After Lunch

Cool! The new presenter-—Constance Steinkuehler--is showing us a castle siege from the MMOG (Massive Multiplayer Online Game) Lineage II. Paladins, magic, dark elves, and all. She recorded it and put it into her PowerPoint. She said they usually spend 2-6 weeks planning something like that. Lots of strategy meetings and coordinating, but the final result is kind of like a scene from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings. Now she’s talking about how some people use real money to buy game value. She’s explaining the difference between the value of a gold piece and a platinum piece. We had the same conversation with Atabong over lunch. He said that much of the gold for sale from games is built up by players in China; the per-hour income from playing to earn game gold to sell on eBay is better than the hourly wage for other labor. The presenter just added that the economy of some of these virtual worlds are actually more powerful than the economies of some real world countries. Of course the point she’s getting to is that all of these meetings, planning, working together to reach both individual and mutual goals, market economics, etc. encountered online are valuable learning experiences with real world transfer. I think I saw a copy of this PowerPoint that someone brought back from a previous conference. It’s good to hear in person. She’s rather impressive and quite brilliant. A well-made case that critics have no understanding of what actually happens during the games, and that there is also a ton of literacy development taking place: fan fiction, emails, tons of reading and writing.

Also over lunch: Atabong shared (after being asked) that he probably spends 2-4 hours a night playing World of Warcraft; 30-40 hours per week. Plus console games on one side for slow periods and movies on the other computer, plus friends on the voice-over-IP. Impressive multitasking. But now I know I don’t have the time needed to get hooked. My triathlon “hobby” takes up any spare time I might have for something like that.

1.8. As an Assistant Professor, she said, her primary job is to write journal articles. And the average number of people who read each journal article written (all, not just hers) is 1.8 readers. It would make feel like, why bother?

Maybe it’s just because I haven’t met the average listeners all around me, but I feel like there are more tech types here than anything else. Followed by (and with quite a bit of crossover) academic types as the next largest group. Librarians seem fewer in number (look at who we brought—I’m the only public service staff of the group). I think it’s actually a good intersection, that the computer people and librarians have a lot to learn from each other and should only improve because of it. I know I have a lot of questions about the technical side of search engines and the like and think I would search better if I understood more about how they worked (not that I’m completely ignorant). But at the same time I’m a little disappointed there aren’t more YS and YA librarians here. The college/university folks are looking at what they can do with gaming, of course, and we had lunch with a school media specialist who is trying to figure out how it might fit into her school, but it seems the public libraries are the most obvious place to start implementing things. I thought there would be more of us.