On Friday the always amazing Carl Cross of Derbyshire Libraries sent an e-mail to the Lib Gaming UK mailing list. You can join the list here – go on you know you want to!
It was a great post and naturally I wanted to share it, and since Carl gave permisison to have it rebroadcast on Teen Librarian, here it is in its entirety! Enjoy:
Last week Nintendo launched its glasses free 3D handheld the 3DS.
There are at least two other librarians on this list with one /waves/ and probably a few more.
For those of you who don’t have one it has an inbuilt social gaming feature called Street Pass. The idea is that your 3DSes send information to each other as you pass unknowingly in the street. Hence the name.
At the moment the information is your Mii (avatar) and a few game specific features such as downloading your best laps in racing game Ridge Racer as a ‘ghost’ for the other player to beat. Streetfighter takes a similar approach by having your team of trophies battle each other for fun, profit and prizes.
There’s loads of fun stuff built into the 3DS that encourages social interaction from early JRPG-alike StreetPass Quest to the utterly mad face shooting ARG Face Raiders.
All cool stuff but what has it got to do with libraries?
Not everywhere is as population dense as Tokyo or London or Manchester and your chances of meeting another 3DS owner in the wild are sometimes slim.
Some enterprising folk are using the power of social media to hook up with others in real life to swap data and to game. All you need is a location and a bit of advertising, preferably in an online space like the Meet Mii Facebook page.
See what it’s got to do with libraries now?
It needn’t stop at that of course. While only one of the launch lineup of games offers online multiplayer (Streetfighter IV for the curious) others have local multiplayer as long as both players have a copy of the game. We’d be offering ourselves up as a venue to find other players.
Of course there are problems with this idea. As far as I can see two biggies and the usual ones about noise:
Biggie 1: It’s potentially a shop window for potential muggers – the 3DS is an expensive piece of kit and if they know there’s a whole load of people with one in their pocket they may well take advantage.
Biggie 2: It’s no good trying to limit this to a given age group. If you’re going to do it at all it must be for all comers which means parents need to be warned. It’s a good opportunity to talk about online security in general of course.
I’m considering trying this in a couple of our libraries and see what happens. I will also be starting a regular Wii club in the near future so I expect that to form part of that too.
Anyone else tempted? Can anyone else see any major problems with it that I’ve missed at this stage of a Friday?
