By Matt Shoemaker
It has been a while since there has been update on some of the work we do around gaming at the LCDSS, so with inaugural meeting of the campus wide Games Interest Community Group next week Tuesday this is an opportune time to let you know about some of our game related projects.
Games are something we’ve focused on since way back when we were the Digital Scholarship Center in Paley Library, and that hasn’t changed with out transition to the LCDSS at Charles. One of our earlier projects, The Best 50 Years in Gaming Gen Con Event Database, which we began working on in 2016, is going to be getting a revamp. A constant struggle with digital projects is that the technology they are built on ages out, and since this project continues to be a resource for researches and the gaming community we will be migrating it to something new. We’ll be sure to let you know when its on its new tech platform.
That best 50 years projects continues to provide value, and one way it is doing so is in the form of providing easy access to valuable data for a book project LCDSS head Matt Shoemaker is undertaking. Exploring the history of tabletop games through the Gen Con game convention, this project will provide a better understanding of how tabletop gaming has evolved the way it has in the United States, how the community surrounding tabletop gaming has changed from the 1960s to today, and how Gen Con played a pivotal role in helping this all happen. If you want to learn more, Matt was recently on the podcast All Year I Dream About Gaming Conventions talking about the project. You can find that episode here.
On the video game front, several of the LCDSS team are working on The Virtual Blockson project. We received a grant from the Getty Foundation late last year to begin work on creating this virtual reality game project which will help high school students better understand primary source literacy and how to use archives by playing through a research project on The Pyramid Club and some of the black artists that were its members. Led by Jasmine Clark, work on the game is underway and expected to complete by spring of 2026. More info on this game will be posted as we get closer to completing it.
The last initiative I want to mention here is our efforts working the Temple University Press on a pilot project to publish peer reviewed board games. Matt Shoemaker has been creating and publishing games for several years now, and his last game, The Red Burnoose: Algeria 1857, is a feminist wargame that examines what this genre could be like if players took on the role of the colonized rather than the colonizer. It was nominated for the 2022 Charles S. Roberts award in the category of best early modern wargame. Having worked on producing games that had a research or pedagogical focus for so long, Matt wanted to see if we could help bring some more legitimacy to tabletop games used in this way by working with TU Press to peer review games designed with similar goals in mind. The LCDSS is currently working with Tyler professor Renee Jackson on her game, Tales of Woo and Woe, which is the first game to go through this process at Temple.
The above is just a sample of the work we do with games at the LCDSS. We’ve also worked with several faculty and students on game based work or class projects in both virtual reality and tabletop in the past. Some of the games that came out of these projects were showcased in an exhibit, Game On!, last year. Jordan Hample is busy preparing for our first Game Jam where, beginning on March 12, participants will create a prototype game for judging based around the Game Jam’s theme. If you work with, study, or teach with games and want to learn more I hope you’ll stop by at our Games Interest Community Group meeting on Tuesday, February 27 starting at 2. I’ll see you then!