 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is a commission's weekly online event. Yes, we are a webinar. You can call us that. It won't be too offended. I won't be offended. I've gotten over it. It's gotten over it. We do this live every Wednesday mornings at 10 a.m. central time. And they are recorded, so if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, it's fine. You can always go to our website and see all the recordings going back to when we started in January 2009. We do a mixture of things here, presentations, interviews, many training sessions. Basically, whatever libraries you're doing out there, we want to share it and get it on the show and get people talking and learning about it all. We have commission staff, Nebraska Library Commission staff that sometimes present here, our speakers, and we bring in guest speakers. This morning we have, I guess I call it a mixture, because you're going to... We have a mixture of today. Once a month, we do our tech talk with Michael Sowers, who's right next to me here. Michael Sowers is the Technology Innovation Librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission. And he comes out once a month to talk about the tech news of the month, whatever's come up interesting since the last time he's on. And sometimes bring in speakers, presenters, interviews, whatever. And I'm just going to hand over to you to talk about who you've brought on to come on the show with us. All right. Thanks, Krista. Today's tech talk is going to be a little different. And please excuse, I've got to say this part at least once. We're going to get a little crafty today. Yeah, I encourage them. We're going to have two guests today, one of which is definitely tech oriented, which isn't, but I kind of threw them together anyways. Our first guest that we'll have here in a moment is Gordon Wyant from the Bellevue Public Library. I saw either an article or an email or something come across one of our mailing lists a while back that said that they had set up their own Minecraft server. So a little gaming and a little tech to run that. And so we're going to have Gordon talking about what he is doing there at Bellevue with that. And that's definitely the tech half of today's show. The somewhat related but not as technical in the gaming area is Lindsay Thompson from La Vista Public Library who was just on the show a couple of weeks ago. We have brought her back because she's doing some live action gaming featuring HP Lovecraft stories, which is why I have my Cthulhu puppet here for those of you watching the video today. So we've got some Minecraft and we've got some Lovecraft going on today. That's that there's our craft. They're latest. And team gaming and just gaming in general, some tech, some high tech, some low tech. So Gordon, you are on the line with us there. Okay. All right. Hello everybody. Yep. We're going to go ahead and just give you control. And as Krista mentioned before we got the recording going, you've got questions for either of our speakers today. Just go ahead and send them in through the Q&A. And we will happily pass those along as time goes. Okay. And there you go. Gordon, off you go. Yeah. We're seeing your screen. Looks good. All right. It's our way to make this smaller. Let's sit here. All right. Well, we'll just, I'll just go with it. I just made that bigger. That's not what I was trying to do. Okay. All right. Well, as Michael mentioned, we've been playing around with some Minecraft stuff. Those of you who don't know what Minecraft is, it's a game that's created by a programmer named Notch from out in, oh geez, I don't know, the Netherlands, something like that. Anyway, it's been out technically since 2009. It started in the alpha stages and you can get in on it for free or for relatively cheap. And it's a Java based game. That's what's called a sandbox game. Basically it gives you an entire world that you can play with. You can destroy. You can build. You can fight little creatures. It's a lot of fun. It doesn't look like all that much. Here's, we're on the library server currently. You can kind of see what it looks like. I just recently had to restart it because they had a new, I'm being followed by a hoarder of ducks. This is rather frightening actually. Anyway, it's rather blocky but you can destroy blocks. You can put blocks down, create things. I'm just going to create a little box here to just kind of show you what you can do. And over here in the distance you can see there's somebody who's created a town. You can just build stuff, have fun, destroy things. At nighttime monsters come out and attack you and try to destroy what you made and kill you, which is always fun. But that's basically Minecraft. It's a very simple open world where you can build whatever you want, do whatever you want as well, mine and craft basically. There you go. The name sums it up essentially. It's become a big deal in the gaming world. Pretty much everybody is playing it. They're on their computer, their Xbox, their tablets even. You can play it on your iPad. There's a mobile version of it. It's pretty incredible. As you can see on the Minecraft website, they've got a little ticker. I don't know how accurate it is but it's probably pretty accurate as far as how many people are currently playing the game. It really has blown up into this immense community driven miracle game essentially. There's no big publishing house behind them. There's no big programming house. It's just one guy and a couple of his friends and they've created this thing that basically takes it over the gaming world. As I've been a huge fan of Minecraft for a long time, I've been trying to figure out ways to bring it into team programming. I hadn't really found a good way to do it due to our restrictions on the computers that we have at the library. Things of that sort made it difficult to do that. I recently was awarded a grant through the Nebraska Library Commission's Excellence in Youth Service to get some 3D printers. I thought it would be a great way to incorporate Minecraft and also be an introduction into how to create things in a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional world, which is what the teams will need to be doing when they create models in Blender or 3D Max or Sketchup in order to export those models into a format that 3D printers can print. So I decided Minecraft would be perfect for that. So we bought some copies of Minecraft for the laptops that we'll be using and in order to kind of celebrate all this, we had a big Minecraft-a-thon event where we had a lot of crafts going on. We had like, you know, Perler bead crafts, you know, with little fuse beads, which Minecraft clearly works really well for that. And we did some papercraft stuff. Here's, we had a big huge area set up with these little Cubicraft boxes that you kind of fold together in glue. I put like magnets on the inside of them. We had a whole bunch of these spread out. People could make their own little Minecraft world. And of course we had Minecraft going on a server that we have. It's very easy to set up a Minecraft server for yourself. And on your own, you just download the server app and just run it. And it's very, very simple. It just brings it up. There you go. Your server is up and then all you have to do is give your IP address like friends all year. You're a page with like mines freaking out here. So I'm going to close that up. Now, so you can just run it with that. And now it's not closing. Here we go. Come on, close. There we go. But there are some limitations into that. I mean, you're going to have to have a decent computer running it. Something that has a decent GPU, a decent CPU. You do want multicore on that. And ideally, you're going to have it up the whole time. And you're going to need to do some maintenance on it about restarting the server. If it gets clogged, if it gets bogged down somehow. Which didn't really work for us. So I looked around for some options in terms of actually having a host server. And I came across this group, MinecraftServer.net, which was relatively cheap. You could buy, you know, they've got a variety of plans that you can go with with, you know, various pricing things. And you get discounts on, you know, doing multiple groups. And there are multiple months. And you can see you can get more people bought into here. So it has 40 slots. That's 40 people that can log into your server. 60 slots, 60 people can log into your server. And the prices is based on that. And that worked well for us. So you can log in there. You can go to your actual control server from their little multi-craft, which is a server control program, directly from their little web app. You can access the console and, you know, do changes through the console. You can modify, you know, take a look at the players. You can click on them and decide what, you know, their default role is, whether they're banned or not, things of that sort. You can see when they're the last time they logged in, all kinds of stuff like that. It worked really well for us because we could have it going up all the time, and we didn't have to depend on one of our computers being up the whole time. It allowed me to focus on the event itself and have a lot of fun with it. Now, a lot of people have, that's kind of what we did for the server for our Minecraftathon. We've left it up the whole time. One of our library clerks was really excited about it and donated some money to keep the server running. So the server we've left up and people have been using it. It's been a lot of fun. We've put it in with our Facebook. You can see the Minecraft IP addresses there. If anybody wants to jump on to the library server that we have at any point in time, the IP is right there on our Facebook. Just follow the public library. You can take a look at it. I recently ran into some troubles with it and I had to reset the world. You can't see all the amazing things that everybody had built before I had to reset the world. But you can get in there and see what it's like and join in on the fun. Because Minecraft is such a unique thing with the things it can do and all those great stuff, it has a distinctly educational feel to it. There have been some people that have licensed with the Minecraft people to sell copies of Minecraft at a discount, up to 50% off of the full price, which is a pretty big deal. A copy of Minecraft costs about $27, which is really cool. However, they've got that discount. However, in order to get the discount, you have to buy it in classroom sets. Basically, the catch there is that they have developed a server program for Minecraft that helps teachers do things that you could do with the server just on its own if you took a little time to read through it. The Minecraft EDU custom mod, which they pay $41 for, they have it set up for you already, which means you don't have to go in and mess with it yourself. But it's all things that you can do on your own if it just took a little bit of time to set up. That's the catch for getting the discount, is that you have to buy their puffed up piece of server mod that really you can do on your own. But you can do some really amazing stuff with Minecraft. People have used it for geometry, people have used it for history stuff, people have used it for architecture. It's really great for teaching people to think critically in a three-dimensional world, which is really, really cool. Just some things that people have done that are really incredible. This whole big thing here that you see here on YouTube is a calculator within the Minecraft world. I'll skip ahead a bit. You can see him inputting stuff onto the keypad and it will output answers in real time, which is really cool. This is an immense, huge programming thing. Think of the old school punch cards, computers. That's basically what that is. Somebody's made a 3D printer, which I think is very cool, considering that's what we're using the Minecraft force to give people a leg up in creating things in a three-dimensional world. You can kind of see how he's sped it up. You can see how he's punched the design in and now his gigantic city-sized Minecraft creation is creating Minecraft creations itself. So there's all kinds of amazing things that you can do with that and incredibly epic things you can do. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. There's quite a few here. Let me open it back up. It's massive. Oh, man. That's this one right here. You can see him walking through the decks. So Gordon, was that actually something that you did that's this massive? Gordon? Sorry, go ahead. Was that like somebody recreated Doom in Minecraft? Is that where you were just showing us? No, what I was trying to show you and I didn't have it on mute. The guy on YouTube was talking and I thought it was you talking. Oh, that's why I shut up for a minute. This is actually a mega object where somebody made the Star Trek Enterprise. So you can make anything in Minecraft. This thing is one-to-one scale. It's absolutely huge. So you can really make anything in Minecraft, given the time and the patience and the sheer fortitude. You can build absolutely anything. You can construct. There's people who have constructed to scale operating like actual functional New York subway systems. Well, as functional as a New York subway system is at any given moment. And I mean things of this sort that you can just do amazing, amazing things with such a simple program. So yeah, people have done, I'm sure people have done a two-scale Doom. It would not surprise me at all. If you just do a search, go ahead. Yeah, well, here's my next question. I mean, I have never played Minecraft. So here's my next question because you mentioned the monsters that come out at night. Somebody spends all that time to build the Enterprise. And I can just kind of guess as to what sort of effort that would take. Do monsters come in and undo your work? I mean, how does that work? Yes and no. You have a variety of game modes within Minecraft. You have Survival, which is what the default game mode is set to whenever you start a game, whenever you start a server. And in that mode, monsters show up and they will attack you if they see you. The ways that your creations get destroyed by monsters is there is a... I can make another one here. There is a monster called the Creeper, which is this cute little guy right here. And what he does is when he sees you, he follows you. And if he gets close enough to you, he'll explode. Now, if you are in your little house that you made and he saw you and he can get inside it or somewhere near it and explodes, well, he won't destroy some of what you've created. That is probably the most often way that things are destroyed in the game. However, another mode which is creative, the monsters will spawn, but they won't actually attack you. They won't respond to you. They'll just kind of sit there. So you can walk up to a Creeper and say hello and he won't attack. You can make friends with Creepers. This is not actually real, this little picture, but basically everybody is friendly with the monsters in creative mode, which is nice and fun. Because then you can create things and you don't have to worry about it. And you can set your own, you can set a single player game to creative mode so things won't attack you. You can set it to survival so they will attack you. But the servers, you can control what the default game mode is and set it to that. So currently the libraries server is set to create so people can create things without worrying about a Creeper coming up and destroying it. That said, there are other ways that your creations can be destroyed. As you can see in this video that's running right now from the Nerdfighters official Minecraft server called Nerdcraft Terrier. It is raining. Well, you also get thunderstorms and sometimes your wooden treehouses or your wooden creations might be struck by lightning in which case fire starts and it's horrible and terrible and sad and kind of fun at the same time. Trying to put out the fire. So yes, some of your creations can be destroyed. It's just kind of part of the world. However, there are certain blocks, certain building materials that are more durable than others. For example, stone is going to be more durable than wood. If lightning strikes stone, it's not going to catch on fire. You might lose a couple blocks and you have to rebuild that. For the most part, it's not a big deal. But that's really the only real ways that things can be destroyed within the Minecraft world. So yeah, you basically set in creative mode, you don't really have to worry about too much about things being destroyed or unmade except by other people, which is something that you kind of have to set in your rules of the server to don't be a mean person and destroy other people's stuff or you get bad kind of thing. In fact, I have something of the... That's not working because of what we're running. Let's see if I can get to it through all programs here. I don't believe I can. All right. But on our server, I have on the welcome board, which is right where any new player will spawn. I have a little sign that just basically says be nice. And basically don't be a douchebag, which is generally a good rule. As you can see, there's a little monster, but since we're on creative mode, he's not going to attack me. A there, be nice, be creative, have fun. And that's just a general rule for things. If you are nice, then you start destroying people's stuff like I'm destroying here except I just built that to show you how things are built, so that's okay. And I find out about it, then I can ban you or limit you in terms of what you can do. So yeah, that's something that you kind of have to control. And it's one reason why you kind of want to have people that you trust that you can also allow to be a mod or an admin so that they can take care of things when you aren't around. Because you can't be on the server 24-7. It just doesn't work that way. So, oh, and it's raining. And so yeah, that is something that you do have to deal with even on creative mode. And that can be frustrating and aggravating. Griefing is the common word for it. And it's unfortunate when that happens. And there's no in-game checks to prevent that from happening. That's something that you have to manage on your own. But anyway, so that's Minecraft. I need to turn this down because if somebody asks something, I know I'm not going to hear them. Before we switch over to Lindsay, I have one more question. Feel free to consider this a completely unfair question and correct me. What if I was to say this just looks like an 8-bit version of Second Life? Well, the graphics are about the same. Second Life being what, 10 years old now? Yeah, its graphics are not great. But what it makes up for in actual graphics, what it lacks in graphics it makes up for in terms of the sheer size of the world. The world is absolutely huge. And as I said, you can create it. And the world is not just what you see on the surface. You can, as the name implies, you can mine. But anyway, you can mine incredibly far down. In fact, we're just going to dig a giant hole just to show you how far down it can go. Not that you will be able to see much because it's nighttime and it's very dark. Put up a torch. So as you can see, I've dug so far down that it's, let me fly out if I can. Did I just, there we go. So I dug very far down and the world is massively huge. Now the world of Second Life is very huge too. But the world in Second Life isn't completely malleable and changeable. I mean it is in a sense, but not in the same way that Minecraft is. I mean you can, oh wow, there's a big hole in the world. It's not catching up here. In the sense that in Minecraft you can immediately change things. Like right here I'm just breaking up the world and rebuilding it as I see fit just right now. So I think that's kind of the big difference because of how huge the world is and how every piece of it can be manipulated, destroyed, built, rebuilt and turned into something new. That's where the bulk of the processing power and the actual meet of the games comes from. I hope that answered your question. I don't know if that really did or not. This is Krista. I would compare it more, not to Second Life. Second Life is where it's their game, their servers, you log into their world and do it. Minecraft I would compare more to SimCity because you have your own copy of it. You don't go here and walk next door and there's someone else's place that they built unless you guys are sharing a server, yes. If it's all in the same server, it's all in the same world. We have it at our house and we have it personally. You're not in a place that someone else has created. You just have your own blank slate and it's your own thing to do something with. Ours on our computer is ours. Mine on my computer is different than the one on the laptop that we have and different from my friends down the street. It's more similar to SimCity except it's even more creative because you create everything from scratch. You don't pick a house and build it. It's a blank slate completely. You've got a mine, you've got to find your wood, you've got to dig up your rock and create the items. In terms of single player, yeah. In multiplayer, you log on to a server and you share that server with everybody that is on the server or has access to server at any given time. But yeah, single player, it's your own world. Every time you create a game, it will create an entirely different world. It will always be different. It randomly generates the terrain which sometimes leads to interesting things like this floating block of dirt that I just found. So yeah, it's very cool. Anyway, I hope that kind of answers questions for you. Really, in terms of doing it for your own library, I think unless you are able to get around your libraries, computer security policies, your city's computer security policies, making your own server is probably not going to work the best. You may need to look into getting a server hosting company like we did. Which depending on the amount of people you think are going to participate can dictate how much you spend. And they're pretty flexible in that. But honestly, the cheapest way is to just have your own server. And it's super easy to do. You can just go to the Minecraft site and you can download your... Gordon, we have one quick question about it. I know the answer, but I'll let you. When you encounter an animal on the screen, is it one that your patrons have created or are they coming from other servers or other players? Oh, the creatures are spawned. The world spawns on themselves. However, you can, in a sense, create your own. Like here I've got this sort of ducks following because I have some seeds out. So what I'm going to do is use the seeds on them and they get those little heart things. I'm going to use seeds on another one and you see they fall in love and they poop out a baby duck. So in a sense, you can make your own animals. Okay. But you've got to find the ones that are just created by the game itself to start with. Yeah. And with the new patch, there's horses. There's horses now, guys. There's horses. You can ride horses. Yes, we have one. You can put a saddle on a horse and ride it and it's really cool. So that's really neat. I'm glad to finally have horses. Very much excited me. I've always said when people ask why I don't game more is because I would game more. So I kind of consciously keep myself away from things like this because I can see it totally sucking me in and not getting anything else done. Oh yeah. Minecraft does have a way of becoming a black hole where you start building something. And I mean, whether you're on a server or your own single player, it absorbs time like nothing else. World of Warcraft has nothing on Minecraft in terms of destroying lives. Through sheer, just all you do is spend your time playing the game. But it's a lot of fun and it brings communities together, building various things. Like for example, the Minecraft area. I'm just going to show you some of the, I had that running for a bit. Some of the amazing things that they've built. And of course the Nerdfighter group is pretty amazing to begin with. There's a big, they decided to build Hogwarts, which they're in the process of doing in this video. So you get a bunch of like-minded individuals in the community, which Minecraft is great about creating. And you can build incredible things, amazing things. And it's just a lot of fun. And it works, I think it's ideal for library programs, for school programs, for just groups of friends. Because of that community-oriented nature of it. It's a lot of fun. And you can build things together, design things together. And if you are doing something like a makerspace that involves, you know, CNC routers or 3D printers or, you know, laser cutting even, it's a great tool in allowing people that are entirely new to creating 3D objects in order to start thinking critically in a 3D world and creating things in a 3D world. Alright. Thanks. Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, thanks a lot, Gore. I think in the interest of time, I think we got one or two questions. We're going to hold them off just for now. And thank you very much for that. If any more questions come in at the end, we'll come back to that. So our next guest is Lindsay Thompson from La Vista Public Library. Lindsay, are you there? Nope, not yet. Hold on. I think you just unmuted Loretta. Lindsay, can you hear me? Okay, great. And have we switched over control there? Okay, Lindsay's been doing some fun stuff with live action gaming and HP Lovecraft. So Lindsay, why don't you go ahead and let us know what you've been doing there? Let's do it again. Yep, we see your slides. Okay, the little blobby thing was kind of in the way. Okay, yeah. Basically, our life-size Arkham Horror was a project that ended up coming about because of our Arkham Horror gaming club. And so I've got a picture here. This is basically what the base board of Arkham looks like. And essentially it is what I like to call a complex board game because it involves more than just normal gaming in a library where you set up the Wii or the Xbox and then the teams go at it. Yeah, there's lots of reading, critical thinking, teamwork, mathematical skills going on in these types of board games. And so Arkham Horror happens to be based off of the short stories of HP Lovecraft and his Cthulhu mythos and everything. And the basic gist behind Arkham is that everybody is an investigator with their own unique abilities and skills, and they work together to stop monsters from spawning in these different locations throughout Arkham and from portals opening to other worlds and more monsters pouring out. And if you don't succeed in killing all the monsters and closing all the portals, one of these massive monsters called an ancient one will awaken and they're about 50 times harder to kill than a normal little monster that's Roman Arkham. So it's a very teamwork-based game and everything. And Gordon and I actually introduced my Teen Advisory Board to it at our very first Teen Advisory Board lock-in back in 2011. And they just took to it like crazy because they'd never seen any type of game like this before. And so they really enjoyed it. And they were asking me throughout the school year, when are we going to get to play it again? When are we going to get to play it again? And because these games are so intricate, they unfortunately tend to be rather expensive. The Base Board for Arkham itself is about $80. And so I told them about the Commission's Youth Excellence Grant. And so we ended up applying for one of them to start our Arkham Horror Gaming Club, which essentially got us three Base Boards, one each of all the expansions, and then some related games as well. And so we started playing it and everything. And I got a few pictures here in the beginning. We basically ended up in the spring break of 2012. We ended up having all the materials and everything and basically sat down at the library from 11 a.m. until 9 p.m. to get everybody oriented to the game and help them learn the rules and stuff because since these are complex games, an average game can take six to eight hours to play. So we've got some pictures here. You can see here how intricate it is to learn everything. One actual Base Board can play eight people at a time. So we have enough in our club to accommodate 50 people at one time. And so they just really, really loved it. And during the school year, we have a club meeting every Saturday by monthly and then during the summer, we have it monthly so that they can come and play and have fun and eat snacks and they just really, really enjoy it. So last summer, the Teen Read Week grant through YALSA and Dollar General was coming up and I sat down with my teens and I told them about the grants and everything. I sat down with them on a Thursday and the grant was actually two on that Sunday. And I said, hey, it's a $1,000 grant. We had received YALSA's summer reading program grants before in the past and I was like, this is a $1,000 grant to do one big thing for Teen Read Week, not just burn it over the summer or anything like that. And I said, does anybody have any ideas? Because the theme last year for Teen Read Week was it came from the library so it was kind of spooky and everything. And our summer reading program last year was supernatural and so we were like, we can come up with something. And so everybody kind of unanimously agreed we should do something related to Arkham and HP Lovecraft and they thought up just different ideas like, oh, we could make Miss Katonic University t-shirts. We could do our own character creation workshop. Yes, we have our own character. We can insert the doctor as a character into the Arkham world, things like that. And then one of my girls, Sarah, ended up having an insane idea and she just raised her hand and said, the other summer we did a life-size candy land for the kids. Could we make Arkham life-size? And everybody was like, yes, that is the best idea in the world. So we sat down and I wrote the grants to make this huge Lovecraft festivities. We incorporated our other ideas and then it would all culminate in the life-size version of the game. And so basically the tab, they promised that, because we usually don't start school, you're programming until October, so we were going to find out if we got the grant last August. So I said, you guys have to promise to dedicate your time to volunteer to make sure that if we get the grant it turns out as awesome as it possibly could. And so they did. And so from the end of August until middle of October when Teen Reads we came around, we were working nonstop to have this program basically happen. So for preparation and everything, we had to think up a lot of things. There was one whole week where we'd been doing nothing but brainstorming. We just sat down in front of the game board, looked at it, and we had to think about things like, how do we make the locations 3D enough? And there are 26 locations in Arkham that we had to make life-size. We had to think about how to make the cards and the tokens in the game life-size. We had to think about how to do the monsters. In the base board there are 60 different monsters that we would have to make props of essentially. All the teams wanted to make costumes for their favorite characters that they liked to play. We had to think of other kinds of props that we would need. We also sat down and when we thought of props, how many of them could be donated? Like, oh, Sarah's got this that she can bring for the scene, or Kayla's got that, and she can bring that, and we can use that. And then we had to sit down and think of all the non-donated items that we'd have to purchase to make this happen and how much that would cost. So there was lots and lots of brainstorming going on. Here's some just pre-prip photos. One of the things I mentioned in the grant was that Fantasy Flight, the creators of Arkham Horror, they are actually located in Roosevelt, Minnesota, which is only five hours away. So I said that we would actually contact them and invite them to our event. Unfortunately, last year it was going on at the same time that they do their Arkham Nights at their headquarters, which is like a three-day weekend of people coming to play Arkham and everything. So in lieu of that, that top picture on the left, they sent us about $300 worth of merchandise and stuff to use in our gaming clubs, to give away as prizes, all that kind of stuff, and also have enthusiastically said, if you need anything else, let us know, and when you do it again, we want to come. They're very excited about it. The bottom picture there is just an example of some of the props and everything we started buying. The great thing about it was that Teen Read Week is in October, and so we had Halloween right around the corner. So a horror theme game was perfect for actually buying props that you couldn't find in, say, April. So basically one of the biggest things that we had in preparation was the portals, that when a portal opens up in a location, it sucks you through. You go do some stuff over in that location, pop back through an Arkham, and then get to close the portal. So our biggest idea, there are eight portals in the game, and they're all along one side of the game board. So we thought what we would do is actually paint six foot tall murals of all eight of the portals. So that was about two weeks worth of time there and everything. So you can see some of my teens here in the bottom corner painting some of the examples of our portals going on there. This was actually probably one of the favorite activities among a lot of the teens, because they got to be super creative. They got to look at these tiny pictures of the portal and try to make them six foot versions, but they had lots of fun painting and everything, and it was great. And our intention was that these portals could be hung on our large meeting room wall. And so if you were in a portal, you could stand right in front of the picture of the portal that you were in. Another big thing that took up a lot of preparation time was how to do all the monsters. So it was very, very easy for the monsters that are human-like, which is warlocks, cultists here, you see zombies, things like that. So we had a bunch of Barbies left over from when we did zombie Barbies. So we utilized those to turn them into monsters and everything. Some of the other monsters that are more creepy looking took a little bit more effort and concentration. And so you can see on the right here is we went and bought a bunch of dollar store stuffed animals that we thought we could turn into things. Luckily at the time, they had a bunch of hanging monkeys. So we bought a ton of monkeys, chopped off their arms and legs to make tentacles on other monsters, things like that. The picture on the left is probably everybody's favorite monster. One of my girls, Katie, she ended up taking the little dinosaur, cutting open its mouth, and then gluing a bunch of toothpicks randomly to make these poor, wool-jagged teeth of the Hound of Tindalos. And so the real monster is not as cute as that guy. So they had lots of fun being creative and trying to figure out how to make these life-size monsters that they could end up fighting and keeping during gameplay as their little monster trophies if they defeated them. Here's another example. The little cardboard tube guy is a Chthonian in the sky over here. He's supposed to be a multi-tentacled, multi-eyed, little sugar guy. So we had lots of them and we did make 60 actual monsters from the baseboard. Another big thing that we had to think about was how to make the cards and the tokens of life-size. This was probably the most, the element that was the most plain, busy work, essentially. Since the baseboard, each location only comes with like seven actual cards. And when you're thinking about playing with 20-some people in a life-size version, I pulled all the location cards from all the expansions and everything. So that's why in the bottom photo you can see that the red deck is pretty thick. The black deck is pretty thick. So that way we weren't having the same card drawn over and over and over. So we actually used all the cards from all the expansions and everything. And so basically what I did was I just went to the Arkham Horror Wiki. I took the photos of each card, enlarged them, printed them out. Then we basically had to spend time getting the corresponding construction paper color, taping the fronts to the fronts, taping the backs to the backs, laminating it, and then recutting them all out. So it was a lot of work. You can see Haley and Sarah there taping stuff down. Luckily a number of our circulation clerks volunteered to help with the laminating and the cutting. So that was a huge help. But they're laminated. They're all good to go. They're great because we can keep them, reuse them every time that we want to redo this. So very, very awesome. So the setup basically, we have a pretty big, large meeting room. And so the event was going to be held on a Saturday. But because we knew it was going to take forever to set up and possibly to take down, we reserved the room for Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. One of my girls is actually already graduated from high school. So she came in on Thursday. And we basically spent the entire Thursday setting the room up. Here's some pictures of pretty much all the props we've accumulated, through the grant, all the stuff that was also donated from my teens, from my own mom, things that we could use at the time to make our scenes more realistic. So we had lots of stuff to set up. So essentially what we did was we printed out images of all the different locations throughout Arkham. We made street signs and everything. And we kind of looked at how large our room was and kind of set them up accordingly to the game board. And then we just started putting all the props where we wanted them to go. And so you see Adi down there, she's taping down the street locations to the floor so they won't move around, start moving all the props to where they're going. More examples, you can see how we hung the portals on the back wall. The portals were probably the hardest part about the setup because they fell down about three times. And that was even with using heavy-duty booktapes flattered on the wall. So we've learned our lesson that next time we do this, they will go up the morning of the event so that we don't have to deal with eight, six-foot paintings stuck together. But it was very awesome. And we were able to actually set everything up. I had at the front of the room two very large tables that was kind of like my Game Master setup because I was basically running everything so that the teams didn't have to come up, draw a card, run back, forget where they were, that kind of thing. So the picture in the bottom is all our cards laid out and everything. The picture in the top shows their investigator sheets so that we can make it a little bit easier. Everybody automatically told me ahead of time, this is the character I want to be. This is the one I'm going to end up dressing up as. And I pre-drew all of their skills, their weapons, all the props that they would end up having. And so that way when they showed up on the Saturday, we could just go straight into the gameplay. And that's the props is probably one of the biggest things that we spent the grant money on. So we've got little knives, little Tommy Guns or a gangster, things like that. And because it was Halloween, we were actually able to find pretty much everything that we needed, which was just great. Some more pictures of kind of like the finalized. You can see that the bottom corner was as best as I could get a whole picture of the room, which was very, very hard. To show the direction that people were supposed to move, we got skinny masking tape and made taped lines like on the game board but on the floor. And so they'd be able to tell where they could move and everything. Some close-ups of some of our favorite locations. Like I said, there were 26 of them. So on the left you can see what we did to create a science lab. That's Steve the skeleton. He was one of our most expensive props that we were like, if we could have everything we wanted to do, what would we want? And he was an $80 fully articulated skeleton. So he's in our little science lab there. We got flasks. Yeah, I printed it. I found weird scientific charts that we laminated and printed out. You got bones, got a lab coat with blood on it, all that kind of stuff. The picture on the right is the general store. Lots of people donated jars and stuff like that. I had one neighbor who goes through wine like crazy. So he was collecting wine bottles for us to put freaky Halloween labels on. So they were potions and witches brew and stuff like that. Down here in the bottom is our river docks that we were so proud of because one of my girls, her grandparents have tons of wooden pallets and we were like that would make a perfect river dock. So we got little fishies floating around and all that stuff. Here's the curiosity shop. So weird Halloween decorations. You can see our rat poison, spiders, skulls of various sizes, all that kind of stuff. This one on the left here is the newspaper area. So printed out a lot of weird headlines, stuff like that. And then on the right is the Arkham Insane Asylum. Our other biggest splurge prop was an actual straight jacket costume because our idea was if a character goes insane, they have to go to the Insane Asylum to get their sanity back. So throughout the game, if anybody went insane, they had to go there, and actually put on the straight jacket while they waited to get their sanity back, which was a very fun distraction that everybody loved doing. It was the first time I'd ever seen anybody actually want to go insane in the game because they all wanted to wear a straight jacket. Here's Hibbs Roadhouse. It's a very fancy restaurant. So yeah, those are doggy, squeaky toys. You open the food. And then the train station. One of my girls and dad had an actual train. So he let us borrow it to make an actual little train. And then the character cosplay. Like I said, everybody already knew who they wanted to play, and they did an awesome job jacking up like their characters. And so I've got a few pictures of just some of my favorites. On the left here is Mary. Her character is Diana, who is a reformed cultist. And so very, very cute. Sarah is on the right there. Her character is Ursula, who happens to be a very brainy, scientific explorer girl. And we've got Pierre on the left. He's Wilson, who's just a handyman. And then the highlight, of course, was Elliot on the right, who specifically begged his mother to shave his head for the part so that she could paint weird tribal type designs and everything. He happens to play a shaman character. And so his was and down the winner of Best Addressed. There's Hayley there. Her favorite character is Montray Jack, who's an archaeologist. And her pose is exactly like the photo on the investigator card for him. It was awesome. The other picture on this slide happens to show our terror track, which essentially the more the town gets scared and everything, it goes up and up, but then shops start closing and you can't go there anymore. And then the little card with a creepy looking eyebally blob thing is Abbasoff, who was the monster, the ancient one that we were attempting not to awaken. And he was the easiest one to do for a life-sized version because if he wakes up, everybody's automatically dead. There is no attempt to fight to him. He just devours the world essentially. So lastly, I've got just some pictures of our actual gameplay and everything. Tap right corner. We've got Quinian, who got sent to jail and had to wear the prisoner's outfit, so she said. And the bottom is Kayla literally following the roads by crawling under the table. Yeah, they had lots of fun doing everything. We got big, you know, like, not fuzzy dice, but same size as fuzzy dice, you know, to roll for all our, you know, encounters and stuff like that. You see a big group picture here of everybody in their locations doing their stuff. Down here, Sarah's examining Becca with some of our medical implements. There's Abby with brains of the science building and Elliot dressed up in the straight jacket. Basically, the life-size version was, you know, pretty intense, obviously, in total. Over those two and a half months of preparation, my teens volunteered nearly 353 hours to make this actually happen. And to them, it wasn't work. It was absolute fun. They enjoyed everything. The great thing about it is when we do it again, we don't have to redo half of that work that we were doing. You know, it's mainly just set up and play again. There were, you know, a few complications that we know better now. Obviously, one of the big things is taking an eight-player game to a 20-player life-size game. We were not getting enough monsters appearing on the board, so, like, we could literally go an hour and a half before another monster would appear. Another thing that we would end up doing is tweaking the rules a little bit so that we're going to have the teens next time instead of playing individually. They're going to play in groups of three to four so that when a card is drawn, instead of having to wait for 20 people to take their turn, a card will be drawn, and then those three people do that action on the card at the same time. So if it says, fight a monster, they all get to fight a monster at the same time. And so hopefully that'll improve the playability of it and make it go a little bit quicker for such an actual large-scale project. And like I said, there were tons of photos taken over the two-and-a-half-month process of getting this done. So on my PowerPoint here, I've got the actual slide to our actual Google Photo album that has, I think, a little over 200 photos showing all the locations, all the stuff as we were making monsters, all the kinds of stuff. And as I said, I mean, you know, this was a huge project that came out of their idea, you know, and we didn't just do this during Tude Marine Week. We also did do the t-shirts. We did the character building workshop. They got to see how hard it is to develop a character because they don't see those rules that are going on behind the scenes. And, you know, just tons of, you know, stuff we ended up doing, you know, we did like paper crafts related to Arkham, you know, and monsters and stuff. We just had a lot of fun. And like I said, we're probably going to end up doing it again sometime and possibly September right now because they had such a huge fun time doing this and they got so much publicity, you know, with the life-size Arkham since we were interviewed for school library journal and everything. And a website devoted to Arkham is going to interview us soon, you know, stuff like that. And we actually applied for the Teenage Weekly grants again this time for this year, and we'll find out at the end of August if we get it or not to attempt to do a life-size version of life. So this is definitely kind of like the thing that they're like, we want to make this our thing, doing life-size versions of games. So that's basically what we did. So if there's any questions, you know, let me know. All right, great. Wow. I guess I have two questions for you because I'm just, I'm sitting here with my Cthulhu puppet. Before, if anyone has any questions or comments or anything for Lindsay or for Gordon going back to his, please use your question section of your GoToWebinar interface and we can pass them on. I'm also wearing a Lovecraft t-shirt. So, okay, my first question is when are you going to let the adults play? If we could get enough adults, sure, you know, I think my teens would volunteer to, you know, either play with adults or help set it up for adults. You know, I mean, we just had an author event over the summer in June, and one of the authors, he lives in Arizona, but he's from Papillion, and so he was like, I'll come on in, you know, no problem. And so he came in and he's like, I heard about your life-size Arkham Plumbing. Oh my God, I wish I still lived here because I would want to do that. Hey, yeah, I'm interested. I'll say that. But my other question is, given that, and I'm sure being in October helps, but given that this is Lovecraft and, you know, the horror and the subject matter, was there any complaints from anybody anywhere about, you know, the subject matter of this game and the program that you were putting on? We've actually had no complaints about anything, really. I mean, a lot of the parents that have come in and seen it and everything really focus on, you know, the benefits of such a complex game. You know, they actually see the teamwork as the teams are working together. You know, all the reading that goes on, you know, when they read their encounter cards, the math, when they have to figure out, okay, I've got this much of a fight and this monster has this much of a modifier which takes my fight down to this, but oh, I have this card that gives me extra help. You know, there's lots of math going on, you know. And, yeah, they're very much more focused on that because there are some things that, you know, might be considered, you know, more adult themes since, you know, it does take place in the 1920s. You know, they're obviously, you know, Hibbs Roadhouse, it's a gangster place. You know, there's alcohol, you know. There's one example. There's a whiskey card in, you know, the deck that, you know, if you drink your whiskey, it gives you, you know, makes you luckier because obviously you're drunk and you're more brave, you know, and, you know. They kind of just understand, you know, it's like the historical context thing. The abuse prohibition was going on at that time. So, you know, the gangsters are hiding all their alcohol. You know, there's, you know, other things like a Lucky Cigarar case. You know, things like that. But, you know, nobody's ever had any problems with any of the adult things or, you know, the monsters, even, you know, the life-size version. I mean, the monsters that the teens were killing, you know, were cute, cuddly little stuffed animals that we just modified. So it wasn't anything actually scary or whatnot. And like I said, I mean, my oldest player is Audie who is 21 and my youngest is Sarah who is 9. And, you know, the biggest problem she has is, you know, not understanding some words when she's reading a card, you know, but otherwise it's something that appeals to all ages to both genders, you know, and they have a lot of fun. Great. Yeah, that sounds wonderful. Any questions from the audience? No, nothing coming through. I got to say, I remember seeing some of this and usually when I have folks on, I try to not to research what they're doing too much because I want to hear it just like everybody else is hearing it and just the amount of work you put into this. And the kids put into this is just phenomenal and looks like tons of fun and yeah, definitely keep me in the loop. I might be, I at least want to see it played if not play it myself. That's a good answer. So, all right. So nothing coming in from the audience and we're a little over our hour here so I think we'll kind of wrap it up just a little bit. So thank you again, Gordon for that and Lindsay. Everybody's supplied their contact information. Chris has been bookmarking all of the links and everything that have been coming across. Normally I share some news here and I think we can just bring that up real quick here. I won't go into it too much but these links will be available in the show notes. Mostly just three things I've got there. One, using Google as a proxy server if you are having trouble accessing some sites. And then two services kind of either going private or shutting down. I think Christa for one of these there. The old reader, one of the Google reader replacements is going kind of private so if you have an account there you may no longer have an account there in a couple of weeks. And then Extra Normal which is I think shown at least once or twice on various episodes that allowed you to create cartoon videos online. They're actually shutting down after being open for about five years coming up in the near future. So if that's a service you use, it's something you might want to be aware of. So we'll put links to those in the show notes and allow everybody to access those and get the information they need on that. So I guess that's it for me in Tech Talk this week. Christa. Great. All right. Thank you. Thanks very much Lindsay and Gordon. That was really cool information. I don't know if I understood a lot of what Gordon was saying about servers. I don't do that kind of thing. But I think it was really good the basics of it and for me not knowing how to set up a server, having all those resources is really great. And then Lindsay, that just looks like a ton of fun. So thank you very much also everyone for attending this week. I hope you'll join us for that next week at Encompass Live when our topic is Boopsy, which sounds like a lot of fun. It's a service to do to create a mobile app for your library. And Louise Elkhorn who is the reference technology librarian at West Des Moines Public Library in Iowa was going to be on with me and she's going to talk about how they use Boopsy to create the mobile app for their library. So hopefully you'll join us for that next week. And if you are a fan of Boopsy, please do like us there. You'll get notifications from there of when new episodes are starting. Like here's the notice of joining us right now. We'll be right before this morning's show. When recordings are ready to watch, I post the notice up here as well. So if you want to keep up on what Encompass Live is doing and you are a big Facebook user, please do go ahead and like us on Facebook. Other than that, we are wrapped up for this morning. Thank you very much everyone. Thank you Michael. Thank you Lindsay, Gordon, everyone. And we'll see you next time. Bye bye. Bye.