Library Blogs

Coursera, a website that teams up with professors from various universities to offer free online courses to the public, is offering an introductory course on gamification, a concept that is gaining speed quickly. The course begins this week. This is reportedly one of the first courses designed specifically for the concept of gamification, and the course itself is partly designed to explore the meaning and purpose of the concept, as well as to generate ideas on how to apply it in relevant ways. Read more about the course here.

Check out Dave Carter, our fearless leader, describing the archive in a more in-depth glance at what we have to offer via this feature on SlashDot.

One of the fun things about getting donations of really old computer equipment is that sometimes we find random bits of entertainment to go along with it. Here is a really old dictionary of computer terms that has helpful (and hilarious) pictures to describe each term.

The archive recently got its very own vertical file, which has inspired a discussion about what we want to highlight and set aside for research purposes. One thing we've decided to set aside are the game ads that come in game cases, and the product catalogs (especially the really old ones) that are donated to us over time. Having them all in one place could make it easier for someone studying game marketing over time to access what they need.

An article hit the New York Times earlier this month discussing the prevalence of sexual harassment in virtual game play. In the article, they highlight several examples online, from a Kickstarter devoted to documenting how women are portrayed in video games to a blog devoted to the unpleasant comments that women often encounter while playing online games. Quoted in the article are also several people who recognize the need to do something about it.

Here is the top 10 of our most popular games in the archive for the month of July. A combination of a lot of kids in the archive, as well as a number of individual users dedicated to playing a specific game everyday has given us a list that looks a little different from normal. Personally, it's been refreshing to see more unconventional games being played.

We've been working on sorting through some of the game ephemera that we've collected over the years and finding a good way to display it. Some of this stuff is just too good not to have out there for people to see.