Over the course of this summer and fall, I have worked with a student researcher to create a video game experience that will help demonstrate information literacy skills. I will go into more detail about the project in the coming posts, but I wanted to start off with this video mapping out our character interactions.

After spending a few months this summer looking through online games and not finding anything that provided the depth we wanted within a limited playtime experience, we decided to mod an existing game. After creating the characters and most of the dialogue, we needed to see where our gaps in quest logic and character interactions were.

Student Fellowship: Morrowind Critical Thinking Mod from Paul Waelchli on Vimeo.

Mapping it out allowed us to identify that our critical thinking quest was too straight forward and made creating more characters and dialogue easy to plug in. With the additional characters and dialogue, I think that we've created a quest that will force players to question and evaluate the information that they receive.

We kicked off National Gaming Day a little early last week with a gaming event on Friday night. Since we ran the event past midnight, we were able to help kick off National Gaming Day @ your Library.

We had a variety of board games brought in by our local Green Bay games store: Gnome Games. Students brought in materials to play Warhammer 40k. And we had various video games going: Goldeneye on the Wii and Halo Reach and L4D2 on the 360 played in each of our classrooms. And students even brought in a PS2 and N64 to hook up in our smaller study rooms. It was a good turnout for our first game night.

The students' overwhelming response was: "When can we do this again."

National Gaming Day @ the Mulva Library from Paul Waelchli on Vimeo.