Games, Gamers, & Gaming

November 2, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (1)

Do you find people coming to your gaming events with questions? "What is going on? Why are you playing games in the library? I'm curious. I'm concerned. I don't understand."

If you've been doing gaming awhile, you probably have good answers already. However, you might not always have time to give a thorough explanation, or maybe people don't want to interrupt you to ask. (We never encounter that elsewhere in a library, do we?) My suggestion, assuming you don't already have something like this, is to make a one-sheet handout available to the curious, the...Read More

October 28, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (1)

Game design is something only the geekiest kids used to do. We huddled over our desks in back rooms drawing maps of imaginary worlds, cogitating on whether to use 6-, 8-, 12- or 20-sided dice (and how many of which) to get the right random number generation effects on outré charts. We thought about wandering monster frequencies, researched obscure medieval weapons, discussed targeted hit location probabilities, cooked up unlikely political systems from whole cloth. We invented terrible doom-laden spells for evil sorcerers to visit on the hapless adventurers, and for finger-waggling wizards to throw right back at the bad guys.

Later,...Read More

October 23, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

I talk a lot about the serious side of gaming here. Sometimes I think I don't talk enough about the serious aspects but I've addressed literacy issues, violence, age and generation issues, what players are learning and recently, about charity fundraising. I try to write in a light, easily accessible style so you don't flinch at my wall of words, as opposed to trying to bowl you over with my 133t polysyllabic erudition. If you confuse taking your work seriously with taking yourself seriously, you didn't catch my post ...Read More

October 19, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (3)

If you live in or near Rochester, NY you probably already know about Picture the Impossible. Lucky you, I say! If you haven't heard about it, check it out. Yes, you have to register to see into the site, but let me give you their "About" information here.

Picture the Impossible is a community-based game developed jointly by the Lab for Social Computing at the Rochester Institute of Technology and the R...Read More

October 15, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (2)

LaVerne Poussaint's guest column earlier this week, talking about NanoGaming and her planned efforts for the Extra Life charity initiative, didn't create comments here (boooo!) but I hope some of you will see fit to support her. What her column did create was a lot of conversation in my email inbox. 

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You might remember Jennifer Nelson, who wrote ...Read More