 every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. But if you're unable to join us on Wednesday, that's fine. We do record the show as we're doing today. And it is available on our website for you to watch at your convenience. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think might be interested in any of the topics we have on the show. Here at the Nebraska Library Commission, we provide services to all types of libraries in the state. So you will find shows for all types of libraries, public, academic, K-12, corrections, museums, archives, blah, blah, blah. Really our only criteria is that it's something to do with libraries. Something cool that libraries are doing, something you think they could be doing. We do many training sessions, demos of services and products, book reviews, interviews, all sorts of things. We sometimes have Nebraska Library Commission staff on the show to do presentations about services and programs we have through the commission. But we also bring in guest speakers as we have this morning. With us today is Charles Fisher. Good morning, Charles. Hello. Hello, and he is from UNO, University of Nebraska at Omaha. And he is gonna talk to us about gaming, walking, hints, tips, and cheat codes. For those of you who are into gaming, you get that. And running a game gym. This is the session that you did at NLA, Arizona, I think right now. Yeah, it was at NLA in October, yeah. Just last month, yeah. And I invited him to come on and spread the word to more people. So I'm very excited. I did attend the session at NLA NLA, our Nebraska Library Association Conference was a combo in person and virtual this year. Some of the sessions online, some of the sessions in person. So I'm just gonna hand over you Charles to take it away and talk about how to run these often game jams in our library. Yeah, sounds good. So folks that have seen it before, I've got like three different versions of this, but on this next slide, feel free to download and check out this presentation as I'm going through it. Snap the QR code with your phone or if you go to the tiny URL, HTCC dash game jam, it'll link you directly to the current presentation I'm on. I like to make sure to share the live versions of my presentation slide decks because I do a lot of editing because I am a poor speller and there's a lot of editing that needs to happen after the fact. So download it, feel free to use anything from it. There's a whole lot of slides on this that I won't be going through today that I encourage people to kind of like check out after the fact and ask questions about, including a lot of really cool pictures of a lot of games that are game parts that we've made here in the makerspace here in the Creative Production Lab. Wow. Cool. So the big question I want to do for folks that are watching or would be doing with this live is why games in libraries. I know I tend to be a little bit of an evangelist in terms of making games, game design, game theory as an educational like frame or both for computer science education, library education and art education. But I've been landing in libraries. I want to see why libraries are primo spaces to really make games or make game programming. So one of it is that if you're already invested in makerspaces or not, if you've got the capacities of library to really develop a community based around game development as a whole. So what Game Dev offers communities is this real inroads technologies and subject areas research no matter what it might be. And I say this maybe a lot. I don't know a lot. I say it here a few times is that there's either a game on a subject that already exists and it could be better or a game that needs to be made about a specific subject and in inviting people into your space to make those games. One, you could build your collection and two, really kind of get people into this interactive, very human thing that we do called playing games. So look, if you want to get into game design, game development in your space, look at what you've already got. That's wonderful about it. You've got books clearly, but you've got computers, basic office craft supplies, maybe stacks of paper that need to go away, big tables that multiple people can sit around and play with stuff, software that patrons otherwise would never have access to on their own without significant investment. But most importantly, you've got people there to guide folks through any subject that they want to get into, including game design. Well, if you've got a maker space or trying to get a maker space into your library, you might even have stuff like laser cutters or 3D printers and people that are invested in the space or work in the space that can guide folks through the additional technology implications of making games or game design as a bigger media practice. So what's cool about asset creation inside of libraries is that you can offer people, even if they're already making games, really cool computers that can run the type of stuff such as video game development engines that are really resource intensive. And what's cool about that software is that it's free now, whereas even 10 years ago, you were buying into a game development engine, but you can download Unity, Unreal or Stencil to any of your computers for folks to get in on game design on their own ahead of a game jam programming event you may be interested in running. And if you've got a maker space, you can really bang out prototypes quickly for folks of if you've ever had an uncle, I'm usually that uncle that has this idea for a board game, how can they get it to a production level where other people can play it and either determine that it's kind of goofy and maybe not worth market space or really is worth market investment and your maker space or equipment or even craft equipment you might have can really take some ideas to a next level like that. And if you- For the video game development engines and the computers for that. Yeah. If somebody need a gaming computer like a high level type computer because many public libraries, they have old computers. Yeah, so- They haven't been able to update due to budgets and whatnot in a long time, five, 10 years. What kind of, do you need a special computer to run those kind of things? No, no, not really. Some of the software, yes, like 3D modeling and some of the lighting stuff that you do in Unreal. But if folks are just getting into game design or game programming as a whole, Unity has this intro level and it's really kind of nice on 2D structures. Stencil is a really cool one where you can kind of get like elementary school kids through and Stencil or Gameacre engine and a couple other free ones that are out there run on anything that's kind of has electricity strapped to it. It's gotten really good where five years ago if you're making game in Unreal, unless you were hooked up to a PC that glowed blue constantly, you're not gonna do much. But now we're to the point where a lot of the intro units in Unity or Stencil can run on anything, including I think Stencil is slowly working on an Android only like snap together game structure. And it's kind of some cool options where you don't need a whole lot of major tech investment to make game programming a way to activate even some older computers that you might have just kind of laying around. Cool, so next up. So the big idea in getting that is knowing that you don't need a whole lot of mega computers. You don't necessarily need high-end software. We've got a list on our website, a free software you may get access to, but game jams. A programming thing, an event proper that you can use to say, hey, let's showcase what our patrons can do. Let's get people into the library and make stuff. But what are they? I've kind of got to the point where I just say, oh, let's do a game jam and just kind of assume people know, but most folks don't. So the basic premise is that you give your participants a surprise theme, whatever that might be, the color blue spring and a very strict deadline in which to make a game of any kind. And at the end of it, they've got to showcase it so other people can play it or maybe even add it to your collection. It's based on the idea of iterative prototyping or iterative development that some folks may never do, but everybody kind of does in some way or another. But it's a really cool way very quickly to get people excited about making a thing. And that time period basis and a theme really turns it into an idea of hacking things or where a hackathon is you've got to, for programmers you've got to code something very, very quickly, but that time stream basis and knowing at the end you've got to showcase really gets people into making stuff. And there's a history behind this. This isn't just something I've kind of made up. We've got global game jam, which I'll showcase later. Ludum Dare, if you want to look that up online, there's always a Ludum Dare going on. Indie Jam and Nordic Jam, where you get independent developers in some tapes, entire state or country governments around getting people into technology by making something small, accessible, and interactive. And IGDA, the International Game Developer Association has been very supportive of this. So our jams here that we do, before the pandemic, they were entirely in-person events. We were doing 48 hours. We just loaded people down with PISA and Red Bull and said, make a game. And it worked out pretty well. During the pandemic changed things up a lot. And I think it was a really good reflection of what we can do where we moved the events entirely online to Itch.io and Discord. And I'll go to that in a little bit, but gave people more time of saying, hey, we'd like to give you make an idea around the rights of spring and let's make a game. And people kind of ate their own pizza. Pizza is a big thing for us on a lot of these games and food as a whole. But post-pandemic, whenever we get there and what we're kind of facing right now is mixing both in-person and online. Of everybody can get to our events wherever they come from, including our most recent Spoopy Jam, our two award winners were from, I think, Denmark and South Korea. So we get a lot of access from literally anybody and making little prizes for folks. So that forcing us to kind of mix, or come in and make a board game here in the CPL or just meet us online has turned about really, really cool. So our showcase, oh, yeah. And then because of that, the offering the online version, did you notice or was it just different groups? Different groups? Yeah, so a couple of things that happened, especially in the first one after doing some feedback is when we made it entirely online, folks that you can kind of see from these pictures are general game developers, identities are typically white men. But folks online, when there isn't a group of white dudes sitting around computers, kind of yacking at each other very loud, mind you, a bunch of white dudes are loud when they make games, is women and people of color that identified as such on our surveys actually showed up more for our online portions. The freedom that you don't have to be in a space that may be intimidating or inaccessible has been great. And I'm, I'm hate to say, I'm glad the pandemic forced us to reevaluate our accessibility structures using online and adding a bit of anonymity to the developers in order to enable that kind of accessibility for folks. Because as much fun the in-person is, I want people to just make games and feel free to make games, yeah. I find when I'm doing online gaming, I mean, I love it because nobody knows what I am. I do gaming in-person with friends here in Lincoln, but they're all people I know. It's just a group that we've always been together for years and years and years. But online, it's great, yeah. Yeah, and it's been great. So if the idea behind what I originally thought, game jams are about kind of making a game development community that's been really fractured or non-existent in Omaha and Nebraska, well, if we can grow the community overall, but just for people anywhere, it's a great way to deal with it. And that's why I say post pandemic, we're never going back to just in-person events. I don't think so, and overall in the whole world, I don't think we are. It's just so many more people being, are now able to participate in all sorts of events they never could before. And just because of the comfort issue or just the logistics. I live in California, but this great event is in Nebraska. Well, it doesn't matter now. Yeah, or what we find out is. It never really mattered, but nobody really was forced to jump into it. But now everyone's like, yeah, I'll zoom into anything. And what we'll get into in a couple of slides here is it's really easy to run an event like this online now because the infrastructure for people that really wanted to do this were like, fine, I'm just going to make a website that makes it happen. So itch.io is just like game jams all day every day. So yeah, I'll get into like the pregame time of thinking about what you want a game to do and knowing how you can make it online. I'll kind of rush to get there a little bit is how long do you want an event to happen? Knowing that it can be online, you can make a month-long event or if you really want just a small in-person event, maybe just do a two-hour one or a four-hour one or like we did in LA, a 40-minute game jam where we got games completed of thinking about knowing that you got that accessibility online is what are you going to make your scale of the event? Are you going to focus on something? Like if you're a one-hour game jam, maybe you only do a board game. Maybe you only do little miniature board games or if it's a month-long one, it's all online inviting patrons to do video games. My suggestion though is do everything. What people make literally anything is what I consistently say. And if you do an online version, is it going to be open to all? This is a question that came up with Global Game Jam is do you want people from other countries joining in and the answer, yeah, make it open to everybody or a local only, especially if you're doing like a one-hour one that's only open to people which you really want to like maybe focus on a local author as your theme, you can make those decisions much earlier on and have on there. And the age group question before you get anything ready is if you really want to restrict it to teens only depending on your programming or I'll suggest open it up to everybody. Like a seven-year-old will come up with the absolute best mind-boggling ideas for a game ever but not quite have those skills. So pairing the ideas kid with a slightly seasoned somebody's made two or three board games turns into a wonderful community building partnership where that seven-year-old will continue to come to your events for the rest of the time that they are in your community and then be the older person that helps the younger person. So even if you want to do local focus consider mixing it up a bit. But the idea behind some of the last six years of us doing this is how you change up your events overall can change up how the whole thing functions. Like the global game jam, somebody else sets a schedule. We just host the event, we use the website, it's been really good. With Ostara, that was our first online event. The end result of a really long lead time and early theme announcement was that way more artistic, weird, silly art games came about it. Insert game here where it's about making a team first and then they get the theme with a much shorter time window means we get more experienced folks in video games that don't look great but function really well happen. And with Spoopy Jam that just happened, it's giving folks the ability to pitch their idea early on by deleting a theme earlier and then gathering a team before any actual development starts means that the games feel more complete and robust. So this is an option of like when you're thinking about your schedule for the event it can pretty much change rather drastically what kind of games you get made. As an example, for 2019, Spoopy Jam has kind of stayed consistent where in our in-person one, we drop the theme, people are given an entire day or even an evening to just come up with an idea before making anything and the idea that what is non-competitive, we handed out prizes but the prizes were like best use of spider legs because it was Halloween themed. So nobody could really make something that used spider legs quote unquote successfully but they could make them with spider legs and spider legs turned into it. That was a really creepy game but it was delightful. It has the idea that how you give your overview structure and letting people know ahead of time gives them a better plan on what they can do. So but the bare minimum that you need for running one of these events is kind of thinking of an aesthetic and your theme. So let's separate those out into two things. Spoopy Jam has a Halloween aesthetic but we'll get into later the theme, the special thing that people are making games on is a little bit more focused or goofy or just it's about sparking ideas, right? If you wanna run a jam, don't just think we're having Game Jam or our libraries named Game Jam is think of how you can really make it into a court event on its own if it had to move in some way. Do you want to celebrate a specific season holiday like the IP author of, let's say, I would love to do this Game Jam so because this was like my summer in seventh grade was how do you do a game about the life and writing of Willa Cather? That was a summer camp I went to in middle school. It was great but I would love to see it as a Game Jam. Very Nebraska. But yeah, you know your patrons well and you know they like a specific thing as we got a bunch of Minecraft folks. We got a bunch of just pulling kids games out of it. Fortnite folks and how do you key maybe making board games around some of the things that they like to do in their video games? Or you have a lot of like, you notice that your young patron fantasy books just fly off the shelf, maybe make a dragon based video or a game event. So that's the bare minimum is just pick a time, pick an aesthetic, generally what you like and then really key in on what your folks love and you'll get a Game Jam. People will make games. So some examples of that is when we went with Ostara where we've kind of got this really whimsical spring, green theme growth thing. But our icons we picked, and this is where you'll notice in some of these is we've kind of landed on these core icons that we use for our outreach where Ostara is about this like the white rabbit, the electric rabbit and on this welcome to 1999 we're doing matrix stuff now but really picking and sticking with because it allows you internally to make your graphics and outreach more focused. But as long as you land on something, just pick something where to go with it. And then yeah, because then it also bled over into our theme where we found Stravinsky's rights of spring and then kind of put some little sprites into it where that got us some really cool ideas. And that was our first time we got a European developer tag in on one of our local events or 21 theme where we're kind of using the general aesthetic to feed into the theme that we give to people. And that theme turned into making stuff about like after like destroying something in the game and then feeding it to regrow, especially during the pandemic. This was a nice thing to people just think about it spark good conversation even if we did get a whole lot of games made for it where our summer game jam insert game here is a little bit more sci-fi ish because we typically focus on video games where that sci-fi structure just let me kind of make these weird arcade cabinet things. And we get more video game focus of your aesthetic and your theme choices can result in getting different communities to come in and play where this is primarily college students come in and make video games in the summer. And that's what we wanted that one to be. And then we wanted to in 2020 talk about alienation. We got games about aliens and people making games about how they felt very lonely during the pandemic. And going back even further where it's if you want to really spark discussions as part of your game jam event getting a theme that really pushes this is what we're talking about the planet and what's cool about games and people suddenly find themselves making games about look, the planet is literally falling apart. What can we do to fix it? How can we cooperatively build something new? I was like, hmm, maybe that's something we need to do in real life too. So your theme can build a lot on that. Spoopy Jam started as we wanted to make a Halloween one. So we did and it looked kind of neat and we tried to pair up a little bit of horror theme but it was kind of too spooky. But then we went spookier sort of and it just went kind of goofy as long as it's extra goofy, everybody got in on it. But our names for this, we've got names ready to go for Spoopy Jam for like the next nine years. I think next year is, oh, this year was Spoopy Jam three Spoopy Jam four is to heck and back very childish, very kind of Halloween, but whatever. It was good. Halloween, but not horror. Right, yeah, it's Spoopy. And if you want to get your urban dictionary out or just kind of, it's not scary. It's like those dancing skeletons from the Disney cartoon from 1923 where they're just kind of like, ha, ha, ha, they scare that cat, but in reality, they're just goofy. But in this one, our themes are kind of latched onto that is it's about bones or dice or skeletons or Johnny Bones Jones of letting your original theme idea kind of feed into other stuff or letting it get kind of weird where in the flesh turned into some funky stuff. But it kind of fed into where we are now where we've simplified our themes or down to like one or two words versus a complete sentence. Our outreach for the events and running them is kind of unified where kind of like clean white, clean black with maybe a pop of a singular color we've chosen for our design. And then just kind of having a little bit of fun with the general imagery. That's what me, knowing that I'm doing a lot of the organization on my own is how simple can I make it so I can reuse something again and again and again for the design portion. So yeah, new Jams 21. Did I make this twice? No, so it goes back to the bare minimum event setup of this is just the very practical what do you do step by step to make your game jam? Pick your dates, when are you gonna announce your theme? How much development time are they gonna get and what is the absolute presentation deadline people are gonna get on? Announcing these very early and making these hard and fast decisions for the time structures are the most important thing for rapid prototyping and development events at all is I need to know what I'm doing. I need to know how long I get and I need to know when I can stop. But if you can change the feel of the jam of when you kind of announce your secret theme is do you do it? Like we're having a game jam and it's about Nike sneakers might be a fun one and he announced it at the same time it becomes less of a rapid prototype and some of the games kind of feel a little bit overworked when you announce the theme at the same time as your event versus if you just do it like, okay we announced a month out and then you only actually get to know what you're making for 48 hours. This sense of panic and scramble is one hilarious as a presenter and two people come together with some very great ideas when they're under that time crunch. So this is the rest of the what do you absolutely have to pick a date and if you can at all safely picking an in-person portion of this especially for rapid prototyping iterative development games people hearing other people come up with really absurd ideas from across the room oftentimes what we'll see during that brainstorming session is teams pull themselves apart and go hey I know how to accomplish that in programming wise or ooh I really like your idea can I help you make art for this is really cool kind of like moving structure of the in-person space that we have yet to figure out how to like discord does it somewhat but when people meet other people in building that community in person and kind of like cling together like wreckage in a storm during the event you really make this kind of really fun community of yes I'll come back knowing that Roosevelt's gonna be there and he'll have a great idea for some kind of game and I just wanna do the 2D animation for him but it kind of results in this type of big motion piece where everybody yeah kind of pulled tables together and drank a whole lot of energy drinks but everybody ends up doing this scramble in person to meet each other and bring their own stuff that ends up being really easy to put together as long as you've got a room with tables and say we're making games folks show up folks have ideas and it just happens and the challenges thing so if you go to some of our webpages on our game jams we do these things called mutators which are you ideally should build your game around the theme but what if you wanna take an extra challenge to it like hey your game must be multiplayer or your game only uses four-sided dice or it only uses if it's a video game assets that were free from Wikipedia that was a fun challenge one year that resulted in really goofy stuff and if you want people to do things like this or do you want specific kind of games topics being made like the Willa Cather stuff is make a game based on the words on page 57 of my Antonia and you will receive a copy of the book. Oh people will do it just like oh cool I get stuff for it but you can get them to do it because otherwise and I keep doing these kind of unlike some someone's self-preservation maybe three or four people at any event actually do the challenges or if they do they become changed to such a degree that they were really good idea kick starters but they really didn't hold themselves to the challenge long-term so keeping them kind of nebulous and free-floating as things people could do it don't spend too much time on the challenges focus on making the space welcoming and having a good theme for people to get onto and then if you really want to push people yeah it's a good idea as well because yeah that's what the idea is like majority of folks don't even read this especially once we're online is I just want to know what my timeline is so I can get done and what's my theme most folks don't even read them I love doing them but most folks don't even touch them so here's some examples of those like I spent a long time and this is like one of five pages of these challenges we did for the 2019 event where we included one of our sponsors where roast coffee, the idea that the game and the board game the video game board game work together it was cool ideas but they didn't end up like latching on as well but they did really good and people in conversation said I didn't hold myself to the challenge but I did start an idea from them so they're still useful just in my case don't make 20 challenges just make four or five because then they can kind of like this one they're a little bit too long because I want to say it out loud because the words are funny scooping the digital spoof challenger here is create your game on tabletop simulators like people because wait that's an option of making a board game on a video game that makes the game for you so that turned into really pushing people towards adopting a new technology that they otherwise wouldn't have touched just by going oh okay and that was really good so if you want to get into doing game jams yourself so you don't have to come up with them on your own global game jam is an external nonprofit you just have to host the local site and right now if you go to globalgamejam.org they are taking submissions for local sites so especially in Nebraska there's only been one global game jam site for the past seven years it's us but I would love to see more out west maybe Fremont picks one up if we go out to Brokenbone maybe we get some in York where your local community will see and they will give you all the support possible as part of the Plains Mountain region of you'll get maybe got a community to college or if Columbus College it would be getting some students there they give you everything you need to go the intro video the theme and it used to be just a 48 hour situation it's still 48 hours but now they've changed it to eight full days of however much dev you want to do I'm looking at the website it looks like it's going to be January 20th through the 30th at 2020 yeah and their suggestion is pick two days in there but we're not going to penalize you in any way if you decide to do all 10 days and that's what we did last year is it's a lot of work on our side to kind of like watch the discord and talk with people and answer questions for all 10 days but it was really helpful I mean last year was and I think I could put this on the left side yeah our theme our visual aesthetic for our local spaces we decided to go with like a neon laser stuff but no surprise it works but in 2021 was humongous where it continues to grow as an event if the game of a GDC in LA has an entire panel dedicated to it and a space dedicated to making the games and locally this even though it was entirely online it was the now after Spoopy Jam 3 the second best attended event we had ever had and 13 but I think we had three board games and 10 full video games made for it because people heard or game developers that happen to be on Reddit or otherwise just go oh go game jams happening how can I do it locally and they'll latch on it's been really good to have that visibility from a large external space and the limited internal work other than making a phone call to your regional rep which is here you might just get me helping you do the event so there's a much more robust structure and this is where it kind of goes into global game jam is really really on the ball as a 501c3 for doing surveys identifying developers and saying once we went online this is our first point in time where we go wow we're really getting a key uptick in identifying as non-male developers which has been a huge challenge in the game development community is once you feel safe and feel accessed and can feel visualized in here people will hop on and global game jams a great way to get in on game jams as a whole in a really robust event so our local ones are examples of this is where I'm saying we've got the opportunity to make your game jam online or your community development very easily with itch.io as a website or itch.io they have a dedicated game jam panel where you don't have to make your own website you just need to like we went with our bare basics pick a date make a description and maybe make some rules and you could even vote on prize winners on here and your website's ready to go and people from anywhere can sign up on it what's even cooler is that once you make a game jam site on itch.io it gets promoted by itch.io and indie game developers will share it on their Twitter if you're kind of friends with them and that's how I get a lot of traction and the second part of that in not having an in-person community or even having an in-person community that might want to talk after hours is Discord just a setting up a Discord server is free relatively simple if you've got set ones you may need to look at some ways to kind of quote unquote police it a little bit but not necessarily especially in game development community of people want to talk about what they're doing and seek help or make a team or just show off what they've got is between these two the infrastructure is readily available within five minutes and you can make a game jam ready to go our end results of that are after the game jam is done all of the games that get made be they video games or like a PDF of rules that people upload like the insert game here 3D6 RPG challenge that was posted up in the summer is you don't have to host the games anymore is people can download them from a link in perpetuity so long as the developer keeps their page up which is open and it defaults to a Creative Commons Zero license so all the stuff is free and this is a really good way to help your patrons build up either a portfolio or for you to just put a link on your website to your game jam event and people can download the games without you having to do a bunch of additional HTML coding just to get your website up it's just put a link with a button on hey look at the games our patrons have made and it's ready to go some takeaways after doing this for a long time is that idea that I kind of talked about is that unique identity of your jam be it global game jam as the global game jam is huge on making sure your promotion goes over well especially getting outside developers to come in the really pushing the idea of that you don't need to know how to make a game in fact some of the best games that have ever been made or ideas that have been turned into games have come from folks with no experience whatsoever and it's not about a competition Ludum Dare feels like a competition you get professional indie developers but if you're here and just say hey grandpa, grandma, kids show up and we are gonna make a game from 2pm to 4pm on Saturday you don't need to know how to make one the games that get made are these really cool very human experiences and you built a new team and they'll keep coming back is most folks aren't really there to make a game they're there to one eat donuts and pizza most of the time or two is they just wanna meet other people it's like I didn't know that I thought I was the only person interested in competitive Catan and changing the rules in Warhammer games well you meet two other people that gets that and all of a sudden then you and in my case you follow your S class after you graduate from college from people you met on making games and now you're a little bit of a tiny company doing side work for folks it's a really you meeting other people not just from a business standpoint or an interest standpoint but it's everybody's together around making something and once you're done and kind of said like wreckage in the storm you've been through a four hour thing you've pulled out your hair you've torn sheets of paper in half because your ideas were dumb or just not workable and at the end of it you stay in touch with those folks on Twitter for the next seven to eight years making jokes about how bad that most recent AAA game is so this one I push on folks of why if you could do in person newcomers will show up for donuts and stay for the board games and stay to help other people test video games if you've got snacks at all it is a phenomenal way to get folks that otherwise would not have even ever considered being part of it to be like well I know I know about medieval history I could help you build that game about horse combat and while they're chomping on donuts is wonderful Ooh we got the printer going on in the back so the weird thing that has kind of cropped up is that if you're on a campus so college universities this is really funny thing that is happening is the least represented of our developers that are on here are the students that are active at school even here at UNO we've got two game design tracks to computer science and art those students don't necessarily show up for our events until after they graduate and it's kind of unique to us where they're like sub concentrations and not a full game design major where maybe Belville University had a few years ago where don't necessarily key and hope oh we need college students to make this a success in fact college students will trickle in and then they will trickle back in down the road but even if you're interested in making hey we want a STEM focus or a STEAM focus including art in that STEM structure making sure you support board game development is super helpful for everybody that gets in there on the basis that if you can make it into a board game you can make it into a video game like you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball but when you have board games a lot of times what you'll see is folks that don't have coding experience or tech experience or even kind of computer averse will kind of step away from their grandiose ideas of making this next complex video game and make a very, very good board game that you can keep as part of your collection and make and hand out to people and go oh I like this experience the other thing is whiteboards, get them as many whiteboards as you can humanly acquire go to Lowe's they have a whiteboard Wayne's Codding cut those down into 12 inch by 15 inch little micro panels that you can put on your lap whiteboards make the event even more so than donuts so people can be hungry but if they got a whiteboard they'll be hungry and still come up with seven ideas and then erase all of them from year to year this is the big challenge mode of if you decide to go into it your first year will probably have five people show up it will be you somebody who is hardcore into making games but once you actually make games of you build it they will come of if you've got folks inside your library that are into board games having them make board games and showcase that hey we made this in our maker space we made this with our cricket craft unit that we have over here we made it on our computers that are just available everyone goes wait so you did this here can I do it too that next year and the years afterwards of having that consistent timeframe of yes every April we're doing this game jam or every last Saturday we're doing our board game jam is that consistency is what gets people there and showcasing that you built something is what brings people in and builds the community time and time again oh yeah if you're on this one was where I pulled it from when I made this for originally an on university one is if you can partner with anybody partner with them if you find a club or organization in town or maybe you've got a hobby group or you have a Hastings book place finding those local people to get in and tag on as addition both helps out without reaching to sometimes you end up with free stuff handing out stuff is great for in-person or even if it's a come by and pick up your goodie bag we have dice from the local card game place or do we just pick them up on your own but game and hobby shop sponsorships are neat but rare to come by most of the time you're gonna be buying it yourself but tagging their name onto it is great to put up a poster in there vendor sponsors here's your guide reach out to Red Bull whatever your regional organizer is or if you're on a campus your Red Bull wings team and they will give you a case of Red Bull for your event especially if you're doing like a two-day lock-in event that Red Bull is great. Oh yeah, I crossed that off because sometimes they just don't show up I was very upset about that this year so I crossed it off the list even though I kept on it so find somebody local and get coffee but Red Bull is really good except when they're not. And there are lots of local companies definitely working especially here in Lincoln right now we have a new coming soon mana games it's gonna be a board gaming location they start out in one of our breweries but now they have their own and I'm sure they love to be involved in these kind of things so yeah look for your local stores there's places where games are being played and you might not realize it like this was being done at Cosmic Eye Brewing you wouldn't have thought oh this bar brewery is a place to find gamers you could, yeah it is. Yeah, well and look at Spielbound here in Omaha Spielbound has made, they've got a board game library they've got drinks on an open bar and it's every Saturday you're on a wait list to get in there. If you had told me as a kid in 2002 I'd be on a wait list for a board game cafe. I won I would have probably lost my gourd but I think I would have been even more of a nerd than I already am it's just like this is where it's at it's super popular there's a lot of stuff popping up and if you get a new, cause what ends up happening especially in small towns cause I know what's happened in Fremont was you'll get a hobby shop that will pop up maybe they only last six months to a year because it's really hard with the margins in a hobby shop but if they're early help promote them and kind of feedback into each other and really work on that again community development through the events. The fun part is if you wanna be a satellite site for our game jams I've already got a year of game jam stuff ready to go. I've got seven years of game jam stuff ready to go. I've got the itch.io site. I've got a board game kit contact me directly and I would be more than happy to hand over resources or show up at your library to help proctor the event especially for a short-term one of having somebody and I'm utterly shameless during these events of walking to people's tables and yelling at them no cut that out you need to finish the game stop adding stuff and get it done or the hour by hour reminders of have you thought about what your player's objective is? Have you written it down? Is it playable by somebody else or talking to two different tables and saying you need to go test theirs you should steal somebody and help test each other's games of that type of like I'd say authoritarian oversight especially to younger game jam events is I've become an acquired skill and if you've got a teacher ought to partner up with an elementary school teacher if they've taught fourth grade they know how to do all of this very, very successfully and just identifying those things. So I would love to come and help folks out and say look we're running Spoopy Jam 4 to heck and back as I think that title on that one and we're doing satellite sites in Chadron and again I'm just gonna go back to Fremont because I've been talking with them a little bit and they're running an event locally so those games get posted up to a collective 20, 30 page game site and every library associated it links back to this huge games collection. That looks real good for future grant applications I'm just saying. So if you want that makerspace structure down the road it's like look we hosted events that got 50 games made sweeps because we did it all together and I'm happy to help out. Absolutely. Yeah. I think it's something that some people are asking wondering about is how do I even get started? I know nothing about building a game, creating a game but I'd love to host from these events. How do I as the library person a complete newbie to this whole thing even get started? Let me see if I got a slide on that. Oh, you do this. This is where it's kind of funny is I've got some slides to that. Is you don't play games more than anything else just play a few games and break them down. This little maybe you can see my mouse. No, you can't see my mouse is on the bottom right hand corner there's a box Jesse shell J E S S E S C H E L L The art of game design is a textbook that I use for course coursework as a whole and they make a deck of cards that ask questions that you can just kind of go through the deck of cards of does your game address the players goal? What are the obstacles? What is the timeframe? And you can kind of go through this whole deck of cards and while you're playing a game either one you've made or somebody else's and just ask questions of it it really kind of uncover some of the core mechanics of game design as a whole. So if you have no experience what I put on this here for is gather yourself a bunch of junk broken board games little pieces of scraps washers as many dice and I said it as a joke at the maker space that I've now turned into an in-class assignment of make excuse me make Candyland from memory. Everybody thinks they know what Candyland is or has an idea it's a game about moving from one end of this rainbow road to the other in some way. If you can make that and then make it better and then compare it to the actual rules of Candyland or all the different versions of Candyland that teaches you quite literally everything on a base level about a game that you may need to know of the player's goal is to get from start to end. What is the mechanic of doing so? Is it through rolling dice? Is it through drawing a deck of cards? Is it through spinning a weird spinner thing? What are the balance? How long should that road be? How many players can play successfully? Are there ways that you can make new key features to make it more fun? So by making it from memory as fast as possible comparing it to the original and then making a better version is a fun internal experience of you can make a game anybody can make a game and then go okay if I can do it about this can I make a game about gardening? Can I make shoots and ladders and involve hot pepper plants and cucumbers in some way of if you have no experience whatsoever give yourself an hour and make Candyland and it is a phenomenal in-class experience for watching students go what way but I don't know I've never played it somebody in the room has and somebody can make it into a version that's kind of fun. I haven't since I was a child and let's see if I can remember what I did. Yeah. In my head what it looks like I couldn't tell you how I played it but I love to make it up. Yeah. And it turns into this really cool thing because it turns into the fun conversation inside of a room of the Candyland you played as a kid did you move using cards or the spinner? Did you move in the 2000s version with two dice that had colors on them? The differentiation in how the different of people's specific memories of Candyland one date them pretty easily and two it's this odd balls like man do I really gonna make Candyland do it to a college student? Oh yeah the answer is yeah you're gonna make Candyland and it's gonna force you to be a better designer in thinking about every part of a game very quickly. But otherwise I think that there's I've got a book list that I can tag I'll add my additional book list from that course I'm teaching in the spring for everybody here but the art of game design by Jesse Shell is a must read and gets you in the deck of cards kind of helps out. Plus if you go to my YouTube and I think I got a link to it on here I run one of these game jams live for folks to kind of walk through and see how it gets done but most of the time here's what's wonderful about the operating aspect of this is you don't need to know anything if you really just wanna have middle schoolers come in and give them a big old sack of dice and some whiteboard and a bunch of scrap paper and a time limit as long as you remind them hey we only have an hour left they'll make really cool games without a whole lot of guidance. It is a delightful experience to know nothing and watch folks just go wild because you gave them the space and the materials to do so. So that's another reason I've really encouraged folks to consider this as a programming at the library because you don't have to have a whole lot of experience or buy-in you just need to let people know hey next two hours we're gonna make a game and then when you're done we're gonna play it and we're all gonna have fun together and it works out really well yeah this is that deck of cards I was talking about with this foam dicer from the dollar store but it gives you ideas of what will surprise players when they play my game is at the lens of surprise this is one of the coolest things and you can get it for if you contact the publisher Shell Games and you're an educational institution either they'll give you a discount or they'll send you like a fat stack of them for free which is how I got them like 10 boxes of these it's been really great. The other things that kind of lets it be is I've just shipped some samples of our presentations and promos of the games that have gotten made showcasing your game chunks and kind of goes into well we keep a lot of these hex things and glass pieces and broken board games on hand of it's a really cool opportunity of if you've got games in your collection that people have never checked out don't check out and you want to tear them apart for a display or for use as a kit to build other games do it it's a great way to recycle things. You can also take a peek at some of our insert game here the website that we have built out and our global game jam site and look at some of our games that we've made as examples of what you can kind of expect after you've been running stuff for five to six years including I think we've got a game it's a bottom right hand corner about a baby swinging from a high rise building to steal people's candy as they walk below the building that one was a really delightful game and when that kid grows up and realizes that we used a sprite of him as a baby yeah that'll be fun. Another thing that I kind of push on folks is the idea of making an arcade machine we've have one I've got all of the outlines ready to go for it you can probably build it out of an older computer you have and you can get people to make video games just for the arcade machine as well this one I'll leave folks please contact me I'll teach you how to make an arcade machine on the cheap with here's all the planes for it how to get it up and running I'll just send them to you they're great it's fun because we can get student made games that'll show up this has been a really cool showcase that has resulted in when you build it they will come of showcasing student made games or patron made games in a place that is very vibrant central to a meeting space folks will say can I make one too and they'll sit down at a computer and you can like well in the next two weeks we'll kind of guide you through making a basic maybe space shooter game or a tag sort of a game but they'll make it and they get a lot of programming experience and they get to showcase it it's been really fun or tying if you've already got a board game event stuff going on is the great outreach if you're running a hey everybody come play our board games but next week we'll be making them is partnering between those two pairings one you'll see more checkouts for your board games and two it becomes a self fulfilling cycle of you've got a collection and people want to add to it if you tell them during your event that the game that they make gets added to the collection they'll add it to their entire collection and they'll say I want to make something great I want to make it a box set let me I think I've got it like this bad boy here was made during a game jam and then made on our laser that showcases 3D printing our laser and it's really fun and kind of like this gorgeous box set thing just by telling someone if you make it we add it to our permanent collection they're like cool I'm a published game maker now it's a really cool feeling yeah I have are getting into board game collections now it's been a thing for years but some are still getting into it that's definitely something that's gonna possibly you know branch off from that yeah and I because I had a conversation about someone with this yesterday of if you're looking for games to either turn into other board games or tear apart put out on your social media of just saying we'll take any board games you don't want you will receive 20 or 30 different chess sets that are either collectibles or absolute garbage and receive like a broken Paw Patrol game for toddlers but the parts are really cool of letting people know that you're all about board games you become this repository if you don't actually have to buy a whole lot of stuff and your collection can grow relatively quickly yeah and this is on that as well as I'll add some more resources for people down the road of if you want to see how a global game chain came out in 2021 go to their website they've got some really cool stuff including right now they're doing the global heritage game jam some of the promo videos that I've made is on the YouTube playlist for our themes if you want to look at the creative production lab as a whole and see what we've got going on check out our website there's a link on there insert game here is all or where we used to be our repositories and at the bottom of this page if you've downloaded the presentation is I've made a purchase list for some of the tech and for kind of a how can we get stuff on the cheap software wise too as part of there but yeah plenty more links for everybody else including please email me I am more than happy to send people back seven pages of pretty much answers to anything that you'll possibly want to I love writing emails I know that's a weird thing to say but I really love writing really long emails yeah and that's the end of that but here's the thing if you download this there's another 20 slides that you can check out on your own including weird samples of games that never got made to cut so feel free download this guy and that's that whole situation yeah great so thank you so much Charles anybody have any questions nobody typed anything in while you were presenting that's okay if anybody has any questions or comments or anything you wanna say go ahead and type in the questions section and someone did see I see George here to say and I didn't notice this myself too I knew about this happy international games week yes coincidentally I don't know if this was we didn't do this on purpose I don't think we got really lucky we're Bob Ross and this everything's a happy accident and we're happy with it and he picked this one and it is international games week is November 7th through 13th this week where you know it's just all about gaming for educational recreational social ALA has a website about it and information about different games and things and how you can use exactly what you've just been talking about today so perfect timing for that yeah see if you have any questions type in I am going to Paul presented control back to my screen well we're just wrapping up if anybody can't get questions go ahead and type we're not coming off right now just let me know so here is something about the international games week page from ALA the slides which I will have a link to the slides also be on in the when we put up the recording and this is what Josh just talking about this was the end of his presentation but all these other slides here that you can go look at with more info oh and you're just saying for international games week this is when you sign up and let them know what you're doing I said they're currently 499 libraries that are registered so if you're doing an event or want to do an event for international games week get on the website there and sign up ALA has a gaming round table that has a lot of work with library battle maps from Pokemon Go awesome and then the global game jam website here if you want to do one there's a link right there get involved they're looking for sites as you said I would love to see 2022 be the largest global game jam ever and it's what's wonderful is every year has been the largest global game jam ever getting bigger this is what you're talking about the cultural heritage game jam yes that's happening right now and they're in global game jam has partnered with the federal government on getting some grants out for that and their general presentation on it has been great the folks running it are really pushing the idea of let's talk about cultural heritage as a whole either in the US or beyond and how can we make games about subjects I put that in that early slide of either there's a game about it that exists that could be better or needs to be played or there's a game that needs to be made about certain subjects and your game jams depending on how you kind of make your theming and your outreach forum can address some very, very cool things very quickly too yeah I think what you said about games that there's you can find a game about anything really and some of them are just for fun some are do you have that deep meaning you know climate change, whatever anything's going on in the world loneliness, cultural issues there's something out there and there's something you might want to create like you said using Candyland and making an aversion of it same thing as any other game that's out there use something that's out there and how would you like to play it how would you like you know think it could be run better or did you have some crazy idea when you were playing I wish I could have gone here or done this go ahead and make it up there's nothing stopping you and especially when it comes to board games there's very little stopping you the vast majority of the parts of a game jam or a board game are just pieces of paper scraps of paper somebody's got some recycled paper they can grab tear up into chunks and make your own game yeah and you were talking about have I'm asking for donations you're saying hey do you have any board games and things I'm sure all of us we or our parents have the old versions of games we play to the kids where half the pieces have gone missing because that's what kids do that's what this broken version of risk that is sitting back on my desk it was just like cool it's the half the cards aren't there to actually play it the pieces got chewed on by a kid but the pieces that are still there are these little army men of different colors perfect for a game jam kit and that's what's going to happen with this is separate out the junk put all the pieces back in together and somebody's going to make something out of this at the end of January yeah awesome all right so does anyone even have any other questions or anything George just just say for the International Games Week he's already planning for next year he's in Indiana so he's already looking at next year because this is happening right now but you can fully solve it all right so it is a little up to 11 o'clock so I think if anybody just nobody does have any questions or anything for Charles we can officially wrap it up today thank you everyone for being here thank you so much Charles for showing up showing all this with us I'm hoping you'll get a lot of people reaching out to you to wanting to do these kind of events in their libraries and we get a lot more cool games coming out there I'm a big gamer myself and husband we do that I wore my D&D logo shirt today on purpose Tron just to I'm hoping more people get involved with it as well as I said we are recording the show right now and it will be on our website here's our Encompass Live site if you use your search engine of choice and type in Encompass Live it's the only thing called that on the internet right now so nobody else can use that name we have our upcoming shows here but our archives are right here today she'll be at the top of the page should be I'm gonna be done by the end of the day today usually I say the end of the day tomorrow but for me as a state employee I'm not tomorrow's a holiday for everyone today so by the end of the day today you'll have the recording will be up I'll email everyone who registered today and attended today so you know what's available there'll be a link to the recording on the YouTube channel a link to the slides all will be there and we will push it out onto our various social media too we have our mailing lists Encompass Live also has a we have a Facebook page if you do like to use Facebook you can give us a like over there we promote about our sessions here's a reminder to log in today we promote about our presenters that we have our speakers on the show when our recordings are available for everything so if you like to use Facebook go ahead and give us a like over there we also use the hashtag Encompass Live a little abbreviation there on our Instagram and Twitter so if you just want to look there for what we're doing you can look for that hashtag and see what's going on on the show you know or just you know keep an eye on the website here while we're on our archives I will show you there is a search feature here you can search our show archives you want to see what other shows we've done you can do the full archives or just most recent 12 months that is because this is the full archives of Encompass Live going back to when we first premiered the show which was in January 2009 we've been doing this for over 10 years but we have all of our shows here and this is something we do, librarians we archive things sometimes for historical purposes and as long as we replace to host them right now on our YouTube we will have these up here but just do pay attention when you are watching a recording to the original broadcast date some of the information in these shows will be still be accurate and useful and something you can use but something may become old and outdated incorrect information now because things have changed so drastically services and products might not exist anymore links might be broken but just pay attention to that date so you know oh this is a really old one maybe I should find something more recent if that's what I'm looking for so that is all about today's show and our archives next week we will talk about next year summer reading program 2022 is ocean the topic of the theme is oceans of possibilities Sally Snyder our coordinator at children's young adult services here at the commission be doing her regular annual list of books that you could use potential titles for your summer reading program for next year so please do sign up for that and any rather upcoming shows we have here I've got December days, January dates I've got more that will be filling in here on these days that are open we're here every Wednesday morning so sign up for any of our future shows thank you everybody thank you Charles it's great to see you this morning yeah it's wonderful to be on with you yeah I hope you have um tons of people calling you and emailing you you send lots and lots of long emails to everybody from your office and all right so thank you everyone and hope to see you on a future episode bye bye