Posts by Val Waldron

Looking for a course related to game studies for the Fall term? We'll list several of them here. You can find out more about studying games at U-M on our video game studies research guide.

As the Winter term comes to an end, we like to take a look back and see which games were most popular in the archive over the course of the year. We take a look at our top 10 games over the Winter term, with FIFA being played about 3 times as often as anything else. We also have a few new games that have taken off, including Spider-Man, Assassin's Creed: Odyssey and the surprise couch co-op hit, Overcooked 2. Looking at our top 10 list over the Fall and Winter semester, we see some similarities, with FIFA taking the lead and Mario Kart making the list as well. In addition, Rock Band 3 made it on the list for the first time in quite awhile.

Interested in creating adaptive and accessible video game technology? Looking to learn which video games are the best of the best when it comes to accessibility? Just looking to game? The library is hosting two accessible and adaptive gaming events in April! The CVGA is also working to add more accessible and adaptive gaming equipment to its collection.

Curious about which university classes are incorporating games into their studies? Here is a list of game-related classes happening this semester.

Welcome back, everyone. We wanted to alert you to a slight change in CVGA hours for the Winter term. We usually have a maintenance window on Monday mornings that we use to keep our systems running, but this window has been temporarily been moved to Thursday mornings. During the Winter term, we will be closed on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day (1/21) as well as during Winter break.

To help conclude our 10th anniversary celebrations, we wanted to highlight an online exhibit that we originally put together five years ago called CVGA Disassembled. It summarizes many of the different generations of game systems, and how they've evolved since they first became popular in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It also takes a look at how game systems have evolved on the inside, including several images of partially disassembled game systems in each game generation.

As part of our 10th anniversary, we're pleased to share with you a timeline of events and milestones that have shaped and highlighted our collection and services over the years. Also, a reminder that we will be having a party on Friday, November 16th from 3-5pm in the Duderstadt Center basement area (just outside the archive space) to continue the celebrations.

We'd like to share the details about a video game-related talk happening in the library next week: This presentation is an exploration of the intersections of video game building, meaningful learning, Indigenous and Western cultures through relation-oriented ontologies - rather than aspect- or object- oriented ones. From the tech that is used to the land and waters the event is hosted on - these connections matter, weaving networks of relations across digital and physical heterotopic borders.

Over the next few months, we'll be celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Computer & Video Game Archive. To help kick off the celebrations, we've decided to create a poll on our bulletin board that provides a place for archive users to share their favorite memories. The questions ask "What is your favorite memory of the CVGA?" and "What is your first memory playing video games?"

The Computer & Video Game Archive is hiring student workers for its service desk. Positions will start at the beginning of Fall term, although there may be some training beforehand. Interested candidates should apply on the Library Student Employment website, indicating the Computer & Video Game Archive as a library area in which they'd be interested.