A Gaming Librarian
Gaming does a lot of "people training" and they do it well. Okay, so they use a lot of intuitive mechanics to get us to do something while giving us goals to strive for. It's not practical to give patrons goals like "the more xp/books you earn/check out, the faster you get your new flaming sword/library card." It would be nice if libraries would apply the intuitive mechanics more often though. Some libraries do, but some libraries just don't.
Let's take World of Warcraft as an example. There are all sorts of skills and spells to use but really, we only use maybe half of those buttons so you can drag buttons onto your dashboard or into the nice row that hot keys specific spells that trigger with a number across the top of your keyboard. You can customize it within reason. They have slots for the buttons and you can't deviate from those buttons which is awesome like Facebook is awesome for not letting people mess with their boring but absolutely readable format. You can make macros that execute some line of text you probably would end up typing every few minutes. You can attach "/follow ClipClop" to a button graphic of your choice and hit the button or hot key number of your choice. All of the buttons are pretty explanitory. Instead of cluttering the screen with text, it's just graphics on the buttons and if you're a "noob" you can just hover over the button a second. It's pretty intuitive though. Cooking is designated by a cooked chicken. Your quest log is a leather bound book. Your character is a headshot of your character. Of course as you get higher into levels, you really have to know how to use your hotkeys and buttons to maximize your character's potential.
Gaming invites mechanics that are ingrained into us. Good games build upon these common set of "rules" so that we can reach our goals. If you wander away from just using the lingo of your trade no matter what you're doing, you're going to lose everyone that's not in the know. Databases is in itself a daunting word and using that to label a link to databases would perhaps not be the best choice of words. Say "magazine articles" or "newspapers" and you'd be closer to the truth. Or do it the World of Warcraft way by using a little newspaper icon. The difference between gaming and the library is the requirement to improve. While gaming relies on an easy to learn system to stay in business, libraries have no such immediate goal. Libraries throw lots of money at things and believe that there's no science to the whole thing. Sometime's they'll even move things around so that each time you approach the site, it's a little bit different to get where you're going. Flash looks nice, but realistically, cycling through stuff everytime you visit the page can be frustrating. It also seriously sucks if you're working with a really slow connection.
As for Second Life, it's all sorts of nifty. Why people need reference in SL outside of how tos are beyond me. I mean the concept is awesome. Make anything. Totally neat! Draw back is that your computer has to constantly redraw the screen which is a pain on your equipment. I'm not thrilled about SL because of this not to mention the ghost towns that happen. Some companies have failed miserably in SL because their clients don't use SL or there's no viable reason to exist in a virtual world without thirst, hunger, or even housing problems. I have a friend that bought a horse and keeps it in her "pocket." SL is great for online meetings, but as people have pointed out, you can pick up the phone or even Skype now. SL has limitations that are a little frustrating. Sure, you can share links, but its a bit annoying to access them in game. Last time I checked, there was no white board feature to do evil genius scribbles on. I don't think we're really ready for Second Life yet. It's odd how some libraries will invest so much time and money into creating a virtual library when environment really doesn't matter. Given the annoymous nature of SL, it's likely that people would rather ask a live person rather than touching objects and guiding themselves. It's fun but for practical matters, we've got alternative technologies that are more efficient.
It's a funny topic to bring gaming and libraries together. Obviously, they could learn a lot from each other's practices but it doesn't seem as if they're linked together in that way very often. I guess it's frustrating to be a gamer and a librarian seeing these conventions that could make both worlds easier to use.
