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First of all if you are heading to Nerd Mecca AKA the San Diego Comic-Con<\/a> in the coming weeks, please stop by room 26AB. In there you will find the Comic-Arts Conference, an academic space to discuss and share findings related to comics. Peter Carlson and I will be presenting findings from a forthcoming paper about academic literacy scaffolding and comics.<\/p>\n When not trolling 26AB, I will probably be waiting in lines at Comic-Con. It\u2019s been a few years since I\u2019ve been, but that\u2019s what you still do there, right? Actually, I\u2019ll probably be looking for folks running Pathfinder, D&Dnext, Savage Worlds, and \u00a013th<\/sup> Age. If none of those sound familiar to you, welcome to the diverse fan-driven world of role playing games (RPGs). For the next year or so, I\u2019ll be looking at role playing game spaces when it becomes (somewhat) untangled from the clicking and typing of online videogame play. I suspect the robust research in that space is sustaining educator interest in videogames, but the origins of games like World Of Warcraft<\/em>\u00a0are still very much alive as their own space. Though I plan to explore some of my ideas about aspects of RPGs on this blog in the future, for now I would point other would-be interested literacy folks to this lengthy tome<\/a>. Jon Peterson\u2019s exhaustively long book details the history of the nascent days of the first RPG: Dungeons and Dragons. Yep, RPGs are a staunchly American tradition and one that is based on non-digital remix and feedback loops in gaming communities. This history of remix is not only still alive and well, but in some ways even more encouraged due to the industry\u2019s Open Game License<\/a> (which I read as a Creative Commons<\/a>-like license for expanding popular gaming systems). A lot more to say about this in the future, but for now if you\u2019re interested in playing in person (in Fort Collins or at SDCC) or online (there are a lot of user-friendly VTTs \u2013 Virtual Tabletops<\/a>) I\u2019d be happy if you helped learn with me.<\/p>\n Last week Ally and I were at the American Library Association\u2019s annual conference in Chicago. I appreciated the artist alley there. That no one was in line to meet folks like Paul Pope<\/a>, Jeffrey Brown<\/a>, or Matt Kindt<\/a> was pretty interesting compared to the craziness those three industry stalwarts will face in San Diego. I was thrilled to get to pick Matt Kindt\u2019s brain about his work. The top picture is Kindt showing a small group of conference-goers his pencil, ink, and painting process for his ongoing series Mind MGMT<\/a>.<\/p>\nTell people this is awesome:<\/h3>