National Gaming Day @ Your Library

I was not aware that there was a National Gaming Day @ Your Library until I saw some pictures from this site's Flickr feed at the top of the page that were posted by Cape May County Library. Apparently kids all over the country, from Kotzebue, AK to St. Thomas, VI, go to their public and school libraries and play video games, board games and even card games like Magic: The Gathering. The libraries even get to compete with one another in Rock Band, The Beatles: Rock Band and Super Smash Bros. Brawl competitions.

Special note: The closest library to me was in Goshen, VA. No Harrisonburg, Charlottesville or Staunton.

The goal of the program is to raise awareness about the uses of games in libraries and expose people to games they haven't played before. It looks like libraries are taken akin to these activities and including them with traditional media.

The website, ILoveLibraries.Org, details everything about it. To get your library involved, go to http://ngd.ala.org/.

Underground Gaming Tournament League

While I posted my finishing blog for Fallout 3 I noticed some pictures in the Flickr feed at the top of the site  of people playing games and painting. Turns out it was a recent tournament from the UGTL in L.A. having a Street Fighter IV tourney along with live artists painting SFIV characters. It's a really neat set of pictures and they even had this video.

These guys are doing competitions up right. And I imaging that some form of this and the competition from Penny-Arcade (The Omegathon) are going to be the future of tournaments. A super collision of cultures. It's awesome.

Video Gaming: The New Golfing

When most people think of sports, they think of grown men getting paid ridiculously high salaries to play a game. We laugh at their mansions and cars and money. But we know they are the best at what they do and we know that most of will never reach their level.

It's the same in the world of video games. Except without the money. But that's changing.

To get a glimpse into this world of Joystick Juggernauts (I'm coining that phrase, btw), Spike TV's Game Head show is touching on the World Cyber Games 2007. It's a global video game "olympics" that consists of about 700 players from 70 countries all playing for a piece of the $450,000 pot. There are quite a few other major league tournaments like this one, but this gets the most publicity as far as I'm concerned.

A lot of gamers think it's boring to watch this stuff on tv, but that's only because they do a poor job of it. We don't get to sit and watch the matches as they go down, just clips of them and knee jerk reactions of the teams as they win games. It would be like watching highlight clips of a football game. That's fun and all, but we want to see the WHOLE thing.

But my take on gaming as a sport is like this: Any activity can be raised to a competitive level. It's what we do as humans. We find something we're good at, brag about it to other people, and hopefully find a way to live off it. Gamers don't need to defend themselves from ridicule and naysayers. The people trying to make a living out of it right now are just having a hard time while the idea gets it's legs. The X-Games started the same way, with skateboarders and BMXers leaving the parking lots and signing sponsors. Gamers, too, will leave the basements, sign sponsors and one day there will be a channel that covers gaming well and lets us all track stats and hang posters of our favorite gamers and collect their trading cards.

In the meantime, I'm still going to play games to waste time, relieve stress and entertain myself with my friends. I'm going to spend money on it that I don't need to, shun my pile of laundry and leave the dirty dishes in the sink, ignore my wife for 5 hours straight and waste an entire day fragging people on the internet and still not get any better than I was the day before.

Sound like a golfer you know? Well, minus the fragging part?