Library Blogs

Another game of old has arrived still in the wrapping, this time from 1983. Oink! is for the Atari and explores the Three Little Piggies fairy tale from the wolf's point of view. Fortunately, we got another copy of the game as well, so this one will probably stay in the wrapping and be shown off in our display case. Sometimes you just have to blow the house down.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled 7-2 in the Brown v. EMA (formerly Schwarzenegger v. EMA) case that a California law barring the sale of violent video games to minors was unconstitutional, saying that video games are a creative medium deserving of first amendment protection.

Video games have received a lot of attention lately from politicians like Obama and Gore, and their messages don't always agree. Gore was quoted at the 2011 Games for Change Festival today, praising the video game industry as a "very large, extremely significant industry with a wildly diverse and rapidly growing audience of players on all kinds of platforms," and gave several examples of games that "integrate social good and efforts to make the world a better place into games." Obama, on the other hand, though not expressly against video games, has warned people of the dangers they present in distracting kids from family time, as well as their education.

The Supreme Court is reportedly finishing up their assessment of an issue presented through a California court case back in November, which questions whether it should be legal to sell violent video games to minors. Video games are currently regulated via the ESRB rating system, and certain ratings may be deemed illegal to sell to people who are underage.

University of Michigan psychology professor Susanne M. Jaeggi was quoted today in an L.A. Times article about research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that explored the possibility of certain video games improving the reasoning and working memory ability of children who play them.

Yesterday, we received a game ordered from eBay that was still in the wrapping. A common occurrence, right? Except this is an Intellivision game from 1982. It's so nicely wrapped, and probably would be worth a pretty penny later on to some collector. And yet it's our job to test these games and prepare them to be used by our archive users. Because after all, games are meant to be played.

Microsoft has just finished announcing the direction that they're going to be taking in the coming year...

The University of Michigan Library's Web Systems department built a Drupal module for searching Serials Solutions' Summon product using the Summon API.

An article on KCET.org describes how researchers of the newly-released video game L.A. Noire used library and archive materials to inspire ideas for the game, from using old photography and maps to inspire the visuals, to scouring old newspapers for real-life crime stories that inspired the plots in the game.

Here are our games for the month of May. For the first time, one of our board games (Settlers of Catan) tied for 11th in our top games list. And clearly the end of the Winter term hasn't deterred the Smashers and Starcraft fans from getting their practice in.