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.