“We recently com­pleted a 6-month trial of Fam­ily Gam­ing at the Civic Cen­ter Library, City of Scotts­dale, Ari­zona. It began as an Adult Gam­ing pro­gram, but we didn’t seem to be able to draw in enough adults to make it worth­while to be strictly an adult program.

We did find out, how­ever, from the first pro­gram that we drew patrons of all ages and had an atten­dance fig­ure (based on an elec­tronic door counter) of 200–300. The nice thing was the diver­sity, not just in terms of race, but ages as well of the atten­dees. If ever asked about the Wii, you can pass on that I had one woman who was in a wheel­chair after 7 back surg­eries play­ing Wii with her grand­son, and I had one man who, although legally blind, was able to pitch an inning of base­ball. In the end, we had over 1,100 atten­dees for the program.

Just some basic facts: Scotts­dale Pub­lic Library has a pretty suc­cess­ful teem gam­ing pro­gram (begun by me 3 years ago), and is hold­ing gam­ing for kids 6–11 this sum­mer at 2 libraries. I had 5 gam­ing sys­tems: PS3 play­ing Rock Band, XBox 360 play­ing Viva Piñata, Wii play­ing Wii Sports, and 2 PS2’s play­ing Gui­tar Hero and DDR (the first month), and NickToons-the last five months.”

Thank you to Rick for let­ting me know about this. I can’t wait to hear how the sum­mer pro­gram goes.