger”, I will call your ass out. every. time. That shit is not cool.)

The long tl;dr

As an individual, I may not be the best person to talk about diversity or racism because of my background, but I do not think that should matter. The discussion needs to happen, and I will step up to the plate and take my chances with it, even if I get hit by the pitcher. Everyone else can walk around with their invisible knapsack; I want to unpack mine.

Do you have any other examples that fall inside these lines? What about suggestions to improve diversity within the gaming world?

tl-dr

Everyone in the game industry needs to have the courage to stand up and create diverse games, and to play diverse games.

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I had this conversation with someone a few weeks ago:

Them: “You’re a gamer?”

Me: “Yes.”

Them: “You don’t look like a gamer.”

Me: “Why not?”

Them: “You’re… a woman!”

The misconceptions the world has about gamers amaze me. Gamers are women, or short, or might even look like Penny on The Big Bang Theory. Or… they might even be… old.

According to The Entertainment Software Association, the average age of a gamer is 37, and 29% of Americans over 50 play video games. These elderly gamers in Japan find that arcade games give them something to do at a time when the rest of their lives have settled down; they find games keep their minds active. I have a family member in his 80s who, until recently, played word and puzzle games on his computer. After he moved to a nursing home and lost access to his computer, he reported that residents play Wii bowling together, and how much fun it is!

I believe the evidence that games have health benefits for *all* populations. Researchers have demonstrated that games have the ability to improve cognitive impairment in older people, such as studies about World of Warcraft and Wii music-making.

The benefits of games for older people with cognitive impairment holds particular interest for me because I lost my dad to frontotemporal dementia in 2010. He was only 67, but this type of dementia can hit people of any age; it has even killed people in their 20s. To be clear, it is not the same as Alzheimer’s – a different part of the brain is affected, the symptoms are different, and it is extremely rare. But when I reflect on the last few years of his life, during which his cognitive decline was very fast and very steep, I remember a few anecdotes that demonstrated the power of games on human lives, and I will share two of them here.

We once took my dad to a support group for primary progressive aphasia patients (there are several classifications of his disease because it is difficult to pinpoint before autopsy). Although they had one group for patients and one group for caregivers, we stayed in the patients’ room because they want family to observe first-time attendees. The group leader, a speech therapist, told the patients a story about her weekend fishing trip. After she told the story, she asked the group questions about the story, to see what they could describe about her trip, and she gamified the exercise. My dad answered several questions correctly, and he said more (and more accurate words) than we’d heard him say in a long time! At the end of the session, the speech therapist asked my dad if he enjoyed the meeting. He said, “Yes, I had fun. I really liked the fishing game.” Again, his linguistic ability and recall amazed us – as far as we knew, he couldn’t speak about what had happened an hour ago! He was in a great mood, too. It was wonderful to see him that way at that time.

Another time, we played Jenga with him. Most people would not think of Jenga as a terribly cognitively challenging game. We tried to explain the basic rules to him, but his mind was not in a place that allowed him to follow directions, especially since frontotemporal dementia can mean that patients are not able to process language correctly. You can’t make dementia patients do what you want; you have to go where they go, and work with them as best you can. He made up his own rules as we went along, and even though I think it resulted in us playfully throwing a block or two at each other, we had a wonderful time! He was relaxed and having fun, which was not typical: it was frequently obvious that his condition caused him stress when he was still aware of his surroundings and his difficulties in interacting with them. But, in the end, he said how much fun he had, and we did too. (He wanted to play again, but we ran out of time.)

When my father passed away, I grieved (and continue to grieve) so many things: his young age, the cruelty of his disease, the unspeakable loss that I feel even as I write this. And so many times, my thoughts return to the many hours that I spent gaming with him, from Candy Land and Uno when I was little, to the early computer games we typed in and played together for hours in the early 80s, to Jenga. It’s these good times you want to remember when you lose someone you love… and then you want to start a blog about games to show how games can save the world.

My opinion varies from day to day about whether information science researchers such as myself can save the world, but I remain hopeful. On today’s topic, information science researchers Lynne Howarth and Erica Hendry at the University of Toronto iSchool presented preliminary research about people with semantic dementia at ASIS&T 2011. Here is their abstract; the full paper is available.

Cognitive impairment as it relates to making sense of information, or to communicating information needs, can range from mild disorientation and aphasia, to a complete loss of short-term memory and use of language. While studies on semantic dementia (SD), for example, are evident in a range of health science disciplines, and social work, little research – particularly within the information science discipline – on categorization or classification strategies for sense-making and recall among those with SD or related cognitive impairments, has been identified. This poster reports on a pilot study exploring “sorting” strategies for recalling everyday life experiences, and the effectiveness of multi-modal tokens as context for association and reconstruction of participant scenarios. Preliminary to a larger study, participants diagnosed with early stage Alzheimer/Dementia (AD) responded to questions concerning personal everyday life events. After a delay of several weeks, they were asked to describe what they associated with representative non-verbal tokens or cues. Recollections were compared with original scenarios to determine (1) whether and how the multi-modal cues provided access to the initial recall of the everyday life event, (2) what additional scenarios, if any, were evoked, and (3) what associative links revealed, subsequently, about sense-making and sorting strategies around memory recall. Understanding how these strategies assist with reconstructing episodic and semantic memories could inform the design of life history retrieval systems for reinforcing or recovering intact memory.

In non-researcher terms: organizing non-verbal cues about their lives helped people with dementia remember things about their lives. This could have particular implications for people with my dad’s disease, since language is affected tremendously. But, even on days when his speech was poor, if we played a song he knew, he could sing along with every word, frequently while air guitaring! Non-verbal cues ftw. But how could we gamify these kinds of meaningful research findings to make them even more helpful in managing cognitive impairment? Let’s work toward our limits in this area… if there are any limits.

In my worldview, the power of information science research – and the power of games – know few limits, even though they are not yet fully realized in the world. They can’t bring my dad back, but I want to believe they can help those who unfortunately follow in his footsteps.

tl-dr

Games can help elderly people with a variety of issues, including cognitive decline.

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In the comments section of my previous posting, I went on a tirade about “active” vs. “passive” media. I won’t pontificate on media theorist Marshall McLuhan, but I will consider some possible reasons why this split remains a useful rhetorical tool for people who advocate the virtues of specific formats.

You’ve probably heard advocates of reading describe how television, videogames, and other visual media are passive because they’re “preprocessed” (like fast food and TV dinners). Books, on the other hand, force you to translate text into the five senses, and are therefore more nourishing (like organic vegetables, but only if they’re locally grown and in-season). These are the people who proudly proclaim that they haven’t watched television since 1972.

Steve Johnson’s pro-popular culture book Everything Bad Is Good for You, whose title derives from ironic observations made in the Woody Allen films Annie Hall and Sleeper, makes the opposite claim. Books are actually a passive medium, because the author generally tells you “what to do.” On the other hand, among other things, videogames enable you to create your own story and to develop such abilities as hand-eye coordination.

So, if books are a more active medium than videogames, except when videogames are a more active medium than books, where does that leave us? Definitions of “activity” and “passivity” are little more than moving targets. Nonetheless, advocates of the former can resort to tortuous arguments to “prove” a specific point, while sidestepping the differences in quality that exist within all media. Text materials may have traditionally held a venerated status, but I’m sure we can all think of television shows and videogames that are more substantive than certain books [about sparkly vampires].

[And now, for a tangentially relevant history and theatre lesson, along with bathroom humour, a most excellent clip from Wayne’s World, and musical references that tie together SWTOR and Blazing Saddles…]

For nearly a century, certain interests have hyped up the differences between audience activity and passivity. Some visual artists and playwrights have focused on fostering “active” audience engagement with their works, with the stated goal of bringing about political change. They set their works in opposition to those that, at least for them, aid in maintaining the status quo by ignoring harsh social realities. The latter may range from novels and films about sparkly vampires to “masterworks” of art, all of which are “passively” appreciated or (to get Marxist here) consumed as commodities.

One could trace these concerns at least as far back as World War I (1914-1918). For the first time in history, mechanized death obliterated millions of young men. After the war, economic sanctions imposed on a defeated Germany set the stage for the eventual rise of a Mephistophelian monster who promised to restore that country’s pride. With the so-called civilized world in shambles, as well as the recent victory of “the workers” in formerly Tsarist Russia, the time seemed ripe to question “bourgeois capitalist” values. One such value was the elevated status of “art for art’s sake,” which holds that great art rises above everyday concerns. To counter that ideal, the Dadaists used absurdism to confront viewers with the futility of simply appreciating art in a world gone mad. Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) is one of the most iconic examples.

Of more specific importance to this posting is the emergence of politically-committed theatre in the period after World War I. Although actors and spectators share the same space, they inhabit two separate realms: the auditorium and the stage. Some playwrights, including the German Marxist Bertolt Brecht, attempted to bridge that gap by taking advantage of live theatre’s relative intimacy. Brecht expressed the belief that it had the potential to dissolve the boundary between actors and spectators, and spur collective political activity. Brecht’s plays draw upon a number of techniques that fall under the broad term alienation, designed to remind spectators that they’re only watching a play [that makes an “important point”]. It’s supposed to prevent them from investing too much emotionally in the characters, usually the dregs of society in Brecht, and to pay more attention to the socio-political implications of the play. One of the best-known alienating techniques is “breaking the fourth wall,” where a character directly addresses the audience. Although they don’t possess the same readily-apparent political agenda as Brecht, the Annie Hall clip near the beginning of this posting and at least one scene from Wayne’s World are examples.

Ironically, it’s hard to escape the sense that live political theatre invests some of its potential transformative power in the notion of spectator passivity; it’s supposed to make you active… in a manner that conforms to the intentions of the author. Furthermore, like educational games whose developers forget elements like “fun” and “enjoyment,” politically-committed works can do too well with alienating their audiences through didactic heavy-handedness. Luckily for Brecht, he at least possessed a sardonic wit, and had composer Kurt Weill along to write delightfully dissolute songs for some of his plays. Similar songs include certain tunes heard in the Imperial cantinas of SWTOR, as well as Lili von Shtup’s I’m Tired in Blazing Saddles. (No stranger to Brecht himself, Mel Brooks even mentions the influence.) Weill himself shouldn’t be too obscure, though: for Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, he wrote the oft-covered Mackie Messer.

The ideas of [yet another German] cultural theorist Theodor Adorno, a contemporary of Weill and Brecht, are also relevant to this discussion. However, that would require yet more expository info and aggro. To oversimplify: Most of us are dupes of the culture industry, which dictates our tastes and compels us to fetishize commodities/consumerism. Such a state leads to horrible things like fascism. Resistance is futile. If you want some idea of what Adorno “might” say about videogames, Eric Roe wrote an accessible posting on the topic.

With so much at stake, is it any wonder that serious advocates of active media can have an unshakeable faith in its fine distinction from passive media?

French philosopher Jacques Rancière has questioned the received wisdom surrounding activity and passivity. “The Emancipated Spectator,” based on a talk given by Rancière in 2004, addresses the agenda-based usage of the terms under discussion. His questioning of the distinction, which focuses specifically on actors and spectators in live theatre, are relevant to any medium. As he asks at one point, “What is more interactive, more communitarian, about [live theatre] spectators than a mass of individuals watching the same television show at the same hour?” (Rancière 2011, p. 16)

Questioning the active/passive actor/spectator dichotomy is very relevant here. In fact, what Rancière says about television shows could extend to MMO games. You participate in the action in real time, albeit from a safe distance via your avatar. On the other hand, gamers might have a soft spot for books as well, despite what Johnson says about them. (In fact, I suspect that many of you reading this probably don’t fit the old stereotype of gamer “passivity,” sitting in your parents’ basement, mollified by pressing buttons and staring at shiny screens, eyes glazed over as you mindlessly munch on chips.) As much as I disagree with Johnson’s assessment of books, the antiquated stereotypes about gamers probably necessitated a rhetorical pushback against book worship. At the very least, it can get people to talk more seriously about the positive aspects of videogames, and (even more broadly) to move away from the compulsion to pit one medium against another.

In addition to the elitist aspect of spectator “passivity,” which Rancière deconstructs towards the end of his 2007 paper “The Misadventures of Critical Thought” (Rancière 2011, pp. 25-49), the term remains insufficient for describing how individuals actually engage with specific media on their own terms. Why can’t we just define “activity” as the complex array of emotional, intellectual, and physiological responses we have to all media, whether political or not, and leave passivity out of the equation?

tl-dr

Notions of “active” and “passive” media are driven by individuals with specific agendas. They advocate for specific media that they perceive as active, while discounting the importance of others they identify as passive. Books and videogames are two media that have been juxtaposed against each other in this manner. In reality, they provide complementary modes of cognitive, intellectual, and emotional engagement, which varies among individuals.

Ding! You’ve leveled up! Please see your local librarian for training.

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N.B. – This post is brought to you by an author who is under the influence of prescription pain medication due to a flare-up of her chronic head and neck pain problems.

I had originally planned to supply you with a different post today – the next installment in what will be a series of “girl gamer” posts – but Life inspired me to do otherwise. On Wednesday night, around 9 pm, severe pain struck the right side of my head and neck so badly that I couldn’t turn my head to the right. Most people would respond by taking a shower, going to bed, or doing something else reasonably beneficial.

But what did I do? I went in game. Not just one game, but two. In Star Wars: The Old Republic, my Sith Assassin spent an hour with a Powertech at a similar level, and we helped each other do side quests and class quests. That was exhilarating but exhausting, so then my blood elf in World of Warcraft briefly wandered around a forest – staying on the paths and not killing a single thing – before I finally decided that bed would be a good idea.

My chronic head and neck pain is the result of a combination of many things: a past car accident that almost killed me, pre-tenure stress, too much computer time, and so on. These are all things that indicate (especially when I get in pain) that I should spend less time at the computer, and more time, say, stretching, or developing related muscles to alleviate pain over time, or even just meditating. But, the emotional benefits I feel from fighting aggro (even though I don’t do it very well), participating in guild chat, whispering in-game friends, and controlling my companions just plain won the battle. (Ding!)

I believe that a connection exists between mind, body, and spirit; what is good for one is good for the others. But what drives us to play games? Why does it make us (or, at least, gamers) feel good? We can perhaps link this phenomenon to addiction as well, but I won’t go there today; Jacob covered this recently. I have a (medicated) train of thought on this, which follows.

As humans, we are driven to seek pleasure, because it increases the amount of dopamine in the brain – something our bodies need. This can lead to behaviors or activities that may or may not be healthy in the long run, but if they make us happy or feel good in the short term, we do them.

Speaking from deep within the information science domain, I’ve found results that support this skew toward happiness in my research on emotional information retrieval. My 2010 article in the Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science demonstrated that Flickr pictures tagged with “happy” are posted more often, viewed more often, and commented on more often on Flickr than pictures than are pictures tagged with sad/angry/disgusting/scary. Additionally, a team of us found that we might be able to agree more about what a “happy” piece of music sounds like more easily than sad/angry/disgusting/scary music. I believe that this is related, again, to our universal need for dopamine and related psychological/biological phenomena that our bodies experience, and that the quest (no pun intended) for happiness is a universal goal that exists within us all. Hence, we all play games because it’s fun for us.

We even game outside of games. A perfect example: organizations implement gamification techniques. Gamification applies game-related principles to non-game things, because they work: people like to compete and play! Tying it back to research on emotional information retrieval, my colleagues in Germany have been developing MEMOSE, which uses gamification techniques to encourage users to contribute emotion-based ratings of multimedia objects such as photographs and videos. A particularly striking gamification concept to me is Foursquare, which allows people to “check in” virtually from places on their phones so they can get rewards such as becoming the “Mayor” of a location.

The designers behind serious games, or games that have a purpose other than fun, seem to promote the idea that games meant for people with illnesses can help people that have illnesses. I don’t have the exact citations to give you right now because my medicated brain probably couldn’t search for them successfully, but I have read research that shows how benefits from serious games for people with illnesses tend to derive  from the social interactions that occur in game, not from the games themselves. Why is this true? More research is needed to really figure this out, but I would conjecture that it’s because the games, in all their “seriousness,” aren’t as fun as the social interactions. Also, if the game is not fun, people won’t want to play it… especially if they are in pain!

This is not to say, however, that games can’t have a directly measurable, positive impact on our health that is perhaps separate from the pure escapism factor that I enjoy so much. According to one study, WoW can improve cognitive abilities in older people (this is a particularly important finding to me, since I lost my 67-year-old dad to the rare but devastating frontotemporal dementia in 2010). Video games could make your vision better. They seem to help children with ADHD. And so on. Jacob is planning a post on health and video games, so we can all look forward to that.

But I am starting to ramble. Given my medicated state, I should have something to eat, and then log into the MMO(s) of my choice for some fun and relaxation. Perhaps my guild is running battlegrounds or warzones. I wonder if I’ll get ganked and not even notice – because I’m feeling pretty good right now, and I’ll feel even better after I’ve logged in!

tl-dr

Gamers play games because it makes them feel good, even when playing hurts.

Ding! You’ve leveled up! Please see your local librarian for training. And take your medicine!

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I said it, and it’s true. Technically, that’s what this whole blog is about; making the gaming and library worlds understand that they need each other. Most of the current tl-dr.ca posts have to do with how librarians need to broaden their horizons to accept and understand the world of gaming, but the reverse is just as true.

How can librarians help gaming, you ask?

Research!

Caroline already talked about this quite a bit, so I’ll just link back to her post. (Oh, and the other one).

Librarians are also really good at doing specific types of research. People base their whole profession around being able to find stuff! Why does this matter to gaming? Think of the setting of any video game, especially a war game, and the history involved in it. Librarians live to find out information for stuff like that. (Hence, why Diane and I love this blog. We get to help people AND talk about games. Win.)

Free games!

That got your attention. Many public libraries sponsor playing video games in the library. What’s not to love about that?

Plus, some librarians even make their own games that are fun and educational (and, in this case, free! Sense a pattern here?).

Game Developers!

This area is extremely under-explored. Diane and I touched on it briefly, but that was just the start of falling down the rabbit hole. Having the organizational help that a librarian can provide when creating a game, or working with a game company, would pay for itself in so many ways that my head starts to hurt just thinking about it. I’ll have to start creating a definitive list so that I can write a monster of a post about it in the future.

Reciprocity!

Sorry, big word. My bad. Libraries and gaming can work together and have a symbiotic relationship. What helps one can help the other.

Librarians already help gaming, and vice versa! “Blizzard librarian is officially the new best job ever.” I think there need to be more jobs like this. (They have an art curator too!)

tl;dr

Librarians just want to help. Let us; we’re good at it. We’ve been doing it a long long time.

*and by librarians, I mean anyone that is a librarian, an information scientist, works in a library, or is involved with Library Land or information. We have a hard time labeling ourselves. Which is funny since we’re all about organization.

Ding! You’ve leveled up! Please see your local librarian for training. <—-See, librarians do that too.

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Jason is a PhD student in the Library and Information Science program at the University of Western Ontario, with an interest in critiquing the inadequacies of genre as the primary way of categorizing music (a topic underlying his blog Geheimnisvolle Musik). He would describe himself as a casual gamer, with fond memories of playing console games on various systems in the 1980s. Jason has also enjoyed strategy video games like SimCity and Age of Empires. Under the influence of friends (and his spouse), he has currently re-caught the gaming bug with Star Wars: The Old Republic.

A few years ago, New Yorker music critic Alex Ross wrote a post on his blog about the performance of video game music at orchestra concerts. He included a trailer for a PBS special called Video Games Live, which features an orchestra playing music from video games. Orchestras strapped for cash in already economically dire times have used this strategy to appeal to a broader audience. The concert in the trailer provides an immersive experience, complete with visuals to remind the audience what the music is portraying. Speaking for myself, it dictates too much what one might be better off imagining. After all, the target audience is presumably well-versed in some of the action that occurs in various games, and they might prefer to reflect on personal memories and experiences; the times they defeated a particularly challenging boss, or bonding with comrades in an MMO environment.

As the trailer points out several times, the audience consists of young people who might not have dreamed of going to an orchestra concert. I agree in principle (if not with the execution featured in the clip) with the idea of video game music acting as a way to expand the musical interests of those who might otherwise remain unexposed to “classical music” Note that I say “expand the interests” instead of “improve the tastes,” because the latter is a loaded judgment. (I’ll spare you from a digression into the ideas of cultural theorists like Adorno and Bourdieu.) Also, I place classical music in scare quotes because it is a highly problematic term. As much as I love the music itself, I dislike the term for reasons that would constitute several essays. (Ross’ 2004 essay Listen to This does an exemplary take-down of the term, which he describes as a “tour de force of anti-hype.”)

Video games share a number of similarities with film, such as the accompaniment of music to pre-crafted sequences, as opposed to the stage-based experience of live opera. Furthermore, both forms may incorporate music from any genre; this brings into question the parameters of both film music and video game music. Since much of what appears in the Video Games Live trailer sounds firmly rooted in the “classical” realm, it brings to mind the ideal of the “total art work,” or Gesamtkunstwerk.

And now, for a brief lesson in opera history. To paraphrase Dante, I assure you that it relates to video games…

You’ve probably heard at least a few snippets from operas by German composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883), such as the ever-ubiquitous Bridal Chorus from Lohengrin, as well as Ride of the Valkyries from Die Walküre. Although he did not originate the term Gesamtkunstwerk, Wagner has become most commonly associated with it. He coined it to describe his aesthetic ideal, an “artwork of the future” that incorporates all art forms: design, literature, performance, and practically anything else you can imagine. The Festspielhaus (festival theatre) he had built in Bayreuth for the performance of his own “music dramas” aided in realizing this vision. The hidden orchestra pit was designed to compel audiences to focus on the stage, ensuring that their eyes wouldn’t wander to the musicians. Boston-based Unitarian minister and music critic John Sullivan Dwight referred to the intended effect as a “wall of sound,” a phrase recycled over 80 years later to describe the Wagnerian ambience that record producer Phil Spector wanted to achieve in his pop music recordings. Completed in 1876, the principles of Bayreuth presaged those that gradually emerged in cinema. Audiences have now become accustomed to watching premade “total artworks” in theatres with hidden sources of sound. A compilation of essays in Wagner and Cinema (2010) delves into these connections further.

A century after Wagner launched Bayreuth with his multi-part mythical epic Der Ring des Nibelungen (of which Die Walküre is a part), George Lucas brought home the connections between cinema and the “total artwork” with one of his own. Right down to a Wagner-influenced soundtrack by John Williams.

In some ways, video games are yet another extension of the aesthetic ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk. The difference, of course, is that their audiences actively participate in guiding the action… at least insofar as designers allow them to do so. When George Lucas made the first Star Wars film, the video game experience was limited to things like Pong. Now, video games have become substantially more immersive, making them more and more similar to the theatrical ideas promulgated by Wagner. (By the way, how’s SWTOR going for you?) As more immersive “total artworks” emerge, and if gamers of all ages (a notion the video game concert clip sidesteps) can learn more about the complex genealogy of the music that accompanies the games they play, perhaps the process begun by Wagner will come full circle.

It is up to us whether future immersive gaming environments are as relatively benign as the holodeck, or as malignant as a self-centred and intolerant dystopia. We must remember that Wagnerian aesthetics has its own dark side as well, embodied in the idolization of the composer and his anti-Semitism by one of history’s most infamous monsters. Similar considerations could apply as well to increasingly dynamic information environments, with the promise of immersiveness connecting us with many configurations of various modes of information, or Balkanizing us into highly specialized clusters of users.

Still think that these ideas about the similarities between opera and video games (or, more specifically, Wagner and virtual reality) are a bit “out there?” Others are actually way ahead of me in that respect. An entire book and a related website have already considered them together.

tl;dr

The affinities between immersive virtual environments and opera are more powerful than you could possibly imagine. Wagner established the foundation, embodying both its light and dark sides.

Ding! You’ve leveled up! Please see your local librarian for training.

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