Library Blogs

Online gamers have used a game called FoldIt to help decipher "the structure of an enzyme of an AIDS-like virus," helping scientists to develop "new insights for the design of antiretroviral drugs. "While the enzyme had "thwarted scientists for a decade," the entire process took the online gamers only about 3 weeks to crack.

The CVGA now has an events calendar to help everyone keep track of when the archive will be reserved for special events, as well as where we will be represented around campus. Check it out here: http://bit.ly/cvga-events

The Shapiro Library on Central Campus hosted a welcome event for incoming freshmen called Party for Your Mind over the weekend, complete with an introduction to the library system's resources, video games from the CVGA, and rubber ducks (library rubber ducks) for souvenirs. Here are some pictures of the fun times that were had on Sunday afternoon.

Here are the top games played in the archive for the month of August. Brawl is ahead of Melee, but I'm sure that will change now that students are returning. And people have been playing a couple of older favorites while the archive has been relatively quiet. Should be interesting to see what the Fall brings!

The CVGA will be featured on next week's special episode of Double Jump about Gaming & Libraries. Double Jump is "Michigan's only local game show," and "explores gaming as a legitimate and mainstream form of art and entertainment." They've posted a Sneak Peak to next week's episode on YouTube, which contains our segment.

Julia Lange, a doctoral student who has been making occasional use of the CVGA for her research, was at E3 earlier this summer, and shared with us a few photos she snapped with her cellphone: Thanks Julia!

Authored by Joanna Price: Your friendly CVGA intern, here, to tell you about a new and exciting group. The Computer and Video Game Archive is proud to host a Girls' Gaming Group, the 2nd and 4th Thursday evenings of every month, from 6-9 PM at the archive. Beginners welcome! If you're interested, please join our Facebook group.

The organizers of the annual Classic Gaming Expo - John Hardie, Sean Kelly, and Joe Santulli - have a mission. They want to start a physical museum that collects everything about classic games - every version of every game, design & developer notes, promotional materials, backups of unreleased games, etc.  The exact location is yet to be determined, but San Jose, CA is their stated goal.

Today we released the third high priority feature identified by the HathiTrust Full-text Search Working Group: relevance ranking for "Search in this text."

We recently had the opportunity to host a social event for the A2 GeekTour, whose aim is to create "a chance for geeks to get together and explore a physical space that has some claim to geekdom." Highlights included the group experiencing moments of nostalgia as they checked out our Atari games and some of the older equipment, as well as an opportunity for them to rock out with a few Rock Band songs, complete with the string guitar controller.