Still alive

I haven't posted for a while because I moved on to some other things, though I keep coming back to my games. I have 8 or 9 pictograms for my Banned Book Week game. I'm dying to share them here, but can't let them leak out. I'm trying to find the Chronicles of Narnia on a major banned books list so I can use the map. Or Lord of the Rings, since there are also plenty of Middle Earth maps. I need to look them up in the print book Banned in the USA...

I ended up missing the Come Out & Play festival in NYC this past weekend. Between not finding anyone to go with me, and trying to get some family finances in order, I decided begrudgingly to stay home. I will work on something for next year.

I am continuing to listen to Scott Nicholson's Gaming in Libraries course. While a lot of it isn't relevant, much continues to inspire me and I really want to try all of these board games he mentions. He is currently talking about the five archetypes of games, which he calls SNAKS for Strategy, Narrative, Action, Knowledge, and Social games. I've been wanting to move away from trivia games, which is what my games are, though I don't know how to make my games educational without a trivia format. I want to look into Cranium games, he specifically mentions Hoopla, to see if they could be turned into something in the classroom.

He talks briefly about puzzle hunts, and how each piece points towards the next piece. I'm wondering if this would be a better format for my Banned Books pictograms than the two-sided map idea.

Today's topic was strategy games. I think this is what I would like to move towards since the research process involves a number of strategies. But that's as far as I've gotten with this idea.

One more tidbit of game news in my world is that our intern, Jessica, started yesterday. I am very impressed so far, and impressed that she seems to be getting into the game ideas. We're going to add the questions to the Plagiarism Game, then she's eager to help build one from scratch. She pointed me to a part of Cyberbee.com that has this cute Flash animation of kids raising their hands. It's not a game, but we're thinking of perhaps turning something like this into a game...