And if you study video games, you have to play. Some time ago I decided that forming playgroups that meet between classes was the best way to accomplish this, especially in the absence of a dedicated game lab (even our Center can’t really serve that purpose, at least not yet). Each group meets weekly for gameplay and preparation, then each reports back to the larger group during the course of the semester, with demos of controls, gameplay and paratextual materials, and accounts of their collective experience. Ideally, every group should have a mix of “kinds” of gamers (self-indentifed): core and casual, experienced and not. The underlying purpose–not unlike that of the playground playgroups from which the name is playfully taken–is social, to promote collaborative learning drawing on diverse strengths in each group. Come to think of it, that may be something that’s lost with the demise of the weekly film-class screening in the little theatre at the back of the library.

And, to follow up, see this.

This year’s program committee also did a brilliant job of vetting and organizing the content for the weekend. Presentations included our colleague in history, Kyle Roberts, who talked about his Virtual Library System, and an opening keynote by Nick Montfort of MIT, whose talk about platform studies ended with some characteristically poetic thoughts about competing definitions of digital humanities. The existence of a strong thread on platform studies, with a special focus on games (I’m thinking in particular of Nathan Altice’s presentation on tool-assisted speed-runs), in the program of an organization like this one–which has historically focused more on data analysis, text markup, etc.–is to my mind evidence of a healthy instability in those still-emerging definitions.