Lots of Monkeys

The day is here, and now I find myself at the apex of “mein gadgetlusten.”

Embarrasingly, and not surprisingly, I really want a PSP. Well, more accurately, one part of me does.

Part of me says, “Oh, hey, just stop by Best Buy–she’ll probably have one, that bitch knows everyone. But you can buy one, then sell it for twice the price on eBay! It’s not an impulse buy, it’s an investment. They’re not due to have any more until May! MAY!”

That part is lying.

If I get my hands on a PSP, I am opening that sucker up and playing Lumines (apparently pronounced, “Loo-mines” according to SONY).

I would like to separate that part of my consciousness. It’s responsible for things like owning almost every iteration of the Aiptek Pencam. I also have not one, but two copies of Stephen King’s Bag of Bones. That part is screaming inside, saying that “You will die if X isn’t in your possession right now. you will be less of a man. X will make you complete.”

That part has issues. A lot of Madison Avenue to work though. But I think he’ll be okay if he makes it through his lunch hour without accidentally stopping by the Best Buy near work.

That part wants to address the rest of you. He says, “I, for one, welcome our new, tiny, shiny, sexy SONY branded handheld convergent media entertainment device overlords.”

I’m not exactly sure how this happened, but I was involved in our library’s “Symposium 2010: The Library in the year 2010.” I served as a member of the “Video Game Community” on a panel that examined the way that video games affect current and future generations of learners.

There were four of us and we took on the topics of “Why Game?,” “Games and Society,” “Gender and Gaming,” and “Games and Education.”

I got “Games and Education” as my topic. Which I wasn’t too thrilled about initially, but I’m happy at the way the presentation turned out. Instead of taking a macro overview of educational games, I went for a personal viewpoint. I talked about three games in particular, that I played. It was taped, and I’m hoping to get the raw footage pretty soon to digitize and post. I won’t go into the particulars of the presentation here, in the hopes that I’ll be able to get that tape. Sooner, hopefully, rather than later.

I didn’t get to bring up my social commentary regarding the sales of M rated games to the parents of minors during my presentation, but I think I did a great job during the Q&A afterwards.

For this panel, the symposium organizers invited experts from various disciplines, and more than a few librarians from local institutions attended. After the panel, there was an informal dinner where the panelists got to sit down and eat with these experts.

Firstly, I would like to apologize to all of the librarians I have yet to meet.

I was not looking forward to this part of the panel. I imagined conversations with librarians to be very dry affairs, temporal wastelands to be avoided, like lines at the DMV. I imagined droning on about the Dewey Decimal System, and waxing rueful over the “good old days” before the internet ruined research.

I could not have been more wrong.

The people (at my table, at least) were dynamic, technically savvy people who are trying very hard to keep information “alive.” I had some great conversations about user interface, podcasting, RSS feeds, and the digitization of collections.

So I had a good time, and the chicken was tasty and well prepared. Dessert was another matter. In retrospect, I should have gotten the apple tart.