The two got sponsorships from nVidia, XFX, and others, and of course the backing of both universities, so this is a pretty big deal. Oregon State's gamers got into Reser Stadium's club level for their party. (Saturday's game will be played there). Oregon's in the Erb Memorial Union. They're playing tournaments on seven games, including CounterStrike, TF2, Unreal Tournament, Warcraft 3 and others.

In all, it sounds really cool, and hats off to OSU Gaming and the UO Cultural Forum for getting this together. I'm gonna be in Eugene for Thanksgiving; kinda wish I was there already.

Civil War LAN [camera]
Civil War LAN [site]

I hang out with other gamers all the time, but it's mostly in multiplayer online play, using headsets. It's social, sure. But as any psychologist will tell you, hanging out in real life allows for even richer styles of communication to emerge. In face-to-face mode, we're better at picking up the little nuances — frustration, glee, sarcasm, subvocalized ranting, body language — that build team cohesion, and allow us to game with a positively Vulcan level of mind meld.

All completely true. The most fun I've had gaming over the past few years have been on those rare occasions that I have someone else playing with or against me at my side. Hearing a voice on the headset is one thing. Being able to turn to your side and punch someone in the arm when they screw up is another thing entirely.

Gaming with your friends is something that should be encouraged more. Oddly enough, this is one area where the PC gamers - connected to the internet years before consoles - excel. Look at LAN parties. Everyone lugs a computer out to a centralized location, complete with monitors, mice, keyboards, power supplies, etc., just for a chance to see the look on their opponent's face when they shoot it off. We need console game gettogethers, where a few folks bring their televisions, consoles, and controllers and people just chill and play together.

Mind you, if I ever seriously refer to such get togethers as play dates you have my full permission to punch me in the neck.

Frag With a Friend for Ultimate Fun [Wired]

With the standard line being that "video games are bad," it's nice to see people actually being encouraged to play them. Nicer when it's librarians being encouraged to play them. At the annual American Library Association meeting in Washington, a room full of librarians were recommended to get their game on. The reason? Today's students are "digital natives," while librarians are "digital immigrants" — meaning that librarians might have embraced tech and learned the language, but it's still not their first language.

According to James Paul Gee, a linguist who is the Tashia Morgridge Professor of Reading at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and Why Video Games Are Good for Your Soul author, digital natives never read the instruction booklet before playing. Rather, they just figure it out as they go along. So students shouldn't be expecting to read a big instruction booklet of tools they'll be using in the library. What's more, tools should be designed with this in mind. In hopes of connecting with today's students, George M. Needham, vice president for member services of the Online Computer Library Center, even suggested that libraries host LAN parties in the libraries after hours and that librarians themselves play more video games.

Wow, libraries just got a little cooler. Brian Ashcraft

Librarians Urged To Game [Inside Higher Ed via Game|Life]

In his series titled simply "Gamers (a work in progress)", photographer Todd Deutsch has produced a series of artfully-composed portraits documenting the slack jaw, slumped posture and terrible skin afflictions with which all gamers are intimately familiar.

Says the artist's statement:

Gaming is an overwhelmingly male subculture dominated by tech savvy brashness and role-playing games known as first-person shooters. Avid players take over empty storefronts and set up temporary computer networks for 2 days of nonstop video combat. The events are called LAN parties and resemble a cross between the rebellious bravado of a biker rally and the adolescent nerdiness of Boy Scout camp. Gamers often exist on contradictory fringes of mainstream culture. Their association with violent games brands them as time bombs dangerously close to becoming sociopaths, while their image as computer geeks and loners depicts them as sympathetic and endearing underdogs.

I ramble on after the jump.

The blue glow of wireframe spectacles in a darkened server farm. The vague smile accompanying a successful headshot. Energy drink cans and scattered junk food wrappers. A lone girl, seen distantly over the top of a Windows XP monitor array, as if being secretly subjected to the xenophobic Male Gaze of the viewer.*

I am reminded strongly of my middle school days, wherein I expended hours upon hours and the entirety of my allowance, glued to Tribes and Quake 2 in a seedy network gaming parlor downtown. Are these vistas depressing, funny, nostalgic, exciting? Were they taken at a single event, perhaps a convention, or over the course of days or weeks, gathering to gathering? How much of yourself do you see in these gaping boys? Eliza gauger

Entire Gallery Here [via Aeropause]

* I'm allowed to use this term because I went to art school for a year and a half!