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What better evidence could there possibly be of the natural compatibility of videogames and libraries than this short video of a couple of college kids dressed up as videogame characters, running through a library, screaming? Even better, it takes place at the University of Michigan UgLi and Fishbowl, just down the street. I wish they tried this at AADL, although the security staff would probably not be amused.

[Via Kotaku, previously at Boingboing]

You may remember Nemo as the winner of Kotaku's Halloween Costume Contest. Well, as his birthday rolled around, and we started discussing what he wanted for his party, the very first thing he said was that he wanted a King Bob-omb cake. As his party got closer, we kept having fun ideas, and by the time the day arrived, things had gotten a little out of hand, and turned into a full-on Mario Party, complete with koopa-shell invitations. The cake was a bit of a structural challenge: Twinkies, as it turns out, are not intended to be load-bearing.

Of course, Nemo wanted to wear his Luigi costume, sans mustache and Poltergust 3000. Everybody got to try DDR Mario Mix. We only put out 1 pad to halve the occupied floorspace, as well as the mayhem. One of the best things about Mario Mix is that its easy mode only uses right and left, which is a much easier place for a 4-year old to learn to play DDR. Nemo has since moved on to Normal mode, and loves to play real DDR, too. His favorite song is 'Speed Over Beethoven' on DDR Extreme 2.

We wanted to have a pinata, but with 4-year-olds, nobody's got the strength to breach the um, containment unit, so some grown-up usually has to rip it open surreptitiously while pretending to 'examine' the darn thing. Instead, we took a square cardboard box (I can't believe we had a perfectly sized and proportioned one in the basement), cut off the lid, and decorated it with construction paper to look like a classic Mario Question Block. We attached it to a string tied to the bannister, and let the kids jump and bop the bottom of the box.

When they hit the bottom of the box hard enough (or if we yanked the string for a little extra oomph), out popped their treat bag, which contained some turtle stickers (not koopa troopas, but close enough), a dumdum and a fruit leather (we figure they cancelled each other out), a real noise-making noise maker (sorry parents), and a Japanese Mario figure, the kind where you don't know which one you got until you open it, and that includes a tiny packet of 6 tasteless white candies. We got them at Wizzywig, where they also have a tissue cozy shaped like a Famicom. I covet it. Anyway, this worked beautifully, and turned out to be a great alternative to a pinata, with the extra advantage of avoiding the mad scramble, which can be a mess, particularly when kids of several different sizes are involved.

A good time was had by all, especially by Nemo, who got a new Mario Kart DS bundle from my parents. And Nemo's papa, who doesn't have to share his DS anymore.

John’s brilliant post skipped over a critical gulf-spanning technique, one that I would have thought he would have included, as he has personal experience with the approach:

Make a movie.

One of the challenges IT departments can face as they grow, especially in the library world, is muggle staff not understanding what all those geeks actually do. Often, the borders of IT responsibility could make a gerrymanderer blush, and since most IT work is done in our dank recesses, far below the hustle and bustle of the patron-filled surface world, delivering a clear understanding of who does what can be complicated by the fact that some staff may not know who these people are that, summoned by a submit button, emerge, blinking, only to immediately disappear under the table. That leads to unfamiliarity, and you know what they say about unfamiliarity: it breeds discontent. Wait, that’s not right. But it sounds good.

So, to address this unfamiliarity, we produced the IAS Television Showcase (quicktime) in the Fall of 2002, to be shown at our annual staff day. While it was intended to give a little information about what we do, I really hoped that it would help the rest of the staff feel more personally familiar with all of us. We shot it on a Friday, and I edited it over the weekend, getting a precious copy rendered and printed to tape just in time for the opening bagels Monday morning. I remember that we were missing a cable we needed when it was time for the premiere (first thing after lunch), so we had to tie a dv camera to the pole above the projector. We couldn’t find the remote for the camera, so I introduced the movie, and then stood on a chair to push play and roll the tape. Sort of a live juryrigging demonstration, if you will.

The audience loved it, and I think it really did help them know us a little bit better. That was a long time ago already, and it’s amazing how much things have changed since then. Just seeing the server room during Joe Harris’ System Spec, or some of the hot new acronyms showcased in Modern Major Geekerel, makes me slightly damp with nostalgia. The gadget rundown, somewhat obscure then, looks positively archaic now. We should do Television Showcase 2.0. I should also find the DV tape that has the finished version and capture a better copy, as Premiere eating the source file for this project was one of my last straws with Windows.

While something like this will take a little time to produce, the potential return on your time is probably far better than even the most productive bilateral committee meeting. Plus, it’s fun. Libraries should be fun. Enjoy!

A challenge facing Library 2.0 is how to adequately explain the types of breakthroughs it might bring us all; but now that we have what some might call Web 2.0’s first killer app in the best blonde joke ever, we have a shining example of Web (and Library) 2.0’s potential, with which to illustrate the breadth of possibilities.

For some reason, the joke reminds me of this absurd, inexplicable Sega CD title called PANIC, perhaps because Nemo and I have been playing it lately. You play as a generic, but undeniably japanese little boy in pink overalls who gets sucked into the global computer network when a virus infects the ‘Computer Network Server’ that controls all the electrical or mechanical devices on earth. You have to find your way through hundreds of rooms, each with several unmarked buttons, to the Computer Network Server (which, you discover, looks like Siddhartha) to deliver a program, called PANIC, that will wipe the virus out worldwide, stopping the malfunctions such as elevators that drop Easter Island heads on waiting passengers, speedometers that vomit, and monuments that blow up spectacularly around the world if you push the wrong (right?) button.

I got PANIC after renting it 3 times in 1995, just as I was was starting to poke around the web on some NeXTs we had at the architecture school. And thus, I was, by sheer luck, in the right place at the right time to create the first ever home page of the Michigan Marching Band Tuba Section. Because we were playing so much PANIC at the tuba house, one of the features of that page was a PANIC-style control panel of 16 buttons with colored ascii symbols on them which took you to some of what passed for weird websites in 1995, although I ran out of weird sites and used a very early uroulette for four of them.

The pure brilliance of the best blonde joke ever honestly makes me think about the web as I haven’t thunk since those heady days when I was first discovering it, when it seemed so much like PANIC, with its interconnected and crosslinked rooms and unpredictable buttons; the web was so deep and recursive. Until recently, the web had begun to seem so familiar, incapable of surprising even with extreme content, which is now totally expected. It’s nice to be surprised again, to have a sense of wonder and disorientation, so different than the numbing comfort of daily browsing.