Against the Grain Volume 20 | Issue 5 Article 33 November 2008 Media Minder -- Building a Video Game Collection: Resources to Help you Get Started Philip Hallman Ambassador Books and Media, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/atg Part of the Library and Information Science Commons Recommended Citation Hallman, Philip (2008) "Media Minder -- Building a Video Game Collection: Resources to Help you Get Started," Against the Grain: Vol. 20: Iss. 5, Article 33. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7771/2380-176X.5211 This document has been made available through Purdue e-Pubs, a service of the Purdue University Libraries. Please contact [email protected] for additional information. As I See It! from page 78 Media Minder — Building a Video So what do we potential customers do? We Game Collection: Resources to default to Google, and Google Scholar. Google is a starting point for much serious Help you Get Started research. It is free of charge. And it is good enough for most initial searches, given that we Column Editor: Philip Hallman (Ambassador are otherwise priced out of the market. We may Books and Media) <[email protected]> also visit a nearby university library on occasions where a generalist search engine is simply not y interest in video games began, Re- good enough. There, we might simply use Web and subsequently ended, with the sponding of Science or Scopus. Mrelease of Pong. It was Christmas, to the frenzy, Speaking personally, my search engine of 1975, and my eldest brother bought a system colleges and universities have joined the choice is Google/Google Scholar. I am gener- for all us kids as a family gift. We proceeded band wagon too. Many now offer courses ally looking for survey research and other sources to open the box and placed the overlay on the that examine the cultural and sociological of data, together with literature on publishing, television screen. Excitedly, we hooked up significance that game playing has had on library processes and reader behavior. Although the cable connections at the back of the set. our society. Sheila Murphy, Assistant Pro- I am not engaged in scholarship, I am not entirely These were the days long before installing fessor in the Department of Screen Arts & untypical. I know my field, and I can recognize a VCR was an act similar to screwing in a Cultures at the University of Michigan, has what is useful and what is irrelevant. Google new light bulb, so doing anything behind the taught a course on video gaming for the past gives me information that I would otherwise be set seemed foreign and a risky undertaking seven years. “When I first developed and unaware of. It is effective, and it presents a real best left to a TV repair man. After a few taught the course in 2003,” Murphy says, “ alternative to A&I services priced at a premium for minutes of tinkering, we were ready to play. there were few academic sources available institutional libraries. The value of the selective, Two rectangles about the size of a cigarette on video games and most video games were quality controlled A&I product is outweighed by lighter appeared on the screen and the remote collected by avid fans, not libraries. But all the money involved. control allowed you to move the rectangles of that has changed quite rapidly. Today there In the longer term, it is probably not the big up or down in a straight line. A smaller are peer-reviewed video and computer game discipline-based indexes that will suffer. Data- ball of light went back and forth across the journals (Game Studies), numerous academic bases such as BIOSIS, EconLit, PsychINFO, So- screen in a manner reminiscent to ping pong programs in interactive media and game de- ciological Abstracts and CINAHL are “category (hence the game’s name) and the object was sign (USC, etc.) and the emerging scholarly killers.” Such category killers will survive because to use the bigger rectangles as if they were field of gaming studies. Courses on gaming they are the databases that are demonstrated to paddles and hit the ball of light out of the are taught across the US and Europe and freshmen undergraduates as the principal tool for reach of your opponent. When the “ball” draw students from the arts, humanities and navigating the particular discipline. They become was struck, an electronic noise, kind of like engineering, all eager to study video games part of the information furniture of the discipline. a thump sound, was generated. Like Peggy as code, art and industry.” It is all those other indexes that are under threat. Lee, I asked myself “is that all there is?” The Additionally, other academic institutions They are “secondary” databases, irrespective of excitement I felt initially soon vanished and I their depth of coverage going back years, their are teaching the skills needed to create, pro- probably played it no more than a half dozen gram and design video games. As Murphy value as highly specialized indexes or as inter- times. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one to disciplinary databases, or the range of content mentions, one leading place is the University feel that way. While hundreds of thousands of Southern California and their Electronic they cover — books, journals, government/IGO of units were sold that first Christmas, it publications, grey literature etc... Arts Interactive Entertainment Program and didn’t generate the massive interest in home Game Innovation lab. On the more grassroots So A&I publishers are facing multi-directional video games that its manufacturers had hoped level, many community colleges are seeing challenges: for or intended and most Pong games were a growing demand for game design courses • Faculty and researchers are increasingly relegated to the basement and eventually the and have responded by developing degrees doubtful of the relevance of the library to junk yard. for interested students. Austin Community their research activities, while A&I services Fast forward three decades. Thanks to the College is just one example of an institution continue to treat the library as the sole pur- that now offers three associate degree plans chaser of their products; world wide success of the home computer and vast improvements in technology, video — Game Design, Game Art and Game & • Google and other generalist search engines game design has improved exponentially and Visualization Programming. can provide a ‘good enough’ result, at least the home video game market is so successful So where do libraries fit into this equa- as the starting point of an inquiry; that it now rivals and often outsells movie tion? They’ve joined in as well. Or, at least • The opportunity to enfranchise users, like me ticket sales as the primary source of popular some have. Public libraries are accustomed and thousands of other small organizations entertainment. In 2006, The Wall Street to collecting what the general public de- and individuals, is being studiously ignored, Journal reported that Warner Bros. film mands, so many now have full out collec- because we are outside the cosy institutional studio announced that they were undertaking tion development and circulation policies framework that so obsesses them. a concerted effort to become a major video for video games. Academic libraries are In summary, they need to convince users of game publisher. According to the article, the further behind, but not all. The University both relevance and cost-effectiveness. They need film industry is feeling the heat from the new of Michigan and the University of Illinois to explore wider, albeit more difficult, markets than kid on the block. Lower box-office returns, at Urbana-Champaign, two of the top ten the academic and research library community in revenues lost to piracy and slowing DVD largest library collections in the country, are which they have felt so cosy. Otherwise their sales have led the studios to begin developing going full speed ahead to collect and develop businesses will be eroded. Users disenfranchised their own video games in order to compete video game collections and archives to be by vendors’ current pricing policies are prepared more effectively. Additionally, the concept used by their campus communities. Accord- to pay for good information tools and for the of convergence is upon us. The relationship ing to its Website, the University of Texas at convenience of using them where they work. It between movies and games will be greater Austin’s Center for American History has is extraordinary that the opportunity to make more than ever. Most will be marketed and pro- already created a video game archive that money continues to be ignored. Hiding their heads moted together and noted directors will be will seek “to collect and provide access to in the sand will not make the challenge — or the hired to help create the look of the game in materials that not only facilitate research in opportunity — go away. But it may hasten their addition to the film. demise. continued on page 82 80 Against the Grain / November 2008 <http://www.against-the-grain.com> video games. Steven Johnson’s book is a great source for contextual- Media Minder izing the reasons why building a collection is acceptable and a good from page 80 first read. The others will help to identify classic and current games that you may wish to consider purchasing or that will help students consider videogame history, but also provide materials of interest to those study- what career opportunities are available. ing communications, computer science, economics, and other academic disciplines that are now, and will for the foreseeable future, be drawn Reviews to the processes driving the videogame industry.” C/Net (www.cnet.com) Media librarians uninitiated in the ways of video game collecting G4 Television Network (www.g4tv.com) may be asking “where do I begin?” Like any librarian asked to develop IGN Entertainment (www.ign.com) a collection, the same types of tools and resources are available to help Gaming Target (www.gamingtarget.com) understand the history of the medium and to place it into some better context for the selector.