International Games Day @ your library Game on November 16, 2013!

November update – a week and a bit to go…

Posted on November 6, 2013

Hey everyone! Ten sleeps (or eleven depending where you are) until International Games Day @ your library. I can't wait! Check out how many people will be playing with us this year!


[Why have some dots turned green? It's a Secret.]

Even with something like 60 new libraries since last week, our total is still a bit down on last year - not surprising given all the shenanigans affecting libraries in the USA, which as IGD's birthplace is still where it's best-known. (If you're joining us on the day but aren't yet on the map, it's still not too late to register, by the way. You can register right up to the day itself - we'll try and do a final update just before IGD.)

But on the brighter side, we still have the better part of a thousand libraries joining us - and check out how many libraries we'll be playing with internationally! I make it 73 libraries outside the USA, in 27 different countries. [1] Welcome to all our new friends from around the world - and welcome back to all our friends from previous years, too!

I hope you're all ready to play. As far as we're aware, everything has been done at our end, and all should be good to go.

Libraries in the USA should by now have received the sponsored games they requested. Thanks again to all our sponsors for their generosity - we appreciate it, and so will the library patrons who get to play your games on the 16th!

Similarly, wherever you are in the world, if you said "Yes" to playing Global Gossip this year, you should also know whether or not you're participating; and if you are, you should have all the information you need to run the game. If you registered your interest but didn't get a slot this year - sorry! We just couldn't get everyone in this time, despite more than doubling the number of participating libraries. You should have had an email either way - if you haven't heard anything at all, please let us know.

I'll post again one more time before the big day, but mostly it's just waiting for the countdown now. I look forward to playing with you all - and with the thousands of people across the world whom we'll be connecting with this event - on the 16th!

 

 


[1] As a proud Aussie I am not above pointing out that Australia, with 24 libraries participating, is coming in second for number of registrations.

(And that's not including Antarctica, which also joins the day courtesy of us Aussies. Just sayin'.)

(In the interests of fairness, I should point out that if all of our Scandinavian friends from Nordic Game Day had also registered with IGD they would probably have beat Australia.)

(But they didn't :P )

However, I am not just a proud Australian, I am also a proud library-lover and gamer. And as such I hope you will all take this footnote as an invitation to try and beat us next year. If you think you can...[Back]

Surprise bonus play: extra games!

Posted on October 25, 2013

It's a good day for IGD donations! Thanks to the generosity of another sponsor, IGD libraries in the USA will be getting more games than we initially expected!

USAopoly has just informed us that they will be shipping US libraries a whole extra game! In addition to the promised copies of the fast-paced vocabulary game Tapple, each recipient will receive a copy of their spatial strategy game Crossways.

(Sorry for the spoilers! But we figured you'd rather have extra time to plan than the nice surprise when you open the box.)

Thanks USAopoly! Here's a little info around the two games to whet your appetite:

TAPPLE BOX F

Each round in Tapple, one player draws a topic card, then starts the timer. In the next ten seconds, that player must give a single word answer that fits within the topic, press down the letter key in a special electronic device that corresponds to the first letter of that word, and restart the timer. The next player must then think of a word for the topic that starts with a different letter, press down that starting letter, and restart the timer. If a player runs out of time, she's out for the round. If only one player remains in a round, she collects the topic card. If players manage to press down all of the letters before knocking all but one player out of a round, the players reset the device, draw a new topic card, then start the timer again, this time having to give two answers for the topic – each starting with a different letter – within the allotted time. Whoever collects the most topic cards wins! If you want to learn more, there's a quick how-to-play video on their site.

Crossways_PR_web600

In CrossWays players want to be the first to build a path of their pieces from one side of the game board to the opposite side, but to build they need to use the cards they draw and have in hand.

On a turn, a player can lay down a single card (e.g., a red 9) and place one of their pieces on this space on the game board; she can also lay down a pair of cards with the same value and place two of her pieces in a stack on any space, including the white ones that are otherwise off-limits. If a player has two pieces in a row on a stack, no one else can play on top of that stack – but by playing a suited run of cards, a player can remove pieces already on the board, putting those spaces into play once again. The CrossWays site has more information if you want to learn more.

Surprise bonus play: extra libraries!

Posted on October 25, 2013

Hi everyone! Great news - Konami (makers of collectible card game Yu-Gi-Oh! - see our guest post about it here) have just told us they'll ship their sponsorship packs to Canadian libraries too! Thanks Konami!

Special Guest Post: Postcard from Nordic Game Day 2013 – Thomas Vigild

Posted on October 22, 2013

You may know that in Northern Europe games are massively popular - despite the abundance of huge games conventions in the States (who me, jealous?), the world's single largest annual games convention is actually Spiel, in Essen, Germany. The existence of a regional Nordic Game Day is just further proof that games are going strong over there. To tell us more, here's the organiser of Nordic Game Day, Thomas Vigild! Thanks Thomas!

Aarhus Library in Denmark

Hi IGD!

Huge high fives from the Nordics, where the preparations for Nordic Game Day 2013 are going really well. Right now over 60 libraries all over the region have enlisted their official support for Nordic Game Day - and Norway is leading the charge - but many more will follow, as we gear up with more events, talks, competitions and tournaments on November 16th.

Games have become a natural and essential part of the Nordic libraries, and especially in Denmark this has been the case for many years. Many libraries in Denmark have dedicated game-librarians, who are skilled in how to communicate about games and cook up events for the patrons.

But libraries in Norway and Sweden are really quickly catching up these years, because many librarians have discovered the social power of games - both physical board games and digital games on both consoles, browsers and tablets.

One example is Drammen library in Norway, where they are hosting an annual “Spilnatt” (“Games Night”), which have hundred of kids standing in line to get into the library. During the night the library hosts all sorts of competitions, showcases of new both international and Nordic games and sometimes also board games, card games like Magic or roleplaying games.

At Nordic Game Day 2013 the big Nordic competition will go down in the beautiful and wonderful crazy mini-golf game ‘Wonderputt’ made for browsers. We wanted to find a non-violent game with awesome graphics and strong gameplay which was easy to get into, so here ‘Wonderputt’ seemed like a good match. The main prize is the new upcoming Sony PlayStation 4, so we´re expecting heavy resistance on the virtual golf-courses all across the region :)

Furthermore the Nordic libraries hosts a lot of regional tournaments in games like FIFA, Mario Kart, Magic: the Gathering, Singstar, Trackmania, Kinect games and also the physical quiz-board game Bezzerwizzer - and yes: quizzing is really big in the Nordics. The main library in Malmø (Sweden) will also feature an exhibition of old classic board games from the 70s, so there will be something for everybody during this Nordic Game Day.

We hope IGD is also doing well, and see ya later :)

- Thomas Vigild, coordinator for Nordic Game Day (supported by Nordic Game Institute)

More pictures from Nordic Game Day 2012 here!

Talking points: Games, systems, and systems literacy

Posted on October 14, 2013

Welcome to the fifth and final entry in that series of more detailed talking points we mentioned! I hope you've found them interesting and informative - or at least useful in making the case for games as having a place among the many modes of culture the library supports. I would be very interested to hear feedback in the comments! Anyway, here's the summary of this final Talking Point from the original post:

Games are systems, and fostering intelligent literacy about systems is an important educational goal on par with fostering intelligent literacy about words.

As we've discussed, games are culture that creates connections between people; they force us to exercise our capacity for mindfulness; and they are as capable of seriousness and at least as capable of fun as any other medium. But we have not yet talked about perhaps the single most important aspect of games: their existence as systems of rules. (And in some cases nothing more - no physical components at all!)

The world we live in is full of systems. Many of these are natural systems, such as the immensely complex system of air and water circulation that moves heat around the planet and (for instance) allows the west coast of Ireland to be far warmer than it has any right to be out there in the Atlantic with nothing between it and the Arctic. Or the migration patterns of birds and insects, or the dance of subatomic particles within every atom of matter, or the myriad physiological systems (nervous, digestive, circulatory, immune, endocrine...) whose interactions enable the individual existences of every complex living organism on the planet - including us.

Then there are the hybrid natural-human systems on which we depend, such as agriculture, water storage and distribution, various forms of power generation and resource gathering, shipping, fermentation, various medical interventions, and many more.

And lastly, of course, there are the entirely anthropogenic systems - languages (and for that matter language as a whole); the high technology of the internet and its billions of electronic components (including the computer on which I write this and the device on which you read it) which of course are themselves systems; government, the military, cities and towns; economies, corporations, production systems, workplaces; architecture, narratives, music, culture... We have always been surrounded and pervaded by systems of tremendous complexity, but increasingly and for an increasing number of us, the systems with which we interact are either heavily influenced by human intervention, or human-created.

(And we ignore to our peril the inescapable reality that all these systems which can so easily engross and consume our attention are themselves embedded in and emergent from the larger natural systems which surround us, supplying their raw materials, enabling and/or constraining their processes, and being affected by their outputs.)

One of the many extraordinary things about humanity is its capacity to perceive not just the moment-to-moment flow of phenomena, but - indirectly - the systems which underlie the endless tumble of events. It's like trying to work out the inner workings of a tremendous factory by peering through the windows - only the factory is the size of the universe, some of its machines are smaller than atoms, and each of us only gets one window a few centimetres across.

It is my firm belief - and I am far from alone in this; Plato, Einstein, and many other great minds agree - that this capacity is intimately linked to our capacity for play. Play is about consequence and experimentation, about if-this-then-that and what-if-this-happens? It is hard to imagine a behaviour better adapted to learning and responding to the parameters of a system.

Games, as codified play, are themselves systems. Some are incredibly simple systems - Tic-Tac-Toe or Snap - while some are tremendously complex systems which attempt to approximate reality (or some imaginary version thereof) - particularly the "crunchier" or more rules-heavy end of the tabletop roleplaying genre and the wargames from which it evolved, which have their roots in genuine military attempts to simulate various actual battle - and economic and ecological - conditions, and which typically by their nature need to be able to respond to player actions outside a rigorously predefined set of possibilities.

I am not an especially good Chess player, and barely know Go, but in both cases I know enough to see that one of the keys to successful play is the ability to successfully visualise the myriad interactions of a single move both on the board at the time and in the branching possibilities that arise from the new game state - the way it shifts the interfering patterns of support and protection. If I move my rook here, it protects my king, but leaves my bishop vulnerable, and if that goes my queen has nothing to protect it either. Of course, this is just one aspect of play; the ability to use the shift of pieces to manipulate your opponent into making key mistakes is another (and according to some, though I personally disagree, even more important) dimension - playing on your opponent through your play on the board.

Clearly these are skills which are worth cultivating - as our ancestors have known for millennia, as evidenced by the prestige rightly accorded excellence at Go, Chess, and similar games by cultures all around the world. This same ability to visualise and anticipate multiple interlocking influences and consequences is vital to biology, medicine, climate science, economics, physics, engineering, advanced manufacturing and informational workflows - pretty much any advanced discipline, and especially cross-disciplinary work and even advanced generalisation. (If you're interested in further reading, the pioneering work in systems thinking - the art of understanding system dynamics - done by Donella Meadows and others is an excellent place to start developing the general skill of analysing systems.)

So that's one aspect of this topic: the inherent merits of games as practice for life in the same way that fiction is - as a playful practice of necessary analytical skills with very real applications. But as we discussed last month, games aren't just systems, they're poetic systems - systems which are designed to express and/or induce particular emotions, ideas, or other responses.

And this is for me perhaps the most valuable aspect of games as culture: they teach us that systems are not neutral, that they can and do embody particular values and weight themselves towards particular outcomes, and that these outcomes are expressive of the way the system is designed at least as much as they are of the qualities of particular participants in or elements of the system. Given that many of the systems which are most negatively impacting most of us at this point in time are human-created, and many of the natural systems affecting us negatively are human-influenced, this is an essential lesson for us to learn - and apply.

 

This concludes our Talking Points series! I hope it has helped to persuade those who need persuading that there is substantial value to be found in games, and that they have the capacity to be the active, dynamic complement to the pensive, contemplative cultural mode that books foster. We need both reflection and decision in our lives; I would argue that we need both games and books as ways to keep those parts of our psyches in good health without being overloaded in reality.

There is a great deal more to say about games - the lessons they teach us (through game theory) about mutual support, competition, community, and more; the mental health benefits; the extraordinary range of social and technological innovations they have driven; the fact that gaming culture, although (somewhat deservedly) having a reputation for being riddled with nasty online behaviour, is in many ways ahead of the mainstream in identifying and constructively attempting to address bigotry and discrimination - but we're on the volunteer dime here, and these are all readily available if you start looking. Plus, we've got to save something for next year!

What I would like to do at this point is to encourage our readers to start talking about their own learnings from engaging with games, either here in the comments, or in your own libraries and communities. One other thing games teach you is the endless variety of human experience, the value of being open to each other, and the exponential possibilities enabled  by sharing. (OK, three things which are sort of one thing.)

In any case, thanks for reading the series and best wishes as our preparations ramp up for International Games Day @ your library!