After spending years languishing in the outer reaches of eBay, Atari is about to receive some new-found academic respect. The University of Calgary is compiling a video game collection that should rival that of any other academic institution. It will combine the best of Atari with PC gaming and even include newer consoles such as Wii and Xbox. For Jerremie Clyde, a librarian with the university, the collection could be revolutionary; it will help the academic community regard interactive media as being as worthy as film and fiction. “Now we’re getting a generation of faculty and graduate students who grew up with video games as part of their media landscape,” he said. “There’s a whole new generation of academics coming in who have been playing video games their whole life.” The collection should be open in March 2011 and will operate like any other part of the library. Students will sign out games, which may be reserved by professors. The library will include enclosed multimedia rooms where students and researchers can play games such as Rock Band. Clyde predicts the collection will be invaluable for a range of disciplines, from history and procedural rhetoric, to human-computer interaction and feminist studies. Massive multi-player online role playing games even became a casualty-free way to study epidemiology when, in 2005, a digital virus broke out among players of World of Warcraft. Clyde hopes the library will help reduce the academic stigma surrounding video games, often thought to be the domain of caffeine-addled, virtual trigger-happy adolescents. Increasingly, games are challenging those stereotypes. By some metrics, video gaming is larger than the film industry. According to the Entertainment Software Association, the average gamer is 34 years old and has played for more than a decade. From role-playing games and massive multi-player competitions that create rich realities populated by online personas, to an independent thesis that can be viewed only on an Atari 2600, the game industry is as varied as its established counterpart, film. Some titles are edifying, others are not. Clyde said games are long-overdue for academic consideration, and he’s not worried about students coming to the library to waste time. “There’s potential for students to goof off already. They have games in iPhones and smartphones, web-based games like Farmville, they’re already there. This doesn’t really add to that,” he said. The fears he’s fielded are similar to those brought to librarians when libraries began to include videos and fiction titles, he said. When students research a medium, their relationship to it changes. “Video games are fun when it’s for play. As soon as you have to do it for study and research, it becomes a bit like work. You find yourself slogging through a game, wondering how a developer has done something, or looking for how it’s rendering light, and it becomes a bit of a slog,” Clyde said. In addition, he expects graduates to be better able to enter the video game industry as developers and writers of commercial and educational video games. In Britain, for example, games are being more widely used to teach kids in the K-12 level. He’s developing a game that could help teach new students research skills. “Video games are a fairly sophisticated media form, so … people will be treating them the same as books or film documentaries. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened sooner,” Clyde said. The collection has another benefit for the cash-strapped institution: It’s cheap. Clyde predicts the video game acquisitions will likely amount to less than half a per cent of the library’s yearly $9-million collection budget. jgerson@calgaryherald.com © Copyright © The Calgary Herald