Back in May, I was invited to give a pre­sen­ta­tion to a group at the MacArthur Foun­da­tion about four oppor­tu­ni­ties for libraries. The fourth oppor­tu­nity I dis­cussed was gam­ing, high­light­ing the social inter­ac­tions that we’re see­ing hap­pen in libraries and explain­ing how they pro­vide a unique con­text for this type of activ­ity. I noticed they had bemused smiles on their faces as I fin­ished but didn’t real­ize why until they told me they’d just fin­ished con­duct­ing a study with the Pew Inter­net folks and that the pre­lim­i­nary data sup­ported my claims that videogames have become a very social activ­ity for kids today. They were still pro­cess­ing the data so they couldn’t share specifics with me, but they promised every­thing would be avail­able in a few months.

Luck­ily, that report, Teens, Video Games, and Civics, finally came out last week as a PDF you can down­load for free. The sub­head­ing on the main page gives you a gen­eral idea of what they found: “teens’ gam­ing expe­ri­ences are diverse and include sig­nif­i­cant social inter­ac­tion and civic engage­ment.” Gama­su­tra has a great sum­mary of the report , so I’m just going to high­light a cou­ple of the sta­tis­tics I found most interesting.

• “97% of teens ages 12–17 play com­puter, web, portable, or con­sole games. 99% of boys and 94% of girls play video games…. Under­stand­ing the nature of game play is vital to under­stand­ing how nearly every Amer­i­can teen spends at least part of many of their days.“
  This is a great sum­mary of why librar­i­ans need to under­stand gam­ing and offer pro­gram­ming around it.
   
• “The 5 most pop­u­lar games played by Amer­i­can teens are Gui­tar Hero, Halo 3, Mad­den NFL, Soli­taire, and Dance Dance Rev­o­lu­tion…. The range of gen­res spanned by the most pop­u­lar games played by teens indi­cates they are not sim­ply play­ing vio­lent first per­son shoot­ers or action games…. The two most widely played game gen­res were rac­ing and puz­zle games, played by nearly three-quarters of teens in the sample.”

I could go on and on, and I was going to in this post, until I read the accom­pa­ny­ing report, The Civic Poten­tial of Video Games (PDF), from the Civic Engage­ment Research Group at Mills Col­lege. In fact, this sec­ond report lit­er­ally *screamed* “LIBRARIES” as I was read­ing it, and I’ve writ­ten that word in many places in the mar­gins. While the first report has the great sta­tis­tics, the sec­ond one delves deeper into those num­bers and takes some guesses at what it all means. It actu­ally makes a very strong case for gam­ing in libraries, even though it doesn’t men­tion us at all any­where in the text. Some high­lights from the Mills Col­lege report, along with some commentary.

• “Although pub­lic debates often frame video games as either good or bad, research is mak­ing it clear that when it comes to the effects of video games it often depends. Con­text and con­tent mat­ter.”
  This is where libraries come in — we pro­vide con­text and con­tent, because tra­di­tion­ally these are two of our great­est strengths. We do this in so many of our exist­ing ser­vices — ref­er­ence, lit­er­acy, recre­ational read­ing, etc. — and we can do this for gam­ing, too.
   
• “Fur­ther­more, inter­ac­tions in video games can model [John] Dewey’s con­cep­tion of demo­c­ra­tic com­mu­nity — places where diverse groups of indi­vid­u­als with shared inter­ests join together, where groups must nego­ti­ate norms, where novices are men­tored by more expe­ri­enced com­mu­nity mem­bers, where team­work enables all to ben­e­fit from the dif­fer­ent skills of group mem­bers, and where col­lec­tive prob­lem solv­ing leads to col­lec­tive intel­li­gence.”
   
• “Civic par­tic­i­pa­tion requires that young peo­ple develop con­fi­dence in their own abil­i­ties (some­times referred to as a sense of agency) to act as lead­ers and to work pro­duc­tively for change. To the extent that youth have the oppor­tu­nity to prac­tice artic­u­lat­ing their own point of view, debate issues, and help oth­ers in their own com­mu­ni­ties, they are likely to develop con­fi­dence in their abil­ity to do so in the larger civic and polit­i­cal are­nas. Finally, civic and polit­i­cal activ­ity is largely a group activ­ity. Youth orga­ni­za­tional mem­ber­ship is believed to social­ize young peo­ple to value and pur­sue social ties while expos­ing youth to orga­ni­za­tional norms and rel­e­vant polit­i­cal and social skills that make main­tain­ing those ties more likely.”
  Com­bined with the Thinker­ing Spaces model, offer­ing more of these oppor­tu­ni­ties is one of the most pow­er­ful visions of the future of the pub­lic library for me, and it cer­tainly cre­ates the “trans­for­ma­tional expe­ri­ence” referred to in the OCLC report that they believe causes tax­pay­ers to vote yes in sup­port of libraries.
   
• “These results sug­gest that the fre­quent con­cerns in the media and else­where about the ennui and dis­con­nec­tion among those who play video games for long peri­ods of time may be mis­placed…. Teens who play games socially (a major­ity of teens) are more likely to be civi­cally and polit­i­cally engaged than teens who play games pri­mar­ily alone. Inter­est­ingly, this rela­tion­ship only holds when teens play along­side oth­ers in the same room.”
   
• “Among teens who write or con­tribute to web­sites or dis­cus­sion boards related to the games they play, 74% are com­mit­ted to civic par­tic­i­pa­tion com­pared with 61% of those who play games but do not con­tribute to these online gam­ing com­mu­ni­ties. They are also more likely to raise money for char­ity, stay informed about polit­i­cal events, express inter­est in pol­i­tics, try to per­suade oth­ers to vote in a cer­tain way, and attend protests or demon­stra­tions.”
  What this says to me is that the com­bi­na­tion of teens in a social gam­ing space, men­tored by infor­ma­tion guides (librar­i­ans) who pro­vide scaf­fold­ing for a pos­i­tive civic expe­ri­ence, com­bined with the avail­abil­ity of free inter­net access, is a con­struc­tive gam­ing expe­ri­ence for pro­mot­ing civic engage­ment in today’s youth. Pub­lic libraries are uniquely qual­i­fied to pro­vide that expe­ri­ence, and it’s almost “low-hanging fruit” for us, as we have fewer bar­ri­ers to that expe­ri­ence than schools do.
   
• “Approx­i­mately one-half of teens, for exam­ple, have played games that led them to think about moral or eth­i­cal issues. How­ever, rel­a­tively few teens (typ­i­cally under ten per­cent) report ‘often’ hav­ing par­tic­u­lar civic gam­ing expe­ri­ences.”
  Real­is­ti­cally, it will be years before civic gam­ing expe­ri­ences are fully inte­grated into the class­room, a process stunted by No Child Left Behind because it de-emphasizes civics and social stud­ies. This is yet another dig­i­tal divide libraries can help bridge by pro­vid­ing the types of civic expe­ri­ences gam­ing in a social con­text pro­motes.
   
• “Most of the group-gamers (49%) play with friends in per­son, with 77 per­cent of group-gamers report­ing play­ing games with oth­ers in the same room…. Over­all, 76 per­cent of youth play games with oth­ers at least some of the time.“
  So if there are ben­e­fits to play­ing games together, is it bet­ter for kids to play with a small cir­cle of friends at home or to bring them together with a diverse group of peers from their com­mu­nity, sur­rounded by the knowl­edge of the world, with infor­ma­tion guides stand­ing at the ready to help them?
   
• “Civic edu­ca­tion research leads us to sus­pect that par­ents, peers, teach­ers, and men­tors can sig­nif­i­cantly increase the impact of civic gam­ing expe­ri­ences by help­ing ado­les­cents reflect on those expe­ri­ences.”
  Note that the Pew gam­ing report doesn’t even men­tion the word “libraries” any­where in it. Seri­ously. How can that be? In addi­tion, MacArthur reports con­stantly refer to after­school pro­grams but don’t spec­ify libraries. If we want to sit at the table of this dis­cus­sion, we need to assert our unique posi­tion to address the issues these reports raise.
   
• “Civic and polit­i­cal par­tic­i­pa­tion among youth is quite unequal. The vot­ing rate of 18–29-year-olds who had attended col­lege was fully three times greater than the vot­ing rates of 18–29-year-olds who had not…. By equal­iz­ing civic learn­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties, we may be able to help to equal­ize civic and polit­i­cal par­tic­i­pa­tion — a fun­da­men­tally impor­tant goal in a democ­racy…. Civic gam­ing expe­ri­ences may be a means of more equi­tably devel­op­ing teens’ civic skills and com­mit­ments…. Increas­ing the fre­quency of such expe­ri­ences is likely nec­es­sary to effec­tively tap the civic poten­tial of video games.”
  Again, I don’t see schools being able to increase the fre­quency of such expe­ri­ences across the board in the cur­rent envi­ron­ment. Libraries, on the other hand, are well-suited for this.
   
• “Both within games and in their offline lives, it is clearly impor­tant that youth have space to develop their own ways of engag­ing civi­cally and, along with such oppor­tu­ni­ties, that they receive guid­ance and sup­port from those with more civic and polit­i­cal expe­ri­ence.”
  See what I mean about how this report has “libraries” stamped all over it? One of the things we need to con­sider is how we can cre­ate opti­mal spaces and expe­ri­ences to encour­age these types of inter­ac­tions, because we pro­vide a unique set of con­di­tions that the struc­tured, time-limits of the school day just can’t provide.

So in addi­tion to the diverse range of social inter­ac­tions that take place around gam­ing in libraries, the rela­tion­ships it helps build between librar­i­ans and users, the lit­era­cies kids inher­ently learn play­ing many videogames, and the draw to the library so kids learn more about the ser­vices we have to offer them, we can now add civic engage­ment to the list of ben­e­fits. The ROI on offer­ing gam­ing just keeps get­ting bet­ter and better.

If all of this feels for­eign to you, it may be that you’re not a gamer or you don’t inter­act with kids who are gamers, because anec­do­tally, I hear what these num­bers say all the time from librar­i­ans offer­ing gam­ing. I hear it most loudly from Eli Neiburger at the Ann Arbor Dis­trict Library, some­one who has fos­tered an online and phys­i­cal com­mu­nity of kids who are pas­sion­ate about the Library because of its gam­ing pro­gram­ming. In his book Gamers…in the Library??, he talks about how you can level up the dis­course by engag­ing kids around con­tent they care about. In fact, back in May, he pre­sciently sub­mit­ted a pro­posal to talk about civic engage­ment at GLLS2008 (which he’ll be giv­ing on Novem­ber 3). In addi­tion, I’m happy to say that Amanda Lenhart, Senior Research Spe­cial­ist at Pew/Internet and the lead on the gam­ing and civics report, will be pre­sent­ing a ssion on this data at the gam­ing sym­po­sium, so this is going to be a hot topic.

If you haven’t wit­nessed this type of behav­ior in per­son, I encour­age you to attend a library gam­ing event and/or talk to librar­i­ans offer­ing this ser­vice your­self. I hear the com­ments week in and week out, usu­ally unprompted, but don’t take my word for it. Obvi­ously I feel pretty strongly that there’s a big role here for libraries to play if we just rec­og­nize and grab it, but you should learn more so that you can decide if gam­ing is right for your library. There’s also a lot more in both of these reports, includ­ing infor­ma­tion about parental education/ involve­ment and impli­ca­tions for school libraries, so I highly rec­om­mend them as food for thought.