Posts tagged with academia in Blog Eaten by a Grue

Guest author Amanda Cote joins us again to share her thoughts on a popular topic at the recent ALA Conference: Video Games in Library Collections.

The Fourth International Games Innovation Conference is accepting submissions for their next conference taking place in September 2012.

Submissions are being accepted for the National STEM Video Game Challenge, an opportunity for students and educators to flex their creative muscles and share their original video game concepts.The competition is divided into four categories: Middle School, High School, Collegiate, and Educators. The general goal of the competition is to motivate interest is Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM).Submissions will be accepted anytime between November 15th - March 12.

The National Endowment for the Arts is offering a grant to help fund "development, production and distribution of innovative media projects," including video games that can be considered works of art.

Our fearless leader Dave was recently quoted in an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education, which explored the growing prevalence of game collections within academic libraries.

Why do we enjoy playing scary games so much? Nicholaus Noles, a developmental psychologist at the University of Michigan, gives us a psychological perspective into the science behind our attraction to games that inspire a sense of fear, horror or danger. One of the reasons he gives is that they "allow us to experience powerful and complex emotions in a safe way," and that developers use situations in which gamers have limited control over a scary situation to create an effective horror-filled experience.

Professor Sheila Murphy is teaching her class again this semester, entitled "Video Games as Culture/Form." Besides a trip to our archive to get up close and personal with some of the more violent games in our collection, students from the class are also contributing to the course blog at http://videogameform.blogspot.com/, where they give their unedited perspectives on a variety of topics related to video games and culture.

A semi-regular round-up of interesting video game links from around the Interwebs.

We've published a new LibGuide for Video Game Studies. It covers "the academic analysis of various aspects of computer, console, arcade, and Internet games," from both social science and humanities perspectives. This guide was created by Ben Nanamaker, one of our University Library Associates here at the AAEL.

With this blog I hope to not only talk about our upcoming Computer & Video Game Archive here at the MLibrary, but also document my exploration into the relatively-new-to-me world of games in the academy. First up is The Education Arcade at MIT.