Library Blogs

Here is our list of most popular games in the archive for July. The Last of Us quickly climbed towards the top, and it's nice to see that Final Fantasy is still making an appearance. We've had lots of junior high and high school visitors, and their favorite games to play are reflected here as well.

It's that time again! Hard to imagine that we need to start hiring for the Fall already, but the Summer goes by quickly. Feel free to share the job posting below. Our deadline for applying for the Fall semester will be on August 15th.

Today we hosted a dance-off in which a professor-who-will-remain-nameless challenged her students to compete with her using the video game Dance Central 2.

Here is our list of most popular games in the archive from June. Smash is back on the list now that it's open to play anytime for the Spring/Summer semesters, and Final Fantasy IX makes an appearance due to the efforts of one student trying to get through it this Summer. Our Arcade Legends Cabinet is also getting a lot of attention, probably due to the number of tours and class sessions taking place in the archive last month.

Yesterday, the archive hosted an English 298 class entitled "The Games We Play." Students played a number of our games that were puzzle-oriented (most of them also included utopian/dystopian themes), and then presented what they learned as they discussed how their game incorporates the concepts of work and play.

Here is our list of the most popular games for the month of May. A Wii U game makes the list, with one very enthusiastic player putting P3P for the PSP on the list as well. Our arcade cabinet has also seen more play over the past few weeks.

Since the announcement of Micrsoft's next generation Xbox One gaming and entertainment console earlier this week, we've received several inquiries about our thoughts on how it's announced features, particularly the cloud computing and DRM aspects, will affect how we deal with it in the archive. Below are my (Dave's) initial thoughts:I've been following somewhat the information about the Xbox One since its announcement earlier this week. While we don't have many details yet, what I've read so far gives me cause for concern as to how we'll be able to work with the new system in the Computer & Video Game Archive.As far as offloading game play to the cloud and requiring an Internet connection to function, this offers a challenge that is in many ways similar to dealing with MMORPGs like World of Warcraft. If the online experience is part of the game, how do you replicate that experience when the online component is no longer available? (And in the case of WoW, even if you have the game and have a server on which to run it, is it really the same experience without several million other players interacting? Ten or twenty years from now it will be essentially impossible to experience WoW.)There is a history of manufacturers not supporting their old gaming platforms; e.g. in 2010 when Microsoft stopped supporting the original Xbox on Xbox Live. If you want to play Halo 2 online multiplayer on your Xbox? Sorry, you can't. And that's for a game that's less than 10 years old.But I can take a game and game system from 30 years ago, plug them in and they still work and play fine. Even for companies that are long defunct. Will the same be true in even 10 years for games for the Xbox One?I'm also concerned about new DRM restrictions, such as requiring a game to be installed and tied to a specific user account. This also presents challenges to us (not to mention to the First-Sale Doctrine...) Though we've been dealing with this sort of thing with PC-based games for several years now and I'm sure we'll deal it, it doesn't fill me with warm fuzzy feelings.Still, with both of these issues, the proof of the pudding is (as they say) in the eating. We'll have to wait until more details are available before evaluating if the Xbox One will be a system that we can support for archival purposes. Or if we're just tilting at windmills.

Here are the top games played in the archive during the month of April. As classes and exams are ending, it appears that Smash has been popular enough to make it back on the list. Banjo Kazooie has also been surprisingly popular over the past month or so.

Word has come to us of another new game-related class being offered in Fall 2013 here at the University of Michigan:Technology and Play This course considers the social science of play and interactive media technology. The three central questions addressed in this course are: “What is play?”, “How does technology mediate play?”, and “What are the consequences of this mediation?” Over the semester, we’ll investigate the social scientific and humanities research on play, the structure of games, and the societal consequences of mediated play for both children and adults. A special focus will be “games for change” (a.k.a. “serious games”) that have an educational purpose. The term will be organized around competing theories of play (e.g., development, fate/chance, power, identity, fantasy, self-fulfillment, nonsense), and will be illustrated with examples from computer games. This is a project-based course. Throughout the semester we will work toward producing two conceptual design projects for playful technologies. These are roughly equivalent to a midterm and a final, or a short and a long paper. As these are conceptual projects, technical skills are not required. Technology and PlayF13 M/W 4 - 5:30 p.m.Undergraduate Section: COMM 408.001Graduate Section: COMM 840.001No prerequisites.Instructor: Christian Sandvig (csandvig@umich.edu)Note that you must e-mail the instructor to enroll in the graduate section.

A little last minute, but here's an interesting event going on in the building today: Join us for an informal show-n-tell and open discussion around Motion Capture in feature films and video games with Marc Morisseau, an alumni of U-M and the UM3DLab. Marc is currently working for Just Cause Entertainment and played a large role in the Motion Capture for Avatar 1, Resident Evil 6, Star Trek 2, and several yet to be announced feature films. It should be an exciting discussion as Marc talks about some of his recent projects and challenges that accompany large productions.