At last month’s Inter­net Librar­ian con­fer­ence, we learned that among other ser­vices for seniors, the Old Bridge Pub­lic Library in New Jer­sey was plan­ning to hold a Wii tour­na­ment for older adults. Why on earth would a library do this?

Old Bridge Library Unites Generations

“You’re never too old to rock out.

Just ask the 10 Old Bridge seniors who took up Gui­tar Hero III as part of the Old Bridge Library’s ‘Senior Spaces’ pro­gram on Nov. 8.

Seniors, along­side teenage vol­un­teers, tested their met­tle in the ubiq­ui­tous air-guitar video game and var­i­ous other games avail­able for the Nin­tendo Wii gam­ing sys­tem as the first step in the library’s plan to make seniors more tech­no­log­i­cally pro­fi­cient and to include them in what Allan Kleiman, assis­tant direc­tor of the Old Bridge Pub­lic Library, called the inevitable redesign of libraries.

‘We want to get them to feel they are part of the 21st cen­tury library and not left out,’ Kleiman said.…

Kleiman said gam­ing in libraries is becom­ing more and more com­mon but using the video game to slowly intro­duce mod­ern tech­nol­ogy to seniors is a rel­a­tively new idea.

‘This is a lot less fright­en­ing to play with than learn­ing to use a com­puter,’ he said.

Kleiman said seniors should be able to snap a photo with a dig­i­tal cam­era or surf the Inter­net or use the var­i­ous other tech­nolo­gies sur­round­ing them. The pro­gram, he hopes, will pro­vide the cat­a­lyst for fur­ther learn­ing and inclu­sion among that community.”…

The pro­gram bridges gaps between the ages as well, Kleiman said, allow­ing teenagers well versed in the ways of the Wii to teach the seniors. The two groups will find a com­mon denom­i­na­tor in com­pe­ti­tion over the video games. Kleiman said the age seg­re­ga­tion that is often found in libraries breaks down when young and old are united by the desire to win.

Kleiman said, though the seniors are undoubt­edly learn­ing from the pro­gram, they are not the only stu­dents in the room. The teenagers learn a bit about life from the seniors.

‘It gives them a whole sense of what grow­ing older can mean,’ Kleiman said, chal­leng­ing the stereo­type of the elderly in nurs­ing homes.…

That does not mean the library is going the way of the video arcade. Kleiman said the foun­da­tion of the tra­di­tional library is still intact but the video games for seniors help “make them feel rel­e­vant to what peo­ple are doing.“[Home News Tri­bune]

I really like how the staff at OBPL are approach­ing this, plac­ing it in a broader con­text, using video games as teach­ing moments and touch­points for social inter­ac­tions between groups that oth­er­wise don’t social­ize together in the library. There are so many video games now that are social activ­i­ties, not just some­one star­ing at a screen alone (not there’s some­thing wrong with that), and as Eli Neiburger notes, libraries can make games social and add value in the same ways we do for storytime.

I think the social inter­ac­tions and social­iza­tion that takes place around gam­ing are often over­looked as being some­thing less valu­able than when it hap­pens around books. This is one of the rea­sons that (as with any­thing) you can’t truly under­stand the ben­e­fits of video games in libraries if you’ve never played them. It’s why I encour­age regional orga­ni­za­tions (like state libraries and con­sor­tia) to pur­chase a con­sole in order for their mem­ber librar­i­ans to expe­ri­ence this. It’s dif­fi­cult to have an informed dis­cus­sion with­out the expe­ri­en­tial learn­ing aspect. It’s like decid­ing if a library should offer a book dis­cus­sion with­out ever hav­ing read a book. Not every­one has to do this, but the folks involved in the dis­cus­sion should be famil­iar with the sub­ject, and they can learn from play­ing the same way seniors at the Old Bridge PL will learn.