“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.