Map games

Word got around to a student who wasn't at my focus group on Monday night that I had talked about doing some kind of games with maps. One of the games mentioned in Trefry's presentation on Big Games is to print a map of New York on one side of a piece of paper, and a map of Baghdad on the other side with landmarks marked on it. People hold the map up to the light and find how those points line up in NYC, then go to that part of the city to learn something about the landmark in Baghdad.

The focus group had suggested using fictional maps like Gotham City, Narnia, or Middle Earth with campus or even all of Williamsport. People could then go to these cites and do something. The students seem to be really excited about this, and it would be a great outreach event, and the student I just mentioned caught me in the caf yesterday to talk about it. But I'm not sure what to put at those sites that would be exciting... Plus the only one of these places I know anything about is Narnia. I'm not sure which of the three has the broadest interest, I know our campus has a popular annual Lord of the Rings Trivial Pursuit each year that pits faculty against students.

This will take some pondering.

Big Games, Part Deux

This morning I received a comment from Jenny Levine, who pointed out that I completely missed the link to the audio presentation on big games by Gregory Trefly on the ALA's gaming Web site. Duh. This was so useful, and I'm so glad she pointed this out to me. I have already listened to it (it's about 45 minutes long) and contacted two people about possibly doing one of these on our campus.

If you really can't listen to the whole thing, fast-forward to slide 45 and about 37 minutes into the audio presentation, but the earlier stuff is very helpful background info. This is where it starts to specifically discuss big games in libraries.

Almost all of the big games revolve around four basic games:

1. tag
2. scavenger hunt
3. hide & seek
4. capture the flag

Libraries are great places because they often have many branches (lots of these games are in NYC), have collections, great spaces, content, unique identifiers (call no.'s & bar codes), referees (librarians/staff), tools (computers, copiers, wi-fi, etc.) and a place to display.

He listed five undeveloped ideas for games that libraries could do:

1. Secret Agent - based on the scavenger hunt. It involves secret meeting points, and avoiding detection (no running or disturbing people who aren't playing). Collect codes, and set levels so they know how they're doing when they "level up."
2. Then/Now - this one interests me the most at the moment. In their example, they had old pictures of places around NYC from the library's archives, and the players have to go around and take pictures of how it looks now. I want to do this around campus.
3. Rent control - the real real estate game. I don't understand this.
4. Babel code - using the foreign language materials in the library to break codes
5. Dewey's Demons - finding codes online or in the stacks to create and take care of creatures. I don't understand the details of this either.

To do one of these big games, look around your everyday world. Give normal activities goals, look for simple ways to track moves. Once you have a plan, run a test play (or he called it playtest) several times until it works, because it never works the first time.

This presentation is definitely worth listening to, and I hope we can do the Then/Now thing with freshmen this fall.

Big Games

I'm facinated by this idea of "big games" that will happen at ALA Annual, which I am not attending. I'm trying to find out more about this concept and how we could use it to make library instruction and orientations more interesting for students. Gregory Trefry apparently did a presentation on big games in libraries and how call numbers can be used as codes, librarians as referees, and scanners and computers used as tools. Unfortunately, the slides are posted but don't have any helpful information for people who weren't at the presentation. So far, the most useful site has been Come Out & Play. They organize a big festival in NYC, which happens to be this weekend, and many of the activities are outlined in detail on this site. Now if I can just figure out how they relate to libraries and how to make them educational!

We have been contacted by the college's development office to have a small amount of time during their annual retreat to introduce them to aspects of the library we want them to know about. Two of us in the library just met with the director this morning to discuss possibilities. We are thinking about some time of scavenger hunt, but we only have them for 30 minutes, including about 10 minutes in the archives. I believe our theme will be "libraries aren't what they used to be," or something like that. It will focus on the modern library. We're trying to focus on what we think alumni and donors would be interested in, and that is difficult.

I'm going to further explore this idea of big games and see if we can find creative ideas to make this fun and to make other educational events for students fun... fun for us and for them!