• I thought I had blogged about National Gam­ing Day @ your library, but amaz­ingly I haven’t — sorry about that. This is a national event coör­di­nated by ALA on Novem­ber 15 that cel­e­brates the oppor­tu­ni­ties libraries offer for play between diverse groups of peo­ple in a safe, non-commercialized envi­ron­ment. To help pro­mote this event, Has­bro is send­ing a copy of the game Pic­tureka! to every pub­lic library in the U.S. (thanks, Has­bro!). The ship­ments have gone out so if you’re at a PL, you should auto­mat­i­cally receive your game in the next week or so. Sug­ges­tions for how to use the game (and oth­ers) are avail­able on ALA’s Games and Gam­ing Resources wiki, and Scott Nichol­son has made a great video show­ing how to play the game, which also sug­gests other NGD activ­i­ties, too.

  In addi­tion, Wiz­ards of the Coast donated two gam­ing kits to libraries that signed up to receive them (sorry, but that offer expired last week), so I want to thank them, too. It’s *very* easy to par­tic­i­pate in National Gam­ing Day, so I hope to see your library on the map. If it’s too late for you to do some­thing this year, you can start plan­ning now for next year’s event on Novem­ber 14, 2009.
   

• The ALA Tech­Source Gam­ing, Learn­ing, and Libraries Sym­po­sium ends today, and the tag is GLLS2008 so you can track it on sites like Flickr and Twit­ter. What a great group this has been. Thank you to every­one who came — you all rock! We’ll be col­lect­ing slides from pre­sen­ters and post­ing them online, along with what­ever audio we could cap­ture (not pos­si­ble in some cases). Give us a few weeks to get all of this posted, but watch the ALA Tech­source blog for more info.
   
• I also want to high­light the 6th Annual Chi TAG con­fer­ence for folks in the Chicagoland region. This is “the only toy and game fair open to the pub­lic,” and it will take place on Novem­ber 22–23 (Saturday-Sunday) at Navy Pier. The show’s founder, Mary Couzin, is an amaz­ing per­son, and she’s offer­ing librar­i­ans (and edu­ca­tors) free admis­sion to the event. (There’s also a dis­count park­ing coupon you can print out from the site.) This is dif­fer­ent from a trade show, as it’s a chance to lit­er­ally sit in the aisles and play boardgames all day. ALA will have a booth there, but I’d be going any­way just to see all of the dif­fer­ent games. If you’re in the area, this event is going to be a blast, so come join us!

I had a great time at the Bridg­ing Worlds Con­fer­ence and spent some amaz­ing vaca­tion days in Cam­bo­dia and Malaysia, so I’m late fol­low­ing up on my con­fer­ence promise to post a link to the slides for my talk Librar­ian 2.0: New Breed or Just Another Day at the Office? (12.2MB PDF). Please note that these slides are more cur­rent than the ones on the con­fer­ence site. I’ll find out about post­ing the accom­pa­ny­ing paper, too.

The con­fer­ence itself was won­der­ful (the orga­niz­ers did a good job), and I was espe­cially pleased to meet in person:

• Haz­man Aziz — I wish I had half of Hazman’s energy
• Ivan Chew — I loved Ivan’s presentation
• Peter God­win — Peter is a very funny fellow
• Kathryn Green­hill — finally!
• Joann Ran­som — who is doing some amaz­ing online com­mu­nity work in New Zealand

I also highly rec­om­mend play­ing any of Brian Kelly’s con­fer­ence speaker games if you ever get the chance.

For those of you who asked for links, the two major papers I dis­cussed in my talk are Fiat Lux, Fiat Late­bra: A Cel­e­bra­tion of His­tor­i­cal Library Func­tions (which details “The Seven Ages of Librar­i­an­ship”) by D. W. Krum­mel and Par­tic­i­pa­tory Net­works: The Library as Con­ver­sa­tion by David Lankes. Both of these gen­tle­men did all of the heavy lift­ing for illus­trat­ing how we’re mov­ing into an eighth age of librar­i­an­ship (“par­tic­i­pa­tory librar­i­an­ship”), and Scott Nichol­son con­nected the dots for me while dis­cussing the his­tor­i­cal con­text of gam­ing in libraries.

As for pic­tures, it’s going to take me a cou­ple of weeks to cull and label the 5GB of shots I took (espe­cially since GLLS2008 starts this week­end!), but they’ll even­tu­ally appear on my my Flickr account. Thank you to every­one who helped make this one of the most amaz­ing trips of my life.

Col­bert Report — Com­mu­nist Library Threat

Using Video Games as Bait to Hook Readers

“Mr. Bagley, now a senior, was so addicted that he some­times aban­doned friends in the din­ing hall to return to the game. But the story was never the attrac­tion. Both the nar­ra­tive and the char­ac­ters, he said, were too sim­plis­tic, and he gave up “World of War­craft” in his sopho­more year.

Video games, said Mr. Bagley, 21, ‘cer­tainly don’t have the same degree of emo­tional and intel­lec­tual com­plex­ity of a book.’

Some peo­ple argue that video games are an emerg­ing medium likely to undergo an evo­lu­tion. ‘I wouldn’t be sur­prised if, in 10 or 20 years, video games are cre­at­ing fic­tional uni­verses which are every bit as com­plex as the world of fic­tion of Dick­ens or Dos­to­evsky,’ said Jay Parini, a writer who teaches Eng­lish at Mid­dle­bury Col­lege.” [New York Times]

I’m dis­ap­pointed in this arti­cle, not because it isn’t a “rah rah, video games are great” piece, but because I don’t think it reflects what would have come from eight months of research, which is how long the author spent on it. Sev­eral librar­i­ans, includ­ing me, have talked with the reporter since Jan­u­ary, and I think we all expected some­thing a lit­tle deeper, regard­less of the view­points expressed. The excerpt above is indica­tive of the back-and-forth, “one said good, the other said bad” piece. I don’t think this arti­cle adds any­thing new to the debate, and I expected a series titled “The Future of Read­ing” from the New York Times to offer some­thing more in-depth.

In the end, I think this arti­cle is a rorschach test for how the reader feels about video games. If you’re against them, you prob­a­bly feel like this arti­cle val­i­dates your objec­tions. If you think video games are okay (or even ben­e­fi­cial), you can also find quotes to sup­port that per­spec­tive. Cer­tainly the com­ments get inter­est­ing and con­tinue the “good ver­sus bad” debate, but I keep won­der­ing when we’re going to get past extremes in this dis­cus­sion in order to fig­ure out how to inte­grate a for­mat that is clearly here to stay into our kids’ media diet (and into our libraries) in a bal­anced way.

Ear­lier this week, I stayed at the Mar­riott Metairie hotel in New Orleans, because I was in town to give a pre­sen­ta­tion for SOLINET. I’ve been stay­ing in Hamp­ton Inn hotels when­ever pos­si­ble lately, because they have very com­fort­able beds, offer free wifi, and pro­vide free break­fast (all at a great price), so I haven’t been in an upgraded Mar­riott lately. Let me tell you, though, that if more Mar­riotts are upgrad­ing to be like the Metairie, I may just be switch­ing, because this was the most awe­some, techno room I’ve ever stayed in.

At first, I was just thrilled to see the read­ing lights on the head­board and the easily-accessible out­lets near the bed. And of course there was a nicely-largish LCD TV. These touches are much appre­ci­ated, but what actu­ally made me gasp out loud was the A/V panel. Yes, you read that right, the A/V panel.

Appar­ently this is part of a ser­vice called Plug into Mar­riott, and it’s a trav­el­ing geek’s dream come true. In fact, I’d love to have one of these in every room in my house! The panel has four surge-protected out­lets, an eth­er­net port, an audio-in port, RCA jacks, an S-Video port, a com­puter video port, and even a mem­ory card reader. This means you can plug in your lap­top (to do work or watch a DVD), an MP3 player to lis­ten to music, a dig­i­tal cam­era to view pic­tures, or a cam­corder to watch videos. You can even plug in a game con­sole, and in fact they actu­ally encour­age this by includ­ing this infor­ma­tion in the doc­u­men­ta­tion. Equally impor­tant, the hotel pro­vides all of the cables, since most of us don’t carry these things around.

The doc­u­men­ta­tion could use a lit­tle help (it tells you to use the TV/video but­ton to get to the dif­fer­ent options, but the old remote in my room only had a “func­tion” but­ton that I cor­rectly guessed would do the trick), and the split-screen for working/watching never kicked in, but I was able to watch TV shows on Hulu and lis­ten to music from my iPod through the tele­vi­sion set.

This whole con­cept is a great exam­ple of say­ing “yes” and mak­ing things eas­ier for cus­tomers, as opposed to say­ing “no,” which is what most hotels do by dis­abling the ports on the back of the TV in the room. It’s a good les­son for libraries how easy it is to make the user expe­ri­ence better.

There’s a direc­tory of “plugged-in” Mar­riotts on the site, and it looks like there are quite a few of them. I’ll def­i­nitely be look­ing at these as I travel, although real­is­ti­cally, if the rooms cost sub­stan­tially more and I then still have to pay for inter­net access on top of that price, I’m likely to stay with my Hamp­ton Inns. Still, this appeals to the geek in me, and I think it shows how dig­i­tal our media is becom­ing, as well as how expec­ta­tions around using that media con­tinue to march forward.

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.

Banned Books Week: I’d Like To Find *BLEEP*

Find more info about Banned Books Week here.