| Lisa Hinchliffe Head of Undergraduate Library University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign |
Karen Schmidt Acting University Librarian University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign |
| David Ward Head of Information Services, Undergraduate Library University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign |
Video, computer, and Internet games are transforming our culture, from socializing and sports to medicine and economics. The level of engagement today’s students show with video games has become a digital holy grail for many educators looking to create newer and more active learning environments that will hold the attention of the Millennial generation. This generation has grown up with a different set of games than any before it – and it plays these games in different ways. Games tell stories, comment on and inform popular culture, provide challenges, create new social networks, encourage new kinds of learning, foster creativity, and let us play. Unlike many other forms of media, games are inherently malleable. Once seen as a passing form of amusement, games are joining literature and film and becoming a new type of literacy and platform for learning. The field of digital Game Studies incorporates these interdisciplinary aspects as scholars today examine both the impact of games themselves on individuals and society, as well as the mechanics and utilitarian applications of gaming technology for teaching, learning, and communicating concepts and ideas.
Through its traditional roles of collecting, preserving, and developing services for scholars and learners and applied in this rapidly developing area of innovation, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) Library is seeking to play a central role in ensuring that scholars and learners have access to games from the past, present, and future for their research and study. Library faculty have become engaged in the rich gaming culture that exists on today’s UIUC campus, with interests ranging from research to teaching to game-playing. The Library’s instructional programs are pursuing games as ways to teach students about library research. Gaming tournaments with guest faculty speakers take place in the Undergraduate Library as an outreach service to students who may not be familiar with library resources. Games are available for checkout from the Library’s media center and an archival strategy for including games developed at UIUC in the institutional repository will be developed in the coming years. A faculty request to place a game “on reserve” for his students this semester has catalyzed the development of a gaming research/learning location within the Undergraduate Library.
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/gaming
Handout (MS Word)