All Sessions

This year ALAPlay combines gaming, comics, costumes, and your favorite Time Lords (and ladies)! We invite attendees to dress up in the style of the Doctors, Companions, aliens, and artifacts of Doctor Who OR with the gleaming gears, goggles, corsets and hats of the steampunk aesthetic. Feel free to combine the two (as fans know, Doctor Who has built in quite a bit of steampunk flair to its (?) universe over the years.) We welcome all kinds of costumes, from the simple to the more elaborate: we'd love to see fans takes on a Tardis dress or perhaps a Dalek hat. There are some excellent gender swapping opportunities out there as well -- why not a Time Lady instead of a Time Lord?

The point is to have fun! Games and activities will be provided by the Games and Gaming Round Table (GameRT) while the costumed fun will be led by the Graphic Novel Member Initiative Group.

Did we mention there will be prizes? Because there will. All attendees can enter our raffle at the door for exciting prize packs from a variety of publishers.

Oh, and this year we're kicking off a conference ribbon game called These Aren't the Droids You're Looking for (http://ala12.scheduler.ala.org/node/4292). To play, you'll need to come to ALAplay to get your game packet and ribbon.

Come hear two fascinating presentations and participate in a special game of Interactive Fiction.

Exploring Stories through Interactive Fiction
Remember ZORK? Text-based interactive fiction is a game genre that has existed for decades, but has not been heavily used in libraries. Interactive Fiction is still going strong today, and allows players to explore stories and to create their own interactive stories. Libraries looking to support traditional literacy with gaming activities can look to Interactive Fiction at the core of an easily justifiable and low-cost gaming program. Join Scott Nicholson, associate professor from the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University and experts from the Interactive Fiction domain to learn about how to use and create Interactive Fiction in both digital and analog forms for your library!

Lemon Tree
We like to bring an element of active learning, including fun and games, into our information literacy teaching when we can, whether that is using crosswords, treasure hunts, or light hearted videos, but we hadn’t before brought games, along with the technology and social nature of web 2.0, into the core of the library. We’re currently changing this and have introduced a social, online game based around using the library resources, developed for us by an external company (Running in the Halls).

Lemon Tree takes ideas of virtual rewards and inbuilt social networks and turns common interactions with the library into a game. Users are able to link Lemontree to their library record, winning points and badges by activities such as taking books out, leaving comments on books, and accessing our online resources. There are social elements built into Lemontree, but the system also pushes key acheivements to Facebook.

Andrew Walsh from the University of Huddersfield will cover some key elements of Lemontree, how they promoted the system, and early feedback from users.