tl-dr

Hello! Today is a repost of the tl-dr inaugural post last year on 12-7. That’s right! One year strong! (I also updated the $$ count in the middle of the post)

Thanks to everyone for reading!

Welcome to the inaugural post for tl;dr, a blog dedicated to bringing together games, gamers, librarians, information scientists, and information about games.

In keeping with the tongue in cheek title of this blog, let’s get right to it shall we?

Child’s Play

To give a brief summary from the Child’s Play Wikipedia entry:

Child’s Play is a charitable organization founded by the authors of the popular computer and video games-based webcomic Penny Arcade that organizes worldwide toy drives to children’s hospitals. Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins founded Child’s Play in 2003 to improve the lives of sick children by donating toys and games to hospitals worldwide. The charity is also seen as a way to refute mainstream media’s perception of gamers as violent and antisocial.^[1] Through Child’s Play, donors have sent over ten million dollars in toys, games and books to children’s hospitals all over the world.

Short and sweet: gamers are people too, and they care. This is coming to be a more mainstream idea because of advocacy from gamers, and studies that have been done, but I think Child’s Play is a hallmark example of how gamers are good people.

Statistics:

Annual totals

• 2003: $250,000
• 2004: $310,000
• 2005: $605,000
• 2006: $1,024,000
• 2007: $1,300,000
• 2008: $1,434,377
• 2009: $1,780,870
• 2010: $2,294,317
• 2011: $3,512,345
• Running Total: $12,510,909

The best part about gamers and the Child’s Play charity, is by their very nature of playing competitive games, gamers are competing against themselves for a new high score every year (read: beating last year’s donation numbers). To add to the sense of contributing and the feeling of being a fellow gamer, check out the xp bar they have on the Child’s Play Homepage.

Why should gamers care about Child’s Play?

Because this is how you (we) are portrayed to the media and the world. Would you rather have them think of gamers as a group of thugs from GTA? or like this?

Why should librarians and information scientists care about Child’s Play?

Did you read my last link? It’s ok, I’ll post it again. That person writing in to Penny Arcade is a Health Sciences librarian. Libraries and librarians are helping the world, but they were also helped by gamers. The new world of the internet and cyberspace is not limited to a web browser; the cutting edge is games.

tl;dr

If you have the spare change, donate it to Child’s Play, it will be doing something great.

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

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. 

Madeline is currently a history and library science student at the University of Maryland, College Park; was formerly a sixth-grade teacher in California, and has always been a proud and nerdy Seattleite/Oregonian.

Portal, the popular FPS/puzzle game that has been the source of too many meme phrases since 2007, has a more serious side than we knew. For teacher-librarians, or anyone else who has ever had to teach anyone anything, Portal is an excellent example of good instruction methods. Nicholas Schiller made this argument in a 2008 Reference Services Review article called “A Portal to Student Learning”, and it’s a very interesting argument for anyone interested in gaming or teaching.

Librarians (especially academic librarians) are teachers, but we are often not trained as teachers. Therefore, when we must design lesson plans and work on lesson goals, it is often hard to get a handle on some of the trickier teaching concepts. Fortunately, Portal is an excellent teacher and can help teacher-librarians understand tricky concepts in a concrete way.

(I’m not going to describe how Portal works because if you haven’t played it, you really should. It costs $10 on Steam, goes on sale twice a year, and might change your life.  Also, if you are interested in the whole idea of video games as teachers, please read James Paul Gee’s What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. It’s fantastic.)

Portal is a good example of two specific teaching practices: scaffolding and assessment.

Scaffolding instruction means to provide plenty of support as students are learning and then remove the support as they begin to master concepts and skills. The first room in Portal is empty except for a cube, a button, and a door, so it’s not too tricky to put those things together and beat the puzzle. Each new room you enter adds a new element- the portals, the portal gun, the sad turrets, the toxic slime. You learn about each element in a structured way and then have to apply in more complicated puzzles. A simple technique you learn for passing from portal to portal gets more complex when you have to chain portals or open new ones while soaring through the air.

Assessment means to test how well students have learned a concept. In Portal, game developers paired assessment with a concept they called “gating”; the doors on the rooms of the puzzles were gates that players could not pass beyond if they had not mastered the concepts of the last puzzle. For me, these two examples from Portal explain the concepts of scaffolding and assessment far more clearly than a technical definition in a teaching textbook. Because I have played Portal, I know how the scaffolding and gating feel.

So how could we apply scaffolding and gating to teaching?

In an information literacy instruction session it can be tempting to try and teach multiple skills at once. For example, we might try and teach advanced research skills using Boolean logic at the same time as we teach the basic interface of the discovery layer. This is probably not a well-scaffolded lesson; it’s not something that Portal would do.

In Portal we would first learn the basics with lots of support and then learn how to apply them.

In an information literacy session we would first learn how to use the interface, then learn how to use it to do serious research.

The same idea works for assessment and gating. The gating concept essentially says that there should be a check after every new lesson is taught. The game assesses how well you know the important skills by not letting you move on until you’ve mastered them. In the previous example, the teacher-librarian could make everyone find a simple item in the discovery layer to prove that they knew how to use the interface before moving on to new skills. This would be Portal-like “gating” in action.

Portal is a popular game partly because it is very good at teaching people how to play it. If you were thrown into the final levels without all the build-up and scaffolding, the game would be confusing, frustrating, and probably only really popular among a niche group of masochists. But because the game slowly introduces each new concept and makes sure you understand it before moving on, you feel successful at each step and more enthusiastic about learning what’s next. As teachers, we should try to give the same experience to our students.

tl-dr

When planning lessons we should always ask “what would Portal do?”

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

In case you didn’t know – and you probably didn’t, unless you’re a librarian who has time to read – Saturday, November 3, is International Gaming Day @ Your Library. An American Library Association-organized event, this is THE day to go to your library and play library-sanctioned games with other patrons. That is, provided that your library is participating. And provided that you knew about it. Chances are, neither condition applies. According to ALA estimates, approximately 20,000 people will be Playing Games @ Their Library at around 1,200 participating libraries worldwide. Will you be one of them?

Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s wonderful that libraries offer these kinds of programs; they promote literacy and community and other positive things. Despite these benefits, not every library is on board with games (no pun intended). When many people hear the word “games” these days, they think about addicted 14-year-old boys sequestered in their parents’ basements to blow up things in front of a console or a PC who don’t quit playing until they are eventually inspired to kill people in real life. Of course, these awful stereotypes are largely unfounded, but they do unfortunately contribute to the reasons why many librarians are hesitant to participate in gaming programs. The odd thing: at the same time, librarians are proponents of reading banned books, and many banned books contain violence. I credit Jacob for unexpectedly pointing this out when he was a guest lecturer in my social media class last year.

Again, the libraries that do participate in gaming programs provide an amazing service. But I also see issues with the most common approaches. In my ideal world, every day is Games Day. I happen to have other plans this weekend that don’t involve games. Many programs focus on catering to teens, but since the average age of a video gamer is… well… closer to my age, and since nursing homes provide Wiis for their residents to get some exercise, we need to be more age-inclusive in our programming. Also, the public or academic library’s function as a community space is not in question here, but why does a library’s gaming program typically only consist of Game Things You Can Only Do If You Are @ Your Library? Let me explain a few of my ideas.

You don’t need games to have a gaming event.

Buying games – or at least buying enough games to have a decent-sized program – is expensive, and libraries are generally experiencing an increase in business with a decrease in funding. (no, I don’t get it either – but don’t ask me, ask @ Your Government). However, if one of our driving forces behind hosting game events is fostering community, then why not have a “gaming cafe” night in which people who play a certain game – or maybe even different games – can just hang out and talk about games? (I’ll grant extra XP to the librarians who decorate the tables with a d20 or a few Magic cards or something).

Metagaming resource provision ftw.

Talking about games, reading about games, trolling online discussion forums about games, collecting RL items that are related to games… Jacob and I call doing these and other things “metagaming.” But if you are new to a game, or even if you’re an experienced player, you need to find resources that can help you improve your playing. Be aware that compiling metagaming resources for gamers will require a certain amount of understanding about the games for which patrons want to metagame. For example, after the WoW MoP expansion, I wanted to find a good PvP spec for my frost mage’s newly reconfigured/epic fail of a talent tree, but it was difficult. If you didn’t understand that, you need to do a little WoW metagaming yourself before you provide metagaming resources to WoW players.

Also, while I’m on this rant, don’t just put up a page @ Your Library’s Website with links to metagaming resources, and expect gamers will find them. Unless it does better in search engine rankings than WoWWiki, they won’t come. Never once in my 30 years of video gaming have I heard a gamer say, “I think I’ll see what the library can tell me about my leveling my frost mage from 85 to 90″ or similar. No. It’s just not in the gamer’s metagaming vantage point. Which brings me to my third idea.

Embed yourself.

Librarians have been playing with this idea for a while now: go where they are rather than waiting for them to come to you. We see this in our attempts to run The Facebook Page @ Your Virtual Social Media-savvy Library, and in academic librarians’ away-from-the-library f2f office hours, for example. Gamers won’t metagame @ Your Library or @ Your Library’s Website as much you would like them to, but the interesting thing is that gamers have a constant need for information. My student Caroline Whippey is exploring this broader issue in her PhD thesis research: information seeking in games. A driving factor behind any game is simple: if you don’t learn, you don’t win. When you learn, you must process information by default. This fact should be taught on Day 1 @ Your Library School, right after the professor gives a stern “no, loving books in and of itself doesn’t properly justify your decision to become a librarian” lecture.

When I say “embed yourself,” I mean ***play the games***! Level a frost mage or a sylvari or something. Do lots of metagaming. Then when your fellow players are ready to metagame, you throw metagames at them. Not literally. Throwing things at patrons is bad service. Then again, metagaming without gaming is also a fail. You see my point.

Yep, this takes time and effort.

Gaming is not a resource-free diversion. Even an encounter with a new board game requires acquiring new knowledge, but we do it because it’s fun. We don’t realize we’re learning, or we don’t think about it that way. If you don’t think there’s learning involved in games, sit down with an FPS on an Xbox 360 for five minutes, or throw yourself into an RBG with somebody else’s character, and let me know if you win. But I already know the answer.

Again, about Saturday… I’m sure Games Day is fun and useful for the librarians and patrons who participate, but I wouldn’t exactly call 20,000/6,000,000,000 people a game-changing revolution. I hope ALA will think more creatively in the future about what gaming means in libraries as subsequent Games Days are planned. If nothing else, let’s think of every day as Games Day, because a day without games is… well, just a day, and we already have 364 of those every year. And it does not necessarily have to be a day @ Your Library for people to learn and have fun – or for librarians to help.

tl-dr

I’ll probably spend International Games Day @ Your Library outside enjoying the last of the fall foliage, but that doesn’t mean (1) I won’t be playing a game and (2) I have all the information and people I need to play that game.

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

This week, all the gamers who aren’t talking about good things like GW2 – or bad things like the latest Zynga “game” that invades my Facebook news feed until I hide it – are talking about the new World of Warcraft expansion, Mists of Pandaria. I knew several days ago that I would have the first post-MoP post (that’s redundant, but it makes sense) on this blog, but I’m not playing it. Why not?

I could easily get on my late-night rant soapbox and talk about the silliness of a freaking panda and proclaim I’ll never sell out to Blizzard’s stupid idea. I’m not playing it because… well… I’m just not playing it right now. I’m flying out to present at the #influence12 conference today, and I knew that if I bought it now, I wouldn’t get all my work done before I left. So I will get it next week. Sorry for the lack of a highly principled soapbox.

I must sheepishly admit, however, that I logged into my boring Cataclysmic WoW tonight so I could at least say hello to my friends. The ones who were starting to level from 85 to 90 told me this unanimously: the scenery in the new areas is amazing, but it’s going to take them a while to level. I don’t remember the exact number, but I think just to level from 85 to 86 is something like 13 million XP, and if you’re doing a quest that’s only worth 120,000 XP, you’re gonna do a lot of quests. Try switching to dungeons or bgs, perhaps? On second thought, why do we bother leveling at all?

We level in WoW because Blizzard keeps making us. They need a way to work in new content to keep us short attention span gamer types interested, so they throw in a new continent, new classes, new races on occasion. According to Scott Nicholson’s book Everyone Plays at the Library, one characteristic of a “game” is that it has goals. Video game creators set goals for us by deciding how many levels we need to go through, how many XP we need at each level, how many things we need to kill before we can get the XP for the quest… game creators give us goals, and we work to achieve them, regardless of whether we get frustrated or bored along the way. When you think about it, the goals are somewhat arbitrary, but we live and die by them in game. (Typically, I die more than I live in game, but I don’t want to lose my gamer street cred, so I won’t talk about that little issue).

But what motivates us to achieve those goals? Reaching level 90 in 12 hours (which some players did, according to the battle.net forums, if you want to believe them) won’t change your life in any real way. You won’t have more money, or more love in your life, or a cleaner apartment… but you will feel like you’ve accomplished something you’re proud of. And, despite the frustration of getting killed by the thing, or the fact that you got in trouble at home because you neglected to clean the bathroom like you promised your spouse you would because you were trying to kill 10 of the things so you could at least get to 86 on your main before the end of the evening… you will have enjoyed the process.

That is what gaming is about. Goals and fun. While not everyone claims to be a gamer, I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like reaching goals or having fun, and that fact could take me on an entirely different tangent. But, back on the leveling issue, I must admit I’m a little frustrated with the MoP level increase. I’ve still got Cataclysm endgame content to play, and I would have been happy with only new endgame content for MoP, and maybe a new battleground and new dungeons, but I guess I’ll be leveling for a while again until I can see what the new endgame content is like. I can’t reach 90 in 12 hours of play, but I don’t want to… the fun would be over too fast!

A closing thought: somebody found this blog the day after MoP’s release by Googling “Wow, pandas suck.” I’m slightly proud of that.

tl-dr

A gamer’s relationship with leveling, and other goal-related gaming activities, is complicated – perhaps even codependent? What do you think?

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

Yesterday, September 12, Ace and I were again interviewed on the fabulous Contains Moderate Peril podcast. This time, the topic was “Are gamers a unique type of customer?” Talking with Brian, Roger, and Ace always equals a great event. I could talk games with them for hours.

Listen to the podcast if you have time, but perhaps the overall points discussed in the podcast could be described as this: the relationship between gamers and the vendors who make our games is perhaps best defined as “complicated.” We buy games and expansion packs weeks or months before we see them, we trash talk games but continue to play them as we threaten to leave them, we tell the vendors what we think without hesitation, and so on.

When we were talking, and in the hours after our interview, I couldn’t stop thinking about library vendors. Before I became a full-time faculty member, I was a systems librarian at an academic library. I was the first point of contact with our integrated library system vendor, and I was very active in their user group.

Additionally, I’ve done library consulting work – mostly conducting usability tests, and training people on how to conduct usability tests – for libraries in different places and different orientations. OPAC and single search interface usability has been (and continues to be) in question for libraries. So, while I’ve never worked for a vendor, I have plenty of experience with library system vendors and their products.

I mention this because the relationships that gamers have with vendors, and the relationships that librarians have with vendors, are unique for different reasons. Us gamers love to complain when our vendors do things we don’t like (the pre-MoP WoW patch is a perfect example; I’m still in mourning over how badly my mage has been nerfed) and we complain when they don’t do things we think we would like. As we discussed in the podcast, we commune around the bitching. Regardless, we continue to play their games. (That said, I did ragequit a battleground recently because my mage kept dying at an unacceptable frequency, and an overpowered druid called me a “retarded mage” as I was struggling to live, but I won’t go there right now.) But, overall, the game vendors use our input much more than vendors in other domains, even though we might think it’s not enough.

Conversely, us librarians don’t expect enough from our vendors. I’ve seen this unfortunate phenomenon manifest itself in so many ways. For example, in the early 2000s, a vendor could say to a library, “Look! It’s all XML!” and the library would think it was the best product ever made because XML was the newest and greatest thing. But once the library purchased the product, the library’s ability to configure and deploy the product was in question, since not all libraries had the resources to do that type of technical work.

Another example: libraries pay maintenance fees to vendors despite the fact that (1) librarians don’t feel comfortable telling vendors what changes they need and (2) vendors don’t necessarily respond well to technical concerns, bugs, or desires for system changes. This is a bit of an oversimplification, but the library system vendor I worked with agreed to implement three (and only three) enhancements per year for each part of the system. Library automation system migration is a time-consuming process; in some smaller libraries, there is a lack of staff who can “talk techie” enough with the vendor to communicate needs and problems effectively. These and other elements make it easy to feel like we’re at the mercy of our vendors.

From a business perspective, you can’t blame the vendors for their position: some development changes are too time-consuming to address from a cost-benefit point of view, and it’s a better use of their time to develop new products and services for us. I have friends who work for library system vendors – I don’t at all believe they represent the Dark Side of Libraries, but I do believe they have their own (understandable) agenda that becomes easy for librarians to forget when we’re feeling passive-aggressive over a glass of wine with colleagues at ALA.

So we have gamers with tremendous amounts of feedback opportunities, and game vendors who are mostly willing to make as many changes as possible because they know that’s what will keep us playing. And we have librarians who feel like their hands are tied when it comes to changing the products that their automation vendors provide. I don’t understand why these different relationships exist. As we said in the podcast, we don’t put much effort into the relationship with the company who made our TV. And chances are that if our TV dies, we’ll just go buy another one because it’s an excuse to buy one equipped with the latest technologies anyway. But we won’t pay for a new TV months in advance with little knowledge of what that TV’s going to do for us (I’m looking at you, gamers) and we won’t keep using a TV that doesn’t do what it needs to do for us without taking some sort of action (I’m looking at you, fellow librarians).

Jacob and I weren’t trying to answer any questions in our podcast, and I’m not trying to answer any questions with this post. However, I hope we can help everyone reflect on how we relate to game vendors, library system vendors, and any other business we support with our money on an ongoing basis. Starbucks (a vendor I support a little too often) guarantees that if we don’t like our coffee, they’ll remake it for free. I’ve taken them up on that once or twice, like when they put sweetener in my drink that I ordered unsweetened. That’s customer service right there! But how is that level of service different from other products?

I’m not happy with the new talent system in WoW but Blizz won’t change it just for me; however, might they change it if all of us nerfed mages and warlocks banned together and requested changes or canceled our subscriptions? We can work on it for sure. They want to continue feeding our addiction.

If enough librarians complained about the OPAC because we think it’s silly to make people omit initial articles in title searches as well as make them type the author’s last name first, would that be addressed? Not likely… unless it’s “all XML,” in which case the library is more than welcome to make the change themselves.

I realize there are likely contradictions in my post, but the complexity of these relationships makes contradictions hard to avoid because you can’t speak in absolutes on this issue… maybe you can’t even use logic. I’m not an economist, but I think I learned in that Economics 101 course they made me take in college that our capitalist society is supposed to work itself out through competition. But with so few vendors making library systems and large-scale video games, perhaps we don’t have as many choices in these areas as we have in who makes our coffee. That said, I hope gamers as well as librarians – two groups that play a large part in defining my own identity – can find ways to make sure that our vendors are giving us what we need, and that vendors are compensated fairly for their efforts. Until then, I’ll be bitching on the battle.net forums. See you there!

tl-dr

Gamers, librarians, and their respective vendors they love to hate… yeah, it’s complicated.

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

Last time, I introduced the concept of BLAP Gamification – gamification that focuses on Badges, Levels, Achievements, and Points.  I also suggested that there were some significant risks with this type of gamification.  When I first started looking at gamification, I was reading the core text on BLAP gamification – Gamification by Design (Zichermann & Cunningham, 2011).  When I read this sentence, it was a full stop for me:

“once you start giving someone a reward, you have to keep her in that reward loop forever” (p. 27).

WHAT, WHAT,  WHAT????!!?!111!!!

It was at this moment that I decided I needed to do something about this.  Up until this point, I had been like many games scholars:

I was sitting in the balcony, making fun of the gamification term, not really paying much attention to it.  I knew there were a lot of “experts” who were selling their BLAP gamification systems, but didn’t worry about it.

But when I hit this little nugget, it caused me to flip out.   If you look at the marketing material of gamification experts,  you do not see this warning.   It’s just slipped into the book – “oh yeah, once you start giving rewards, you can’t ever stop.”  If the goal of using gamification is to raise sales on a specific product or teach a skill that then has real-world benefit, then the short-term reward-based gamification is fine.  If, however, the goal is to create long-term change, then BLAP gamification can create problems for those trying to help.

Long-term addiction is great for a gamification consultant, but potentially devastating for the users of a system (and the unwitting sponsor who is paying for the system to be created.)

This, for me, was a life-changing moment.  It was the point where I decided I needed to figure out what was behind this statement, and then to see if I could develop a better way.  I was quite concerned about schools, libraries, museums, and other places of learning joining in on the BLAP gamification movement not being aware that by doing so, they were signing up for life.

Internal Motivation and External Rewards

As I started to do research into why this statement was made, I came across Self-Determination Theory (SDT) by Deci & Ryan. They have spent decades understanding motivation and gathering data from hundreds of studies in the educational domain to look for patterns to support their theory.  This theory is about why someone chooses to do something without an external influence, and is centered on the importance of three needs for internally motivated growth:

- Autonomy: Individuals need to have control over their own choices

- Competence: Individuals need to feel like they are skilled

- Relatedness: Individuals need to feel that they are connected to other people and the world.

There is a sub-theory of SDT that is relevant called Organismic Integration Theory, which is focused on the effect that extrinsic motivations (such as rewards) have on someone.   If someone does an activity because of a reward, then that person internalizes aspects of the reward along with that activity.   If that person sees the reward as used in a controlling manner, then that sense of control is connected to the internal motivation to do that activity.  Since we don’t like someone else controlling our behavior, some of that internal motivation is replaced with negative feelings of control.

What this means is that:

• if you get a reward for doing an activity, and
• if you perceive that reward as being used to control your behavior, then
• you are less likely to do that activity without the reward.

(as an aside, I am simplifying all of these theories for the discussion here – to learn more, start with the SDT website at http://www.psych.rochester.edu/SDT/)

Returning to BLAP gamification, this means that if the gamification system is implemented so that the participant perceives it is there to control behavior, then if the system is taken away, the individual will have less internal motivation than before the gamification!

As a real-world example, consider a summer reading program in a library where children are given rewards at different levels of reading books.  This is BLAP gamification, where the points are accrued by reading books and the levels correspond to different prizes. In the short term, this produces results – children check out more books when rewards are available.

In the long term, however, it can cause problems.  If the children perceive the use of rewards as controlling their behavior, then this reduces their internal motivation to read.  Those with high internal motivations to read will still read, but those with low internal motivations to read will then be less motivated to read without the rewards.

If we look at the use of public libraries by teenagers after they age out of summer reading programs, we see that it is, in general, not good.  Teens are one of the hardest groups to bring into the library; in fact, this is where many gaming programs in libraries are focused.   If the summer reading program was instilling a love of reading in these teens (as is a goal), then we wouldn’t see this behavior.  Now, correlation is not causation, so there is no proof of this connection, but it is certainly a possibility.

Where this raises a great concern for me is when I see gamification programs for libraries, where the proposal is to offer rewards for every aspect of using the library.  Just as with summer reading, the short term rewards will be there – library use will go up if patrons get rewards for coming to the library and checking out materials.  But what long term damage will be caused?   How will this change the patron’s interest in visiting a library that does not have the reward structure?  What will happen if the gamification system is taken away?

This short-term benefit and long-term damage is of serious concern to me.  Organizations see the short-term jump in engagement, so are eager to join in on BLAP gamification.   It is easy to implement, so more and more groups are adding points, levels, badges, and achievements to their activities.  But what will be the long-term costs of these systems?

And is there another way?

In my next column, I will talk about another method of gamification designed to increase internal motivation and avoid reliance upon rewards – meaningful gamification. 

(By the way, if you would like to panic more about the damage reward-based systems have done to our society, take a look at Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn.  This book is chock full of examples of how rewards make people less effective and strategies on how to avoid rewards when working with people.)

tl-dr

Using rewards to control behavior is how we treat animals.  Humans deserve better.

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

Since when did librarians start liking the idea of censoring things? The last I heard, librarians were some of the most anti-censorship people you could meet. Don’t believe me? Read the first part of the Library Bill of Rights. (Emphasis mine)

The American Library Association affirms that all libraries are forums for information and ideas, and that the following basic policies should guide their services.

I. Books and other library resources should be provided for the interest, information, and enlightenment of all people of the community the library serves. Materials should not be excluded because of the origin, background, or views of those contributing to their creation.

II. Libraries should provide materials and information presenting all points of view on current and historical issues. Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.

III. Libraries should challenge censorship in the fulfillment of their responsibility to provide information and enlightenment.

IV. Libraries should cooperate with all persons and groups concerned with resisting abridgment of free expression and free access to ideas.

So why is it when the topic of video games comes up everyone starts to think about censoring violence to protect kids? It makes me angry. I think it has to do with how video games are portrayed by the media.

This comes to mind, because, whenever I give a talk about video games and libraries, the inevitable question I get is: “Can you recommend any non-violent video games I can use in my library?” Since when did libraries start censoring any type of content in the library based on violence?

If someone came into the library looking to read the Hunger Games (which is extremely violent btw. The movie is PG-13), or even watch the movie (once it is out of theaters), librarians would be the tripping over themselves to help. “Do you want the first book, second book, third book, the companion guide, or a parody of the book?”

But I bet if someone came in asking for a video game of the Hunger Games, the first thought would be “is this appropriate for the library? What if it’s too violent?” I’ve heard the same idea from many many people — in the library world, and outside the library world. The idea that video games are damaging is stunting the professionalism and growth of the library world (and everyone else for that matter).

Violence is not the issue. I just took 5 minutes to search WorldCat, and I came up with 853 results for Braveheart and 991 results for Saving Private Ryan, both extremely violent and graphic movies about war that are part of the collections of libraries in the U.S.

So… it’s ok to have extremely violent movies and books in the library, but video games are where we draw the line? Why? I do not even understand.

I have some theories about it though.

Theory 1: Because of how interactive video games are.

There’s a thought that video games can be “training tools” for certain skills (good or bad). The problem is, a lot of video games are based on war or violence, so the knee-jerk reaction to video games existing anywhere in the public is that they are damaging to children or society, because of said violence.

Well, both of those knee jerk reactions are wrong, and people need to get over it.

A great quote to get to the gist of what I’m talking about: “Lots of people who play ‘FarmVille’ don’t actually farm.”

The average age of people who play video games is over the age of 30. Video games have a rating system that is the same as, if not better than, the one used for movies. And books don’t even have warning labels or ratings!

I’ll be completely honest with you. Growing up playing video games, watching movies, and reading voraciously, the only time that I have been completely sickened by something being too graphic and too violent is when I read a first hand account of the Battle of Verdun in a history class. I was queasy and nauseated by what I read. I don’t get that way when I play violent video games, because there’s a difference in understanding a simulation (e.g. TV, movies, video game), and something that happened in real life. But even if I did, kids still would (should) not be playing them (Hi there ESRB rating system!).

Plus, what do libraries care about that stuff anyway? If someone tries to ban a book from the library, or something from entering the library’s collection, there’s a whole process to stop that! Banned Books Week exists for a reason people! The problem is, it shouldn’t be just books. Libraries and librarians don’t just care about books. You remember the ALA Bill of rights linked up above? There’s a reason I bolded ”other library resources” in that quote. Libraries and librarians should be protecting content regardless of format.

Video games are a legitimate medium, they are art, and they need to be treated as such.

Theory 2: Because people do not understand video games 

Be honest. If I came into the library and said I wanted to sit at a computer and play Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, you would look at me like I was crazy. I bet librarians would look at me the same way. But if I asked for a book or a movie on warfare? Would not bat an eyelash. They both have the same type of violence, though, so why the difference in opinion?

What’s the difference? A comfort and understanding of the medium. I think part of that has to do with the average age of many librarians. I’m not being ageist here, I have known (and do know) many people of all ages that play video games and love them. (Most gamers are almost 40 anyway). I just think that the concept of many hardcore video games is much more familiar to a younger generation because they grew up with them. They are a part of that culture. It is the same argument about the “Internet Generation” and how younger people today think and work in a completely different way than previous generations.

That is what this blog (and this post) is trying to solve. Diane and I are using this platform to bring information both to the LIS community, and to the gaming community, so that there can be more understanding and interaction between them. Let go of preconceived notions about video games and allow them into the library. The community that can be built around them would astonish even me, I’m sure.

So let’s take a note from the Library Loon, and Stop the Silencing.

Because remember:

tl-dr

Do not judge video games because they are a new and different medium. Allow them to be part of the information culture so that they can flourish in all environments.

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

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

Hi there!

I’m Scott Nicholson, and I’m going to be offering my voice here over a series of posts. I thought I would let you know a little more about me and my work with games in libraries.

I’m currently an associate professor at Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies, where I’ve been since 2001.  Before that time, I was an academic reference librarian; so, much of my time at Syracuse has been spent teaching courses for future librarians.  I’ve also been a gamer for over 30 years and have played all forms of games.  I was one of the co-authors of the first edition of Cthulhu Live and the designer of the published board game Tulipmania 1637.  From 2005 to 2010, I created 70 videos about modern board games through my series, Board Games with Scott and am still making short board game videos during my play of a game called InPlay video reviews.  I’m also a regular voice on the On Board Games podcast.

In 2007, I started doing research about gaming in libraries.  I started with some large-scale surveys to understand how libraries were using games to bring people in to the library, get them engaged with each other, and break down boundaries between demographic groups and between library staff and patrons.   The results of this survey was published in a Library Review article called  Go Back to Start: Gathering Baseline Data about Gaming in Libraries.  Working on this led me to create workshops for librarians wanting to use games, which in turn, led to my first book, Everyone Plays at the Library  and a number of columns in library publications.

The Gaming Experience

At the heart of this research, and how I think about games, is the concept of the Gaming Experience.  Many people who think about games treat them like independent entities, like literature or film.  I argue that in order to consider a game, you also have to consider the player and the context in which the game is played.  Different people in different contexts will enjoy different games.  A game played in a different context or with different players will be a different game experience.

A game like Tic-Tac-Toe played between two 35-year olds who have played the game many times is a very different game experience than Tic-Tac-Toe played between a 35-years old and his 3-year old nephew. Playing Diablo 3 on a fast computer with a big screen in a room with 3 other people, all playing together, is a different experience than playing on a Mac laptop that is several decades old on a slow Internet connection.

This concept of the gaming experience is critical for anyone who facilitates games, as they will be creating this experience.  This is where the concept is important for libraries, schools, community centers, or anywhere that someone is using games to create an experience.  Too many times, I have seen gaming programs struggle because one of the organizers is pushing a game that he or she enjoys playing instead of facilitating a game experience for those in attendance.

Rebooting the Franchise

Over the last academic year, however, I have been through a transformative sabbatical as a visiting professor at MIT, where I worked with the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT game lab.   I came to MIT to work on board game design as a pedagogical tool and opened up my time there with a colloquium called Breaking up the Monopoly with Modern Board Game Design.  What I realized, however, was that I would be throwing away an opportunity if I didn’t fully immerse myself in what was available at MIT.

My work now has shifted away from board games and games in libraries, and is focusing on using games as information containers through meaningful gamification. I will be exploring that topic in future posts to this blog, and so I won’t provide any more spoilers!

tl-dr

Check your local library for gaming programs, and if they don’t have one, volunteer to get one started!  Just remember, it’s not about what you want to play, it’s about facilitating a good game experience for attendees.

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

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

What is Knowledge Management? The short answer is that it is What Valve Does. (note: The jury is out on whether this is really from Valve, but either way, all my arguments still apply. I’m going to act like it’s real.) The long answer is much more complex, but bear with me because it will bear great fruit at the end.

What is KM? (The boring part that makes the rest of the post really cool)

(Side note: The main concentration of my Master’s in Library and Information Science was in Knowledge Management, so I’m not just making all of this up, I do have experience with it)

Knowledge Management is difficult to define easily, and means something different to a lot of people because it can be implemented in many different ways in many different business structures. (Note: Information is stuff that you can easily organize and hold in your hand or put on a computer. Knowledge is what you keep in your head. Don’t know what I mean? Try to explain to someone who is blind what the color blue is.)

Wikipedia has a definition, but it’s kind of confusing.

Strangely, I find the best way to describe KM is to talk about what it’s not. Quotes that follow are from here.

“If only HP knew what it knows it would make three times more profit tomorrow”

Lew Platt, ex CEO Hewlett Packard

And what that really means is what follows:

“Knowledge Management is the discipline of enabling individuals, teams and entire organisations to collectively and systematically create, share and apply knowledge, to better achieve their objectives”

Ron Young, CEO/CKO Knowledge Associates International

So the trick with KM is to take all of that Knowledge in a company (not information), and be able to use it.

Valve uses KM, and I do not even think they meant to (The beginning of the cool part)

Valve released/leaked an Employee Handbook a little while ago, and I highly recommend you read it. (I know, you didn’t even read the employee handbook at your current job, but trust me on this one, it is AMAZING.)

The employee handbook is a way to help new employees integrate into the Valve system, which is very unique. In a nutshell, Valve is completely flat. Completely. There’s a founder, but he has no more power than the guy who was just hired. There are no managers. No hierarchical structure whatsoever. Because, according to Valve:

“The hierarchy will begin to reinforce its own structure by hiring people who fit its shape, adding people to fill subordinate support roles. Its members are also incented to engage in rent-seeking behaviors that take advantage of the power structure rather than focusing on simply delivering value to customers.”

So Valve instead focuses on hiring the best person for the job. And then having the people working at Valve hire someone who is even better than they are, thereby growing the awesome of the company.

It is brilliant, and it is KM because of the elimination of silos.

The idea is to take all of the ideas within a company and let them run wild and work as they will. Do not stifle the company with bureaucracy or a hierarchical structure. Just get the job done. It is such a brilliant idea, and yet it almost never happens because it is extremely difficult to make happen. Valve even acknowledges this on Page 49.

Q: If all this stuff has worked well for us, why doesn’t every company work this way?

A: Well, it’s really hard. Mainly because, from day one, it requires a  commitment to hiring in a way that’s very different from the way most companies hire. It also requires the discipline to make the design of the company more important than any one short-term business goal. And it requires a great deal of freedom from outside pressure—being self-funded was key. And having a founder who was confident enough to build this kind of place is rare, indeed.

One of the main key points that they acknowledge is the hiring process, and hiring of great talent. Hiring the right people that can work in this type of system is really key. If people are not self motivated and do not know how to form their own teams or work on their own projects, this system would fail utterly.

So what else does Valve talk about in the Employee Handbook that is different from most institutions?

They are absolutely and completely supportive of their employees both at work and in the rest of their lives.

for the most part working overtime for extended periods indicates a fundamental failure in planning or communication. pg. 17

Nobody has ever been fired at Valve for making a mistake. It wouldn’t make sense for us to operate that way. Providing the freedom to fail is an important trait of the company— we couldn’t expect so much of individuals if we also penalized people for errors. Even expensive mistakes, or ones which result in a very public failure, are genuinely looked at as  opportunities to learn. We can always repair the mistake or make up for it. pg. 20

Valve pays people very well compared to industry norms. Our profitability per employee is higher than that of Google or  Amazon or Microsoft, and we believe strongly that the right thing to do in that case is to put a maximum amount of money  back into each employee’s pocket. Valve does not win if you’re paid less than the value you create. And people who work here ultimately don’t win if they get paid more than the value they create. pg. 27

And they have an employee vacation for a week every year! So awesome.

Keeping your employees happy and fostering a “flat” organizational structure is great, but it is being able to utilize that structure that really matters.

Which brings me to my next point:

Communities of Practice

Valve calls them “Cabals.” Compare the Wikipedia definition to what was being described by the Cabal article about Valve from Gamasutra. To me, t hey are the exact same thing. The crazy/amazing part is not that Valve was able to discover this on their own, but that they followed through and took it as far as possible. This is an amazing case study of communities of practice. I can think of many Knowledge Managers who would give limbs to get into this company just to observe and see how it actually works on a day to day basis.

I guess the Information/Knowledge Community better start noticing the Video Game world a lot more then, because that is what Valve does.

Please, it can’t be that easy.

There are problems with the system, there are problems with every system. Valve even acknowledges them on page 52 of the Handbook.

What Is Valve Not Good At?

The design of the company has some downsides. We usually think they’re worth the cost, but it’s worth noting that there are a number of things we wish we were better at:
• Helping new people find their way. We wrote this book to help, but as we said above, a book can only go so far.
• Mentoring people. Not just helping new people figure things out, but proactively helping people to grow in areas where they need help is something we’re organizationally not great at. Peer reviews help, but they can only go so far.
• Disseminating information internally.
• Finding and hiring people in completely new disciplines (e.g., economists! industrial designers!).
• Making predictions longer than a few months out.
• We miss out on hiring talented people who prefer to work within a more traditional structure. Again, this comes with the territory and isn’t something we should change, but it’s worth recognizing as a self-imposed limitation.

In my mind, these are problems that other systems may not have, but they are not system breaking problems. It is just a system that people are not comfortable with and requires a lot of self motivation. It also requires a lot of collaboration and being able to work well in an environment that no one in many education systems are trained for. There is no teacher/boss/manager telling you what to do. Something needs to be done? Do it.

Inside the company, though, we all take on the role that suits the work in front of us. Everyone is a designer. Everyone can question each other’s work. pg. 37

In my mind, the biggest problems that Valve now would have are problems that no one except Valve employees could know about. I am sure they have Knowledge and Information Systems that could use looking at, that are inefficient, that store things in ways that are hard to find and just lose information in the mass of information they have. But that is a problem a good Knowledge Manager could solve over time, especially in an environment like this. (Hey Valve, if you’re looking for someone like that, I know a guy. /winkwink /nudgenudge)

There is no way a large company could do this. It’s too big!

I’ll let the book speak for itself:

Concepts discussed in this book sound like they might work well at a tiny start-up, but not at a hundreds-of-people-plusbillions- in-revenue company. The big question is: Does all this stuff scale? Well, so far, yes. And we believe that if  we’re careful, it will work better and better the larger we get. This might seem counterintuitive, but it’s a direct  consequence of hiring great, accomplished, capable people. Getting this to work right is a tricky proposition, though, and depends highly on our continued vigilance in recruiting/hiring.

Other thing I thought was cool

They have a glossary at the end of different jargon, lingo, and code words that employees use regularly. This is so helpful to new people and really just increases how fast they can be integrated into the company. Every office/group of people/community of practice should have something like this.

tl-dr

Valve has instituted a structure that allows for a very organic use of Knowledge Management. I hope they release more information about it. Plus, working there looks like it would be great.

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

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License