Why is a librarian making a podcast about video games? (Apologies about the audio quality of this episode.)
Librarianship and video games seemingly have nothing to do with each other. Why is a librarian teaching a course on games? And what is the metaverse?
We think of games as forms of escape, as entertainment, often as very mindless entertainment filled with action and violence and fear. Certainly, there are those kind of games.
There are also games that are incredible stories that take you on thoughtful adventures where you overcome challenges and make new discoveries. Games—like film, theater and novels—can be forms of storytelling. Games also can be informative and educational, like nonfiction.
Games are information. Games are information resources that can help you learn to navigate the challenges of life.
Unlike books, movies, and other forms of digital information, games are interactive. Games respond to the player's actions. Games can create a unique experience for each person. Games are the dominant form of storytelling in the 21st century. As virtual reality advances, games become more and more immersive.
The software for creating games are also used to create many of today’s films. Game engine software, such as Unity and Unreal Engine, are being used in theater. More significantly, game engines are used in the automobile industry, and architecture, engineering, construction, and in simulations for public planning, and visualization for scientific research. Game engines are complex toolkits that pull together many different types of additional information to create what is essentially an interactive publication. But game engines allow us to go beyond our traditional publication to create an interactive experience. And that interactive experience may be 3D. It may even be immersive.
The internet: the web has evolved over the last three decades to be a significant part of modern life. Indeed, we all live and work in a digital culture enabled by complex networks of digital information. Do not think, for instance, that we have reached the end of how digital information will evolve over the next 30 years.
One of the key drivers of the digital evolution will be game engines. The creativity, the innovations, and even new industries to emerge from game engines will bring massive changes to our way of life, whether that's good or bad, will be up to the people who were born in this century, the ones we are educating in this century.
This is not 1995. This is not 2000. This is not even 2010. We will soon be entering the middle of the 21st century. Today's college students in the year 2050, the middle of the century, will be in their late 40s and early 50s. Over the next decades, they are the ones who will decide how the world changes, how digital culture evolves. And most importantly, they have to face the very serious challenges, impacting our planet, and the very survival of our species.
Game engines are a set of software and corresponding 3D digital information that is a toolkit for conceptualizing, analyzing, and creating solutions.
The metaverse: the metaverse is a silly name.
But in 1993, the web sounded like a silly name.
I remember thinking back in 1993: the web? Are people actually going to go around saying that the term? The web.
The metaverse may or may not stick around, but it's certainly gaining traction as the term used to describe the next generation of digital culture. The metaverse is an immersive environment that we experience with others. The shared participatory nature of the experience is an important element. The immersive element refers to virtual reality. In 2021, this all sounds very far off.
Back in 1992, 1993, 1994: the web evoke the same sense of being something almost unbelievable.
Hardly any mention of the metaverse takes place without referring to the 1992 novel Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. The science fiction novel about a futuristic time where reality and virtuality are mixed is reportedly a darling of many executives. The novel is credited with coining the term metaverse. I have not read, Snow Crash. I do have the book. I read a lot of novels, but I've always had a very hard time getting beyond the first couple of pages of this 480-page novel. Do I need to read the book that is almost 30 years old? Not this one.
As a librarian, my professional practice involves helping people understand the information landscape. The information landscape is not limited only to the e-books, the journals and databases licensed by library. The information ecosystem is extremely broad and extremely deep, consisting of many kinds of sources. My career as a librarian has focused on building digital information resources. Librarianship is not only about helping people navigate the information landscape and consuming information, but also about the capacity of individuals to create and build new information resources.
The internet has significantly lower the barrier to entry for publishing. Indeed, an entire part of the library profession is focused on building digital information sources. That's a large part of the work that happens in digital scholarship, and in the digital humanities. In some cases, libraries are digital publishers. There's even a Library Publishing Coalition. In my own career, I've developed digital exhibits, digital course reserves, websites, ebooks, and databases.
We are entering a new frontier of digital information in the form of interactive narratives, interactive documentaries and playable experiences that transports people into an immersive digital environment. These interactive narratives and immersive experiences can be created through software known as game engines. This very podcast is a form of digital scholarship, a digital conversation.
What I want to accomplish through this podcast: digital scholarship comes in many forms. Let's look beyond what is formally called scholarship and look at the workplace, particularly the types of environments in which our students will find themselves. Most of our work, professional work, knowledge work, takes place through a series of conversations. There's conversations in meetings with our colleagues, with customers and potential users of whatever product or services we are offering. Those formal conversations are surrounded by informal conversations with our colleagues and others. Those conversations may be in person, via zoom, email, or perhaps words may be exchanged in the hallway or expressed briefly.
The most important conversation that we cannot forget is the conversation in our head that we are having with ourself. As humans, we are communicating all the time. It is our work. In most workplace problems or miscommunications in games, we are communicating with other characters in the game. They may be real people in a multiplayer game or non-playable characters simply responding to us with a limited set of pre-programmed options. As machine learning evolves, the dialogue capacity of these machine created characters will evolve, thereby creating more and more lifelike conversations. As any writer of fiction knows, one of the challenges of lifelike conversation is that the other person responds to you with a response you did not expect that takes everything in a different direction.
One of the use cases for games is simulation, whether it's 2d or 3d or fully immersive VR. We will have more opportunity to simulate different work situations in which people can learn to respond more empathetically and persuasively, and how to feel less threatened in a situation with a supervisor or a colleague, or there is a low level of trust that with every possible futuristic scenario.
These things I talk about are not going to happen on their own. Brainstorming possible ideas and scenarios is the easy part. Making those things happen is another more difficult part. Turning an idea into an application and into a product and then bringing it to market is much more difficult. It's an extremely valuable process. And I'm not talking valuable in the financial and lucrative sense. I mean valuable of making a positive contribution to society.
That's where another set of conversations come into play: ethics. How do we make these new products and services truly valuable to society in a way that does not do harm. The dialog of ethical conversations about the future of technology topics, like the technical aspects of the future, are grounded in technical documents and researched by those thinking seriously, and writing seriously about technology.
Conversations are expressed in many forms. There's a continuum of the casual hallway exchange of information to the more formal in-person meetings of an organization. These are interwoven with formal publications. All these forms and conversations, informal, formal, scholarly, technical, financial, play a part in creating outcomes, the products and services that we all experience. F
For those of us who are academic librarians, our students cannot afford to have us focus only on scholarship. As an information professional, a librarian helps users navigate and bring together all types of information that are communicated formally and informally between people.
In the game creativity podcast I'm exploring the craft of games, and the impact that creativity upon society.
The format of audio is chosen for its very essential characteristic of sound, even though games are a visual medium. Audio, like text forces a conciseness, a thoughtful need to express in words what is normally conveyed as visual images. The spoken word communicate in a way that's different from the written word. The human voice conveys emotion in different manner than writing. Putting your own very human voice out for all to hear is a very fragile step that add vulnerability and takes you to a place that you, as the speaker, may prefer not to go. But there are places we must go. The world around us is going places we might prefer not to go. We must harness the possibilities available to us, and direct these resources in a good and ethical manner.
The game creativity podcast is my effort to combine my 30 plus years of experience with technology, and my 20 plus year career as an academic librarian, plus more than 20 years of deep thought about narrative. The game creativity podcast is the spoken record of my life's work.
The future is not a technological utopia. We may very well be heading towards a dystopian environment, the stuff of terrifying scifi movies. My generation, and the one before, I was born in 1965. my generation and the one before, have messed things up. Those born around the beginning of this century are the ones who are facing a lot of challenges. They are the generation that we are educating. That generation will decide what this world is like for the remainder of the century and the next. There's a lot of work to be done. That brings a lot of opportunities, entire new industries will be created. Today's students will create those industry. Do not underestimate the challenges, the climate crisis is already causing havoc in the world. Environments are changing. Ecosystems are being impacted, animal species are becoming extinct. And the pandemic has showed how vulnerable we are to an event that few expected, but that's the point. We've known that this type of pandemic was possible. We cannot ignore the possibility of future pandemics that could be even more dangerous.
We must develop a full understanding of what we call artificial intelligence. If you care about the future and you now have intelligence, don't think of AI as a black box, as an abstract concept. Machine learning is very powerful. I tend to prefer the term machine learning over artificial intelligence. I think machine learning gets more to the core of the concept. Machine learning will radically impact our culture and society over the next decades.
Again, it's the students of today who get to decide the impact of artificial intelligence, machine learning on the world, but only if they think about it, if only they're prepared and willing and focused on meeting the challenges.
What have we learned about the evolution of digital culture and information in the last 30 years? And how can we help people not be big repeat the same mistakes over the next 30 years? New mistakes will happen, but we, the world, society have the opportunity to be more intentional in creating the digital culture of the future. The digital culture that our children as adults will build.
The novice learner of today is creating not only the mid-21st century but setting the foundation of the late 21st century.
This podcast originated with the course on the digital publishing of video games that I'm teaching at Washington and Lee University, as part of the digital cultural information program. The course takes place during our short four week mini spring term. 19 students in the course, most of them have played games, have been playing video games. Some of them are not really gamers, and they bring a diversity of interests and viewpoints to the course. Their major assignments for the course were to create two podcast episodes instead of creating, term papers, instead of creating posters or videos. I wanted them to explore inwards, in their own voices topics of interest to them. They got to choose their topic. And they worked. Each student worked on two podcasts, and you'll be hearing those podcasts on this channel. About the next about the next 25 episodes will be podcasts for my students for the spring of 2021. All the students had to do an individual podcast, and they all had to do a podcast in a pair with another student. In many cases, they interviewed other students who play games, and they were free to explore the topic of their choice, and who they might want to interview. And the material that they came up with is fascinating. And I'm looking forward to hearing your feedback and comment on it. Also I have extended the invitation to the students who are interested in continuing to do podcasts on this topic, they may do future episodes or may join me in conversations. I will also be doing a large number of episodes. I have made a personal commitment to myself. I am saying this out loud to keep me honest, of doing 100 episodes of this podcast before I give up on it. Maybe nobody will listen to it. But there are thoughts I need to get out. This has my thinking on this topic, the topic I'm very, very intrigued with, the topic that in many ways I have been thinking about deeply for the last 20 plus years. And most importantly to me, I have a 10 year old daughter who loves games the storytelling. And I love her. And I always want her to have my voice. So maybe I'll say something one of these episodes that might be useful to her. At some point in our life.
Thank you for joining me on the game creativity podcast.