The LTR update on gaming in libraries is just about done, and I’ve been reading some fascinating articles and books as background for it. I’ve been wanting to read Susan Gibbons’ 2007 book The Academic Library and the Net Gen Student and this gave me the excuse because there is a chapter devoted to online gaming. Gibbons focuses solely on Massive Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games (MMORPGs), which at first seems a little strange for an academic librarian. However, she explains what these games are, provides a little history about them, gives some information about how NetGens use them, and then brainstorms some ideas for their relevance to academic libraries. I’d argue it’s good reading for folks in *all* types of libraries.

Given some of the negative comments I’ve gotten here about gaming in libraries, including how it will devalue the MLS, I really enjoyed the following history from Gibbons.

“In the late 1700s, parents were warned to protect their children from the many dangers of free access to ‘romances, novels, and plays [which] poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth’ (Reverend Enos Hitchcock, Memoirs of the Bloomsgrove Family, quoted in Standage 2006, 114). The early twentieth century witnessed the scourge of ‘moving pictures’ because of which ‘God alone knows how many are leading dissolute lives’ (from The Annual Report of the New York Society for the Presentation of Cruelty to Children, quoted in Standage 2006, 114). Or how about the evils of the telephone, which causes laziness, the tendency for crime caused by reading comic books, or the sins of the waltz, with its “voluptuous intertwining of the limbs, and close compressure of the bodies’ (from Times of London, 1816, quoted in Standage 2006, 114). The pattern is clear: the new form of entertainment of the younger generation is misunderstood and portrayed as the ’scourge of society’ by the preceding generations.

Brown suggests that many of us miss the importance of online gaming because we focus too tightly on the game itself: ‘So don’t just think about the games themselves–the content–but about the knowledge ecologies developing around these games–the context’ (2002, 64). The knowledge ecologies of online games include conversations, reading, writing, research, buying and selling, the formation and dissolution of partnerships and pacts, mentoring, instruction, and a host of other activities. The games do little more than provide a compelling and immersive platform for all of these social activities to occur.” (p.34)

Gibbons has clearly spent time studying and thinking about about how the reference desk could incorporate some of the best features of MMORPGs (I’m hoping I have enough room in the LTR to include a mention of these provocative ideas). She is clearly being proactive, rather than simply reactive (especially in a knee-jerk way).

If I’m going to be responsible for the end of the world because I advocate for gaming in libraries, it’s nice to know I’m in such good company.