tl-dr

I’m pressed for time to write this post due to a number of RL issues, but I’m pretty fired up so I’ll see how many words come out. I encountered this #1ReasonWhy thing last night in a Gamasutra article. #1ReasonWhy is a Twitter hashtag being used by women who work in the video games industry to state 1 reason why “they don’t feel comfortable in the game industry.” I’m not mad at the campaign itself; I’m mad that it needs to exist.

I’ve never worked in the video games industry, but I have worked in IT, both in corporate and in academic settings. So I can say based on firsthand experiences that for women, it’s not a picnic. I could share stories about what I experienced in those past lives, but I don’t even need to go back that far. Even now, I teach technology courses to library and information science students. Most of them are women, and most of them don’t feel comfortable with technology. But when I share teaching stories with my male colleagues who teach the same classes, I learn that they don’t have the same challenges I’ve had with students challenging grades and so on. I’ve known for years that as a young (or at least a young-looking) female teaching classes that are typically taught by a member of the boys’ club, I’m at a disadvantage. I know I have to work twice as hard to hold my ground with the students so they will give me half as much respect as they give the men. Why is this the case?

This overcompensation phenomenon is not just based on my past as an IT professional or as an IT instructor. It happens in the gaming realm too; unfortunately, it seems to come off as militant feminism. Due to my time issues, I can’t find links to them, but I’ve seen so many things online where women are working so hard to hold their place in the gaming world as players. But generally, the message is driven into viewers’ heads: we’re here to play, not to fuck you. (I’ve said this before: what if men worked hard to communicate this same message? Everyone would think they were crazy!) I think girl gamers take overcompensation to an extreme, but maybe not. Take a look at Fat, Ugly or Slutty or my recent post about when I was “raped” in World of Warcraft and make your own call on this.

Some men have been pretty shitty to me over the years. I’ve been raped. I’ve been in abusive situations. I’ve been treated by male IT colleagues like I don’t even know how to turn on a computer. While this doesn’t make it hurt any less, I know that these awful behaviors are based on their own insecurities and weaknesses. But why should us women have to work so damn hard to prove ourselves to be above their weaknesses and their lack of e-peen?

That is my point today. Women shouldn’t HAVE TO do any of this: the tweets about why women feel uncomfortable in the games industry, the working twice as hard for half the credit, the pleading with assholes to not “rape” their battleground team members (read the post). My political leanings aside, I’ve always had an issue with affirmative action because I believe that people should be given opportunities and rewards based on what they do, not based on their gender or race. I don’t want special treatment just because I’m a woman, only the same treatment.

Feminism, to me, means that women should have the same chances and opportunities that men have to do what they want to do. For some women, that might mean having kids and staying home. For me, it means pursuing a career in information science and playing video games. Both sets of goals are fabulous, and neither one is less valuable. But don’t trash me because I’m in what’s generally considered a boys’ domain, just like I don’t trash women who have no interest in this stuff. The more “traditional” women do work that is less valued in the world, but the work I do is also maybe not something women are supposed to do. So if poppin’ out kids and raising them isn’t valued, and women are undervalued if we go out in the larger world, what are we to do?

Dr. Marcia J. Bates received the Award of Merit from the American Society for Information Science and Technology (my primary professional organization) in 2005. This is the highest honor that you can receive from the Society. Her acceptance speech made me cry when I heard her deliver it, and I still get chills about it when I read it. You can read it yourself, but I want to highlight the end of her speech:

Finally, when it comes down to it, there’s a big difference between going through life with the wind at your back, and going through life leaning into the wind. I retired at 61 not because I really wanted to, but because I was worn out.

Fair treatment of women can happen only when we ALL self-consciously ask ourselves what we are doing every time we apportion work and rewards to men and women. Fair treatment does not happen without a self-conscious effort to change.

That’s why THIS recognition, the Award of Merit, is so very important to me, and I value it so highly. After all, I’m only the 8th woman to have received this honor, in the 40-plus years it has been awarded. Thank you.

I have felt for many years that I’ve been living my life “leaning into the wind,” but only when I have to deal with people who don’t understand. When I started playing video games at age 6, I didn’t know that it was supposed to be wrong. I played with my dad, and with a male friend who lived in my neighborhood. I had no female friends. I didn’t know this was supposed to be a problem until I was a teenager – when I started to see boys as more than people to hang out with – and even then it wasn’t a problem because boys actually liked the fact that I could talk about things they enjoyed as well: games, computers, whatever. This holds true today; just ask Fox the gamer. Even when I found my love of information science and started building my career, I didn’t think about the fact that information science is considered to be “library science for boys.” But I could never see myself reading story time to a bunch of kids in the children’s section. That’s a wonderful thing to do, it’s just not me.

We all should have the chance to be who we are. Unfortunately, people who don’t know this get in the way. Prejudices against people who don’t fit whatever mold is floating around in their heads is due to their own closed mind. But those of us who are just out there enjoying what we love shouldn’t have to be the ones doing the work needed to open their minds. It rarely seems to work, anyway.

Until we figure out how to open minds, see you in the battlegrounds, I guess. But beware. My DK is OP.

tl-dr

We are all created equal… until somebody tells us we’re unequal. Don’t let anyone do that to you.

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

 Welcome to the tl-dr Newbie Blogger Initiative Post (Number 2)! Big props go out to Syp and his blog Biobreak for starting up this concept. It’s a great way for new bloggers to get into writing for whatever their reasons are.

For this post, I want to write another post on how to help out other bloggers. After this post my high-and-mighty-soap-box will be broken from the advice I have spouted. For this post, I’m going to focus on Categories and Tagging (in the WordPress nomenclature), because I am an expert on such things. Really. I swear. I have a Master’s Degree in how to organize stuff (even gamers), and I work professionally creating organization systems for online systems. Ask me about web design and I would not be able to help you besides say, “You should make it look pretty!” But data modelling, curation, and organization are my wheelhouse. Star  Shadow has a great tutorial on using categories and tags in Wordpess. I’m just going to build on what was said there.

Categories

This section is very controlled and will be how you want all of your posts grouped together. For example, if you’re running a gw2 site:

Professions
—Mesmer
—Ranger
—Warrior
—etc.

Crafting
—Leatherworking
—Cooking
—etc.

Type of play
—pve
—pvp
—wvw

etc. etc. The main goal with “categories” is how you want to group your posts for people to *browse* or *navigate* to a different subject on your blog.

You can break out the categories any way that you want really, just remember that once you decide on them it’s hard to change them. If you want to add a new category to 100 posts that you’ve already posted, you have to go back and add them by hand. So deciding on categories near the beginning of your blog would be a pretty good idea. (If you want some help with this, I’m happy to throw some ideas at you.)

Tags

Tags are important for 2 things on your blog.

1) Searching
If you’re searching for something on your blog (not from google), the tags are what will be searched, so think about what types of terms people would search for. (Google will search fulltext, categories, AND tags, so it covers all the bases)

2) Word cloud

This is important because it’s a great visual for the tagged content on your site. People will click in here a lot to find different content you produce, so if you use many tags in the same ways they’ll be able to find more content they are interested in. I read an article last year about word clouds that actually said they improve how people find stuff on your site by x%. I don’t remember all the details (like who wrote it), but I remember the paper being solid. If I find it again, I’ll let y’all know

Cases and phrasing

This is just for consistency to help out your users. It takes a bit more thought when you put tags on a post, but the effort is well worth it in the long run.

Make sure you always use the same case for words. So, if you have a tag for a guild wars 2 blog, and you want to tag every post being about guild wars 2, make sure you always say “Guild Wars 2″. The system thinks “Guild Wars 2″ “guild wars 2″ and “gw2″ are all different things. It can’t understand the semantic similarities between them, so you have to be diligent about using the same phrasing, capitalization, and case for all the tags you use. (e.g. “tags” and “tagging” are actually 2 different tags in the system).

Meta tags

I’m going to use a real example here to illustrate how tagging should happen “behind the scenes” of a post where it is only done for a system.

Here are the tags for the last #nbimmo post I wrote. And I was lazy and didn’t do all of them. I only did about half of what I wanted/should have.

nbimmo,newbie blogger initiative,newbie blogger initiative mmo,creative commons,creative commons license,cc license,cc,sypster,biobreak,dmca,digital millennium copyright act,takedown notices,take down notices,c word,cunt,c-word,attribution,sharealike,share alike,noderivs,no derivatives,noncommercial,non commercial,plagiarism,jacob ratliff,jacob a ratliff,jacob a. ratliff,gameronomist,gaming information,information about games,video game information

Let’s break it down a bit to make sense of it.

“c word,c-word,cunt”

Let’s start with this one, because I bet many people did not even see it in my list. First of all, let me apologize for the language, as it is definitely R rated and NSFW (but in this context it is SFW, because I could have this conversation at work because of the context).

In the post these keywords are taken from, I had a section that referenced the “C-Word”, and I was talking about copyright, but referring to the C-U-Next-Tuesday variety as a tongue in cheek joke. I added that version to the Meta Tags because 1) having it doesn’t hurt anything (because no one can actually see it), and 2) if someone is doing a search for that word and comes upon my post, I would rather they be on my blog than somewhere else.

“copyright,copyleft,piracy,pirates,pirating,dmca,digital millennium copyright act,takedown notices,take down notices”

A few of these words I used in the actual post, but most of them I did not. I never talked about copyleft or pirating. The others are just the many variations a word could have. Pirates and pirating being a good example. I would not use all of these for the visible tags (as I mentioned above), but using all the variations for the meta tags is good because then I get different people to come to the blog who have different search behaviors.

“creative commons,creative commons license,cc license,cc,attribution,sharealike,share alike,noderivs,no derivatives,noncommercial,non commercial”

Same as above.

“gaming information,information about games,video game information”

I put these tags in the meta tags section of every post published on tl-dr. It’s the main focus of our blog, so I want to make sure people looking specifically for these topics gets to us

“jacob ratliff,jacob a ratliff,jacob a. ratliff,gameronomist”

These tags are all about me. My name and how I am searched on the internet. Before I started using the handle “Gameronomist” there was only 1 search result for it on Google, now there are tons. Googling my name has also changed because of the SEO I’ve done on this blog. I have moved up significantly on the searches, and this blog is ranking up in them as well. Good personal branding.

Do you have any suggestions for good ideas about tagging and categories? Let me know!

tl-dr

Categories are ways to organize posts. Tags are used to search for posts. Meta tags are for Google.

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

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.

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

Community is one of the most important things to gaming, heck, to the human race! Having a good community of people around you while doing an activity can transform that activity from something dreaded to something enjoyable. Gaming (to me) is just the opposite; it’s a wonderful activity that becomes amazing with the right people around.

Everyone likes to have friends (a.k.a. “community”) around when playing games. The big question is: what makes something a good community as opposed to a bad community? I’m not much into psychology (from an academic point of view), so I’ll just point you to Maslow.

You’ll notice that Love/Belonging are right in the middle of this list, and are necessary to reach personal esteem and self-actualization. Belonging to a community is necessary for human beings to achieve happiness, and so gaming should concentrate on that as much as possible.

Who hasn’t sat around screaming at each other and the TV playing Mario Kart? You haven’t? Do it – it’s the most fun you’ll ever have. That or playing FPS games against your friends. It’s immensely satisfying to compete and kill your good friends. All game genres and platforms provide some type of community. However, MMOs have the corner on community gaming in my mind (hence the “Massively Multiplayer” part of the description). Gamasutra has even gone on the record with an article saying that community can make or break an MMO, and I agree completely.

[Simon Ludgate has] long held that the most important feature in any MMO is to build a strong player community. It doesn’t matter how shiny or content-filled your game is: if it lacks in community, players will leave. Community makes or breaks an MMO: games that have leapt off the starting block full of praise and high review scores fell flat on their faces when they failed to build strong player communities, and games so bland they ought never have been made in the first place are still running today thanks to player involvement.

I completely agree, from both a personal perspective, as well as from personal observation of watching games come and go in the market, and not even the MMO market. Look at Call of Duty and Halo. They’re both relatively simple shooter games, but who actually buys those games for the single player adventure? It’s all about the multiplayer community and competition.

The gaming community outside of the games

Community within games is important, but there is a wealth of community for gaming that exists outside of playing games, and it’s talking about games. (Sports already do it, and guess what? Sports are games!) To paraphrase myself: participation with a community outside of a game is part of what makes someone a hardcore gamer, rather than a casual gamer.

It is my opinion that the hardcore gaming community should be a target of public libraries and information scientists.

Why?

Libraries are in a unique position to offer great amounts of information to different sub-cultures of the hardcore gaming community. Rather than just worrying about having a Wii in the library, or getting teens in the library to play Rock Band, public libraries could specialize in a specific community of gamers. Focus on the people and their information needs for their passions. There is a definitely lack of attention being paid to many gaming sub-cultures right now, exhibited by this opinion on the fighting game community. The author is speaking about mainstream gaming news outlets:

We read your work and we listen to your podcasts. Please read and listen to us. I appreciate 1up for hiring freelancers from the community to write reviews for fighting games. Thank you, but this is not enough. I appreciate Kat Bailey’s recent piece on arcade culture in Wired last week. It was off, but Jared Rea did the best he could in guiding her to where she needed to be.

All gaming sub-cultures crave information on their specific brand of gaming. Libraries are in a unique position to be able to provide this. How do you think a community would react if there was a fighting game tournament in a library? With player’s guides, internet gamefaqs available to browse (with the help of a librarian), or even a local librarian that works there who is into fighting games? Imagine an academic library having a game room to blow off steam during finals week! This is just the first step of what could be done if a community was built around gaming in a library.

The difficult part? Like any good community, the leader of the community (the library/librarian) needs to be an integral, and interested, part of that community. Make it happen, and libraries will see a whole new audience and information need they can help satisfy.

Here’s an example: The IMLS is leading the way on building community for libraries, museums, and education. Here’s a great article about how the IMLS is partnering with different groups for public school education. My only problem is that it does not mention gaming anywhere in the article. To really be at the forefront and to make an impact, games need to be integral to what libraries are doing.

tl;dr

Community is the most important thing to foster for human beings, including within gaming environments. Opportunities exist for libraries to fill this community need for the hardcore gaming community. They just need to reach out for those opportunities.

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.

<rant>

I am a hardcore gamer. And a Director-at-large of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T). And a librarian. And a nerd. And many other things. But there is one thing I am not: somebody who fits in the boxes… and my views on my discipline as well as my outside interests follow suit.  As a result, I tend to question an unnecessarily and unfortunately divided field that is decidedly out of most people’s scope of thinking.

When I was a master’s student in information science (with an information systems concentration), I worked for the late Dr. Mark E. Rorvig, who believed in quantitative empiricism so strongly that he thought you could determine relevance in image retrieval mathematically: it’s either relevant (1), or it’s not (0). He semi-joked that it was too much trouble to involve human subjects in your research because it was too much trouble to get approval to include them in your study. When he suddenly died after he told me that I needed a PhD, and I got accepted into the program, I was left without an advisor. Thankfully, Dr. Rorvig’s friend (and intellectual debater) Dr. Brian C. O’Connor took me in. He put all kinds of different notions in my head, such as the idea that pictures are not words and words are not pictures; therefore, words are inadequate for describing pictures.  Dr. O’Connor and cataloger extraordinare Dr. Shawne Miksa co-supervised my dissertation, and I ended up with a user study about photojournalism professionals’ preferences for describing and finding their photos in an online system. (Hint: Library of Congress Subject Headings don’t work.) I worked as a systems librarian through most of my PhD student years to gain valuable experience and pay the bills. Now, I’m just this weird mix of a researcher, and I’m proud of it.

As a result of all this, I frequently take a step back from my daily research, teaching, and service work to look at the field of library and information science holistically. I wonder how we got here, and how we can fix it. I want to state a few observations, none of which should be all that new to anyone in my field:

1. Library practice typically does not influence information science research.

2. Information science research typically does not influence library practice.

3. They seem so disparate that I sometimes wonder why we are considered one field. Trends such as evidence-based librarianship are not catching on as much as I would like to see, but there are practical reasons for this. Librarians do not have time to do research (even though some academic librarians have to find a way to fit in research so they can get tenure), and information science researchers don’t have time to be on the front lines, so to speak.

4. Gaming provides a perfect example of this divide.

5. This is unfortunate on too many levels.

Why is gaming such a good example? I’ve been examining the following books lately. They are all geared toward librarians who want to incorporate games into their libraries:

• Czarnecki, K.N. (2010). Gaming in libraries. New York: Neal-Schuman.
• Gallaway, B. (2009). Game on! Gaming at the library. New York: Neal-Schuman.
• Harris, A., & Rice, S.E. (2008). Gaming in academic libraries: Collections, marketing, and information literacy. Chicago: American Library Association.
• Neiburger, E. (2007). Games… in the library? The why, what, and how of videogame tournaments for all ages. Chicago: American Library Association.
• Nicholson, S. (2010). Everyone plays at the library: Creating great gaming experiences for all ages. Medford, NJ: Information Today.

These books all have valuable, useful ideas and tips for librarians who, thankfully, want to take programming in a gamer’s direction. All of them cover, in various levels of detail, topics such as:

• types of games in existence (both video games and board games),
• directions on how to create library policies for gaming,
• advice on game collection development,
• suggestions on running gaming programs/tournaments,
• marketing your library gaming,
• using games in information literacy activities,
• and so on.

One point of contention I have with these generally useful books is that they tend to focus on teens as their primary age group. The American Library Association’s Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) focuses a lot of its efforts on gaming in libraries as well. However, the average gamer is 37 years old. (I won’t tell you how old I am, but this statistic means I’m not completely out of the ballpark on at least one thing!)

The bigger bone I want to pick with this body of literature – actually, almost any library practitioner literature, as I tell my Master of Library and Information Science students when I teach them research methods – is that 99% of it is based on “how we done good.” I don’t know how many practitioner conference sessions I’ve attended that talk about “we decided to implement x program in our library because y committee decided it would be a good idea, and here’s how it went.” Far too often, libraries tend to continue x program, even if it causes the staff extraordinary headaches, or even if patrons don’t really care about the program that much. (Sometimes, of course, programs and services are a win, and that’s fabulous. But not always.) The little empirical research that librarians do is not always the best quality, but that’s not their fault: they have time constraints because there’s a patron in their face wanting to know why a printer isn’t working, our master’s programs don’t foster research as part of our disciplinary culture, and so on. This causes researchers such as myself to decide that conferences like the American Library Assocation’s annual meeting because these kinds of presentations are not worth precious travel funds. It causes practitioners to avoid ASIS&T because there’s no “so what” in the theoretical/exploratory research talks for them; this is an issue I ran on in my Board election.

But what if we worked together? Library science, information studies, “i” this or that, whatever you call us, we can be one field, and we are an applied field. I wouldn’t want an MD researcher taking blood samples from me if he’d never spent time treating patients, and I wouldn’t want a clinical physician prescribing a new medication to me if he hadn’t read up on the literature about it. We are a professional field as well; should we be any different?

Back to gaming, and the examples I mentioned earlier. I have no empirical data on this, and it’s not based on “how we done it” because I don’t work in a library anymore. But, as someone who lives geek/gamer culture, I can tell you this: libraries can do so much better with the gaming programs, plans, and ideas presented in any of the practice literature I’ve ever seen, and information science researchers can do better with the way they conduct gaming research.

“How could this potentially be accomplished, Diane?” “Well, I’ll make some suggestions!”

For librarians: Information science researchers can find out things. We can interview, survey, or observe gamers (of any age group, not just those crazy teens we keep going on about) to find out why they game, why they would want to come to the library to game, and what truly valuable services the library could offer to gamers. For example, if you’ve just picked up World of Warcraft for the first time and want to know how to get your tauren druid to level 85 and dominating in bgs, maybe a “gamer library cafe” setting in which new and experienced WoW players can sit together with a coffee and WoW access. MMO players do not need to/may not want to/may not be able to come to the library just for the sake of playing a game. We are real people with real lives: we have kids to put to bed; we have custom-built gaming setups at home with intricately programmed gaming mice and keybindings; we watch American Dad on Hulu and chat with our fellow guild members while we run warzones with them.

For researchers: Nobody can compete with the big kids. Video games such as Skyrim, Star Wars: The Old Republic, or Wii bowling are just plain fun, all for different reasons. (Smaller companies make games that are fun, too.) But let’s say an information science research team decides to make a so-called serious game containing educational content about how to manage stress. They place it on the principal investigator’s university server, and ask a few “stressed” undergrads enrolled in somebody’s intro to psychology course to play the game. They get some nice but constructive feedback from the students, write it up, publish it in a journal, declare this “exploratory study” about serious games a “win”, and move on to the next publication. But why don’t they have students spend some time leveling up a Sith or a Jedi in Star Wars: The Old Republic, and maybe tell them about multiplayer quests and guilds and all the other things that make MMOs social and fun, and see if that seems to help manage stress? It certainly helps me feel better to spend some time in game after a long day…

For everyone: games aren’t bad, nor are they as shiny as you might think. The stigma surrounding “violent” video games is unwarranted; Jacob will post on “violent games” next week, so watch for that. I’ve been a gamer since I was 7, and I’ve killed a lot of virtual monsters, but I’ve never intentionally physically hurt someone in real life. Also, it annoys many gamers when you say, “Oh, you game??? Did you game recently? Last night???” To which a gamer might reply, “Yeah, I did! Did you watch American Idol last night?” if she is feeling particularly snarky. But I digress.

These are just three of many possible suggestions. With this post, I would like to declare a need for a practice-based library AND information science research agenda focused in the realm of gaming. As examples of what is possible, I’m proud to cite two studies completed by my colleagues in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at The University of Western Ontario, and presented at the 2011 conference of the Canadian Association for Information Science:

Victoria L. Rubin and Sarah C. Camm. Griefing and Deception in Video Games: Examining Attitudes towards the Phenomena.
Summary: Though not new to online gamers, griefing – an act of play intended to cause grief to game players – is understudied in LIS scholarship. We expand on the definition of griefing for library contexts by considering its deceptive elements and examining gamers’ attitudes in a gaming forum and an e-mail survey.

Caroline Whippey. Interacting with Information in a Digital Place: Information Practices in World of Warcraft.
Summary: This study examines the ways in which users interact with information in the video game World of Warcraft. Utilizing data gathered through participant observation and the recording of public chat, this presentation explores how information is presented as well as how players seek, share, and utilize the information they encounter.

I attended these conference talks, and I was struck by the amount that we all have to learn from each other, just from these limited examples.  A librarian who is planning a gaming program – but who is not a gamer – might not know about griefing, and how awful it can be. An information architect or game developer who designs in-game features needs to know how people actually do things in game, and how features can best be designed to meet gamers’ needs. As you can see just through these two examples, the potential is great for both sides of the proverbial LIS table to help people find stuff (because that’s what we all do), but we need to work together and talk together. And, of course, last but never ever least… we all need to play together!

</rant>

tl;dr

Librarians and information science researchers need to work together to make gaming experiences (whether in the library or at home) as valuable and fun as possible for gamers of all types and ages.

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.

Just a forewarning before you get too deep into this post: It’s going to be full of jargon and the nerd will be deep; both the gamer nerd and the library nerd. Truly full-on nerd. (Or Geek. Whatever.)

Disclaimer: This is in no way endorsed by Bioware, and it just contains the authors’ opinions.

Bioware has also been noted as saying they understand the Galactic Trade Network system is lacking. Rumor has it that they had another system in place during beta, but it taxed their servers so much it was crashing the game. (These statements are conjecture)

Diane and I are making a couple of assumptions for this post, so we’ll just list them here.

1) You know what an Massively Multiplayer Online game (MMO) is.

2) You know what Star Wars, The Old Republic (SWTOR) is.

3) You’ve used an online auction system before (like eBay).

The Galactic Trade Network (GTN) is the (rough) equivalent of eBay, but it exists within SWTOR. That’s right. A hugely robust search system that is completely independent of the world wide web exists. This area of information search and retrieval is undiscovered by most, if not all, of the information science world. It’s time to take a look at it now. And more than that, it’s time to critique it, and see how it can be improved when hundreds of years of classification and organization are applied to it.

^A visual of the GTN, so you know what we’re talking about.

Everything is already classified

The good news about the GTN is that (almost) all of the content is already classified, and that’s just because of the function that the content plays within the game. Items have a number of different metadata attributes (ways to describe something), like: Title, Level requirement, Stats on the item, Quality (Artifact, legendary, etc.), Armor Type, Weapon Type, the list goes on. All of these different things are metadata attributes that are applied to different items. (Librarians use the word “metadata” because it’s easier than saying “the word(s) you use to describe an object” when talking about stuff like this. Additionally, the formal definition we learn in library school – “data about data” – is just too circular to be meaningful).

So all of the items in SWTOR have rich classifications and abundant metadata already on them. What does that mean?

It means that Bioware has the foundation to create amazing search interfaces. All of the content exists and it’s easy to find, and now it’s just a matter of taking all of the content and creating a user interface that allows for easy access for the user. Sounds easy, but it’s extremely difficult.

User-Centered Design

Bioware has already come out with a system, and it works, but it could be improved upon. The SWTOR Community has already commented on how  the system could be improved. I’ll run over them really quickly and add my comments to them. (The original post is what I’m using for this section)

1. The drop-down categories (armor type, rarity, level reqs, etc) should be for NARROWING DOWN EXISTING SEARCHES, not confining what you may search for.

This is possible, and could be done, but not in the current system that Bioware has implemented. The common “faceted navigation” that you see in most commercial websites like Newegg and Amazon has become an industry standard, but applying it to an in-game system has yet to be done (to my knowledge). This would be a large innovation in the gaming world.

2. We should be able to search by name FIRST. I should be able to type in exactly what I’m looking for, click buy, done. It’s that easy.

I completely agree with this one. The current system allow for no “Title search” of an item. You are required to pick a filter before searching by title, which makes for extremely nice database design and a lot less server load, but annoys users now that they are used to being able to search how they like. This keyword search to narrow down an existing search also does not work very well right now, it only works on a direct match of a keyword (e.g. “Red Goo” not “red go”), which is frustrating as a user.

3. If I’m listing multiple same-item auctions, PLEASE have it memorize what my price was. If I’m leveling up my crafting skill and I made 20 Random-Blue-Chest-Piece-of-***-Kickery, please for the love of all that is Star Wars let me only name my price once rather than making me type the price in 20 times. That is way too many clicks and key presses.

Save the time of the [user]. Any little change that can be done which will make the life of the user better should be done.

4. Include an armor SLOT drop down. Helm, gloves, chest, legs, etc. If I’m looking for a Purple Medium Armor level 47BOOTS, I shouldn’t have to search through pages and pages of chest pieces, leg pieces, and helmets to find it.

This will be an easy fix, and one that I assume Bioware will implement rather quickly. As I mentioned above, all of the data is already classified well, this is just a matter of adding another “filter” which the current UI doesn’t support.

5, 8

Hit up the original thread to read these. They don’t have anything to do with the system or UI, so it is beyond the scope of this post.

6, 9, 10, 12, 14, 15

Save the time of the [user]. (see #3)

7, 13

See #4

11. Some of the items are currently being listed under the wrong categories. For example, Underworld Trading Fabrics are being listed under Diplomacy.

A bug in a new system that needs to be worked out. Perhaps the metadata for “Underworld Trading Fabrics” is in the wrong part of a database somewhere. Just needs to be looked into on the back end.

Simple GTN Additions

Aside from a complete overhaul of the GTN system, there are a few things that Bioware could do to improve upon the current GTN UI. They’re simple changes that will make the lives of all of us users much easier.

1) Alphabetize the drop down menus.

The current drop down menu that is first chosen looks to be ordered by “priority”.

That’s fine for someone who is looking for something at the top of the list, but each user has a different priority. Alphabetizing the list will make it easier for people to scan down the list for what they’re looking for (e.g. I’m looking for a “consumable” so I automatically will look toward the top of the list, instead of the middle where it currently is now). This is by far the easiest change they could make, and it would increase usability so much.*

*Some of their drop downs are alphabetized, some are not. There is very little consistency to it.

2) Make the list shorter / Separate it somehow

The best practice for creating lists like this (a taxonomy) state that you don’t want a list longer than 7-10 terms because the standard user just zones out and stops reading the list. Either make the list shorter (hard), or separate it into different lists for easier reading. Create a hierarchy out of it, just on the list.

Example:

Gear

• Armor
• Melee Weapon
• Ranged Weapon
• Implant
• Earpiece
• Offhand
• Relic

This way, users can see what they are looking for at a glance very easily. And it doesn’t even require a change to the background programming of the system, it’s just a cosmetic change on the UI.

3) Refine by specific stat

This one may be a bit more difficult, but I’m unsure without knowing the intricacies of how Bioware’s actual database system works. There should be a filter or refinement tool to allow for searching/narrowing by a specific stat (e.g. Willpower, Might, alacrity, etc.). It could even be more general and you can narrow by primary or secondary stat.

Crafting materials

Right now being able to find crafting materials on the GTN is a nightmare, mainly because of the no title or keyword search option (or the keyword narrowing function not working properly). A quick example: If I want to find a material for crafting something, doing a search yields 26 pages of results, with 8 items on each page. Narrowing this by title would be easy, but the best way to be able to do it would be to sort it by crafting level.

Most crafting items just have “Item level 1″ as their item metadata, but they also have a specific “grade” applied to them, which can be Grade 1 through 6. There are also many sub-categories of crafting materials.

Being able to search or refine a search by a “Grade 2 Biochemical Sample” rather than a “Grade 4 Biochemical Compound” would allow a great amount of functionality for advanced users. And, again, the metadata/classification already exists, it’s just a matter of implementing it in a user friendly way.

If you liked X, then you would also like…

The above was all Jacob’s work; now it’s my turn (this is Diane). Think of us as two sides of a d20.

Recommender systems try to predict what the user would like based on current and past searches. If you use Amazon, you are familiar with recommender systems. For example, if I search Amazon for SWTOR, I get the following recommendations on the SWTOR product page:

As you can see, it recommends SWTOR game time, another video game, an operating system that supports SWTOR, and so on. This is based on past behavior of other Amazon users.

Pandora is a popular example of a recommender system: If you start a “Katy Perry” station, Pandora will play music by other dance pop artists. Some of us think recommender systems in their current forms are frequently too narrow in scope, and some of my academic research seeks to work on these ideas. For example, Katy Perry is certainly similar to Taylor Swift, Avril Lavigne, Rihanna, and so on, but what else could a system find for me that is not so obviously related? Who were their musical role models when they were growing up? Who has a voice similar to Katy’s that I might enjoy? I’m currently leading a project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada called “Using affect-based labels in whole collection retrieval” to, in part, investigate these issues.

As a researcher, it’s my job to be visionary, so here we go. In the long run, information science needs to stop thinking about documents/objects (e.g. A pdf, a word doc, crafting materials, medpacs, or PvP gear) in a system as individual silos, things that can only be retrieved if you can identify one or more facets. The idea that you can only find things by telling the system what you are hoping to find- and telling the system in the terms of the system – needs to become old school. In the paper entitled “Breaking in and out of the silos: What makes for a happy photograph cluster?” that I presented at the Document Academy conference in 2010, I stated the following:

… extensively known Web sites and tools really only provide ways to start “searches” with “keywords.” A search for any relatively broad search string retrieves far too many documents for an individual to sift through. Additionally, the “black box” phenomenon in which the user does not know what exists in the system is of ongoing concern … known-item and narrowly-defined subject access searching … has denied us any substantial progress toward new ways of thinking about information exploration.

Let’s say I am a Sith Assassin, and my crafting skills are archaeology, treasure hunting, and artifice. Here are some potential information exploration questions:

• I have x, y, and z crystals (crafting materials) in my inventory. If I could learn what products others are selling that are made with those materials, it might help me decide what to make next based on supply, demand, and physical feasibility. Also, knowing what products are most popular might help me decide what I should spend my time and credits on.
• I am at level 13, and it’s my first SWTOR character, so I am still a noob. I think Khem Val would be a better tank if I could get him some better armor, but I don’t know how to find armor except by sifting through the GTN with the existing interface that Jacob described above, or by hoping to loot/find something good. How can I find things that fit my character’s (and Khem’s) current status? He can only use heavy armor. I think his pants are already pretty good, but he doesn’t have anything on his head yet.

Max level players/characters won’t have these kinds of questions, but you can’t get to 50 until you figure out things like these. Be patient with the noobs’ needs. Focusing on the user and how their information exploration happens is a valuable tool, rather than just focusing on finding specific documents or objects. It’s about the user experience, not the the search result.

In conclusion, finally

MMO players are in a constant state of information seeking. This knowledge state compels us to retrieve or explore information constantly; the plethora of items we need to purchase for crafts, combat, and other tasks are essential to becoming 1337. Better in-game information search, retrieval, and exploration systems that facilitate making the obvious and not-so-obvious connections between items for sale would help us put these pieces together in meaningful ways. We, Jacob and Diane, with our classification and systems expertise, would love to help Bioware make this all better. (We’d also love an all-expenses-paid speaking engagement in Hawaii, but as previously stated, this is all just our opinion).

Side note: We had to edit this post before publishing it because Bioware fixed a few of the issues without mentioning it in patch notes. Good work Bioware!

tl;dr

The UI for SWTOR’s GTN could use some improvement, as many players have noted. We have some ideas on how to make it better.

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.

Welcome to Gamer Classification Week! This week, Jacob and Diane are providing a 5-part series on the categorizations related to gamers and gaming. Understanding these many aspects of gaming is essential to helping you understand games, gamers, and the information with which we collide. Today, Diane provides a look at how gamers are viewed – what a bunch of nerds! See Part 1: Casual, Hardcore, and Professional Gamers.

Today’s question: how are gamers classified? Are we geeks, or nerds, or perhaps dorks? This is a simple question with a complex answer.

Do you consider yourself a gamer, or at least a geek, nerd, or dork? If you’re unsure, I have a simple test for you: go to the ThinkGeek and browse. Do you like anything you see? If so, you probably have gamer/geek potential. (Personally, I love ThinkGeek’s Tech Jewelry page – but I’m a stylin’ kinda geek, and I think the idea of wearing a broken image necklace is beyond hilarious. But that’s me.)

Gamers as well as similar people who might be called nerds, geeks, or dorks have been marginalized for years. My dad, who passed away in 2010 at the young age of 67, was an original. He carried pens in his (plaid) shirt pocket, spent entire weekends fixing $10 radios because he thought it was fun, built PCs from parts, and worked in the computer industry from the early 1960s until he retired. He really didn’t care what anybody thought of him for doing these things, which a trait I picked up from him. But people who didn’t understand him just dismissed his activities (and even his work!) saying, “Oh, he’s a nerd, so that’s what he does.” I think he was the best male role model a girl could have: be yourself, and enjoy it!

As a result, I am a happy and proud nerd. But, despite this positive influence, others have made me suffer for it. For example, a “popular kid” called me a “dork” in 7th grade gym class, and then threw a basketball at the back of my head so hard that I almost fainted. As a result, I’ll see black spots in my line of vision for the rest of my life. Yeah, really popular stuff there.

On a happier note, think about the “nerds” in the Revenge of the Nerds films: people with weird hair, bad fashion sense, no social skills, or just plain… different. People made fun of them and bullied them. But what happens in the end? They always win! (This scene from the first film, in which they used computers and other technologies to make relatively danceable 80s music at a talent show, is timelessly epic.)

What else are we known for, stereotypically? Let’s see: we stay up all night and sleep all day, consume three food groups (sugar, caffeine, and fat), and… play games. Right? Maybe.

Geekdom has become mainstream, but it also has taken on a different angle over time. We’ve equated nerd/geekdom with being intelligent, completing work on time, and using today’s technical conveniences. People say, “I’m such a nerd. I’m always on my iPhone.” Sometimes I want to reply, “Not necessarily. That thing came in a beautifully designed package from a shining white store, and if you open it up, it will void the warranty.” Computer stores used to be true geek sanctuaries: they had all kinds of parts and interesting accessories, dusty shelves, concrete floors, random items like Star Wars mouse pads, and last year’s games on clearance.

Now, computers are mainstream no-brainers, and I’ve been complaining for years that everyone sold out. You can take a computer home in a little box from a Big Box store, and then you download almost everything you need online. Remember, though, that geeks made the circuits that run your computer, the code that makes YouTube possible, and the databases that store your Facebook profile. (Yes, there are multiple databases that store your Facebook profile. Don’t ask.) If you want to see how real geeks buy technology, see Newegg 0r Fry’s, and the truly brave can visit here in person for an old-school experience.

To be fair, there are other types of geeks/nerds/dorks. For example, I know several “humanities nerds” (my term): people who can recite a wide range of literature or recall the composer upon hearing the first two lines of an obscure piece of classical music (as well as the composer’s birth and death dates and places). These types don’t tend to game as much, however, so while they’re really important voices in the geeks’ chorus, they don’t factor in quite as much to the conversation on this blog.

Where does this leave us? I’m not sure. Geeks and nerds and dorks are so varied that it’s difficult to classify us. Just look at the cast of characters in Revenge of the Nerds, and you can only come to one conclusion: they’re all different, but they’re also all loveable in some way… just like every person alive today.

And we shall inherit the Earth.

tl;dr

Gamers are geeks, nerds, and/or dorks… but why is that bad, who cares, and aren’t you one too?

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.

Alex currently masquerades as an IT Systems Administrator and Consultant by day, while time constraints force him to only indulge in his true love at night. An avid gamer since childhood, he explored the many iterations of console games, then further ventured onto the fledgling Internet using MUD’s, BBS’s, and chat room games. Five minutes after trying Dark Age of Camelot in 2002, he was hooked on MMORPG gaming for good.

Make sure you’ve read Part 1!

Welcome back everyone! Jacob and Diane have once again been kind enough (read: bribed) to let me continue my exposition on the launch of Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Last time, we talked a little about the building blocks of game development and what makes games tick. I’d like to take a second and thank one reader, Veri, who brought up an aspect of “Playability” in her comment that I never even considered: things like motion sickness, epilepsy, and other medical deterrents that might prevent a person from enjoying a game. Thanks for the response!

Now, on to today’s topic.

In a world where more and more people are “plugged in” to social media/metworking sites (such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc)  via the internet, the processes of information control and information dissemination have become increasingly more crucial to the success of just about any endeavor.

If you want an example, take tl;dr. Diane and Jacob have not used any traditional forms of media-based marketing or advertisement to try and publicize this blog. Instead, they’re relying completely on two things to find new readers and compel them to make tl;dr a daily stop: 1) word of mouth and 2) social networking sites, such as Diane’s Twitter account.

To be technical about it, I could even make the argument that social networking sites fall under the umbrella of “word of mouth” advertising. Think about it: Facebook and Twitter are completely built around one friend telling their group of friends about a good (or bad) product, experience, store at the mall, etc. That’s pure word of mouth advertising.

So let’s say you’ve got a game currently in development. Let’s call it... Taxonomies 2: Library Strikes Back. You’ve covered the developmental process we mentioned Tuesday, and are feeling really confident about your launch.

How do you get customers to come play your brand new game?

You market. You advertise. You drop hints, teasers, and hooks. You do whatever you can to catch people’s attention and make them want to play.

Without being drawn into a tangent on successful marketing tactics that I admittedly know little about, I want to make it clear that there are several layers of business aspects outside of game development that must be managed concurrently in order to successfully launch (and run) any massively multiplayer online game.

Going back to our hypothetical Taxonomies 2, what’s the next step? Your game development is well underway, you’ve run a successful marketing campaign and have attracted a decently sized customer base who are interested in your game.  Now what?

Community Management, that’s what.

This is where Information dissemination and control become even more crucial, if that’s possible. You’ve got to keep your customers hooked on a game they can’t even play yet, all while managing to withhold your key plot points, unique game mechanics, and anything else that really makes your game stand out. Wouldn’t want to ruin the surprise now, would we?

The Community Management team is the first line of communication for all your customers. These men and women are your Support Desk, Reception Desk, Information Desk, and Customer Service Department all rolled under one big umbrella. To touch on social media again, these are the people who will be posting on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and blogs all across the internet to try and provide that exact bit of information to keep the customer happy.

After all, when you run a store and need to close early for some reason (inventory, maintenance, etc), you can post a note on the door or window and be done with it. Take a second and imagine the ramifications of getting that simple message across to all your users across multiple countries, time zones, and languages. The process just became infinitely more complex, which is one of many reasons that Information Dissemination is so important. Tools like e-mail, social networking sites, and web forums become invaluable in spreading that message in a timely manner to prevent unsatisfied customers.

When you stop to think about it, running a game sounds quite a bit like running any other successful business, right? You’ve got Product Development which flows into Quality Assurance, which flows into Sales & Marketing, and finally Community Management & Support.

My question of the day: How would you all — as librarians, information scientists, and/or gamers — create a flow or process to handle information dissemination? If you’ve run into various examples, what would you keep the same and what would you do differently? Leave a comment and tell me all about it!

So…the stage is set, the curtain drawn, and the lights are dimmed. Check back the week of January 16 when I bribe the dynamic duo into letting me finish my Star Wars Trifecta: How and Why BioWare Proved They are True Masters of the Science of Gaming.

tl;dr

When a new game comes out, there is more than just the game to be worried about. Information dissemination is key.

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

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