Saturday, July 5, 2008

Hands-On Assignment: College Library Video Games

For my hands on assignment this week, I decided to stay right here on campus and see what College Library had to offer in terms of games you could check out. I had heard during the end of last year that they were going to start getting video games, but hadn't really paid much attention to it. So I went in to College Library and into the Open Book Cafe and they had a pretty decent selection of games for Playstation 3, X-Box 360, and Nintendo Wii.

For the Nintendo Wii, games included The Godfather, Summer Sports, Lego Star Wars, We Ski, Petz Dogz 2, the Wii Fit, and House of the Dead, just to name a few. For the Playstation 3, the games they had in the library were NBA Live 08, NHL 08, Grand Theft Auto IV, and a game called Bloodshot. Finally, for the X-Box 360, they had NCAA Football 08, MLB Baseball 2K8, Marvel Ultimate Alliance, WWE Smackdown v. Raw 2008, Burnout, Dead Rising, Saints Row, Viva Pinata, and Tony Hawk to name a few.

Looking at this selection, I couldn't help but notice a few things. This immediately made me think about the gender articles we read. It seems like almost all of these games would be games that would apply to males. Many are sports and first-person shooter/violence type games. However, it's hard to make that assumption when I saw games like Petz Dogz 2 and Viva Pinata also available to be checked out. So it seems that even though College Library has a wide variety of games, most of them are themed towards males.

Even that College Library has video games that students can check out makes a huge statement as to how important video games are becoming as media in our society. Video games are being accepted as valid forms of media and are important to society in it's influences and College Library has realized that the impact of video games cannot be ignored. And if there is a demand for them, which there is because the library website says they have 110 titles and they probably only have about 40 not checked out, then I think it's awesome that UW has stepped up and started including video games in our libraries. Another thing that is cool is that you can go to the website and request video games that you think the library should purchase.

No comments: