YALSA blog: thoughts from PAX East and an intro to interactive fiction

March 20, 2011

Last weekend I went to PAX East in Boston. I had a great weekend playing games (new and old) with friends (new and old) and enjoying nerding out, but there were definitely moments when I had my librarian hat on. One of those moments was during the keynote address, given by Jane McGonigal (author of Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World). She talked about how gaming can be social, how gaming can be an avenue for healing, and why gaming matters in general–and I was thinking a lot about gaming in libraries and how it sounds like we can use a lot of what’s in her book to make the case for gaming. (Check out this Reuters article for more about her work.)

Over the course of the weekend, we played a lot of games, and I’m excited about introducing one of them, Zombie Dice, to the kids who come to my weekly drop-in gaming sessions.

But we didn’t just play games at PAX–we also talked about them and listened to people talk about them. One of the panel discussions I attended was on legal concerns in gaming, and I was struck by the overlap in the legal issues we encounter in the library world: gamers and librarians alike come across questions about the doctrine of first sale, copyright, digital distribution, and the rights of minors.

But the one thing I encountered that weekend that really got my librarian jets firing was interactive fiction. A piece of interactive fiction is a text adventure game where the narrative unfolds as you solve puzzles and interact with the world around you. I think it’d be really awesome to organize an IF competition for library teens where they create their own stories or adapt their favorite YA novel into a game–or at least to show them this alternate form of storytelling. I’ve written more on the YALSA blog about interactive fiction and about a great language and development environment, Inform 7, that makes creating IF accessible even if you’re not a programmer. I included a little mini-game and the source code for it if you want to see how easy Inform 7 makes writing IF.

Have any of you brought IF to your library?

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Tags: gaming, interactive fiction, wearing my librarian hat, yalsa blog