Video games are now a part of libraries, but many questions have still been left unanswered. What is the true value of the video game as a storytelling device? What kind of digital literacy does a video game offer? And most importantly, what do we do once we have the video gamers in the library? Hoenke will share insights into the video gaming culture and show through examples how this medium is a form of digital literacy that librarians cannot miss out on.

1. Video Games and Literacy
Justin Hoenke
Teen Librarian
@justinlibrarian
justinthelibrarian.com

2. What is the true value of the video game as a storytelling device?
Image via http://www.toy-tma.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Final-Fantasy-7-Aeris-Death.jpg

3. ENCOURAGE STORYTELLING
Question: Do you worry that video games are eroding people’s ability to read novels?
...But there is a bit of the book which also suggests that the problem may be that this way
of inhabiting the imagination may do something harmful to our relationship to story, to the
way in which human beings have always needed and responded to the art of the story and
that is something to be worried about, because I think that there is something about
storytelling that is very intrinsic to who we are as human beings.
-Salman Rushdie
Recorded November 12, 2010
Interviewed by Max Miller
Directed / Produced by Jonathan Fowler
http://bigthink.com/ideas/25129

4. FINAL FANTASY III
FOR THE SUPER
NINTENDO WAS THE
FIRST "BOOK" THAT
I READ.

5. SIDEWAYS STORYTELLING
He doesn’t... in fact, doesn’t really have to follow the main narrative line of the game at all for long
periods of time. There is all kinds of excursions and digressions that you can choose to go on and
find many stories to participate in instead of the big story, the macro story. I think that really
interests me as a storyteller because I've always thought that one of the things that the Internet
and the gaming world permits as a narrative technique is to not tell the story from beginning to
end—to tell stories sideways, to give alternative possibilities that the reader can, in a way, choose
between.
-Salman Rushdie
Recorded November 12, 2010
Interviewed by Max Miller
Directed / Produced by Jonathan Fowler
http://bigthink.com/ideas/25129

6. What kind of digital literacy does a video game offer?
IMAGES VIA:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/courosa/5356149140/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/courosa/3324822540/sizes/m/in/photostream/

7. TRANSLITERACY
The Transliteracies Research Project defines online reading as:
the experience of “text-plus” media by individuals and groups in digital, networked information
environments. The “plus” indicates the zone of negotiation—of mutation, adaptation, cooptation,
hybridization, etc.—by which the older dialogue among print, writing, orality, and audiovisual media
commonly called “text” enters into new relations with digital media and with networked
communication technologies.
From Libraries and Transliteracy
http://librariesandtransliteracy.wordpress.com/beginner%E2%80%99s-guide-to-transliteracy/

8. MINECRAFT

10. What do we do once we have the video gamers in the library?

11. IT'S EASY

12. VIDEO GAME+STRATEGY GUIDE
IMAGE FROM: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cantonpubliclibrary/2502060472/sizes/m/in/photostream/

13. GAME ON!
CREATING YOUR OWN VIDEO GAME

15. GAMERS TELL STORIES
● Fan fiction
● MMORPG (Warcraft, Everquest, Wizard 101)

17. @justinlibrarian
facebook.com/justinhoenke
justinthelibrarian.com