started out play­ing “Just Dance” on the Wii (whoo-hoo!)
Wii is a great place to start
when you’re ready to learn how to use a Wii, send your 12-year old out of the house because they show you too quickly
you can teach your­self to do this (really, you can)

why gam­ing?
– con­nect with patrons who are gamers; they love it when you show an inter­est in some­thing that’s impor­tant to them; it’s good to know about gam­ing regard­less of what type of library you’re in
– pro­mote mul­ti­ple types of lit­er­acy
– increase traf­fic
– it’s fun

applied for ALA’s Gam­ing, Learn­ing, and Lit­er­acy grant with the Ver­i­zon Foun­da­tion
got $5000, $4000 of which was spent on Wiis & DDR for each library in the school dis­trict
had a few logis­ti­cal prob­lems but money from the Ver­i­zon Foun­da­tion was slow in com­ing, which forced some changes
she also loans her equip­ment out to teach­ers
also explor­ing hav­ing kids cre­ate games using Scratch

$1000 for gam­ing at her school — com­put­ers, con­sole, and board games
kids have become the experts and help each other

they do a fam­ily fun night at least once a year
Wendy sets up DDR and Gui­tar Hero + Band Hero
PS2s aren’t as ver­sa­tile as the Wii but can still be good to get you started, espe­cially with DDR
had trou­ble find­ing games that would run on their old com­put­ers
– used Civ­i­liza­tion, a vet game, Star Wars (which is the most pop­u­lar and is her only T game)

gets shy and non-sports kids involved
it’s fun to watch them social­ize and help each other

now we’re play­ing group Back­seat Draw­ing — awesome!

showed some books with game themes
they also read a lot of guides and cheats — they do a ton of read­ing around gaming

men­tioned “Libraries Got Game” by Brian Mayer and Chris Har­ris and their align­ment of board games with AASL’s stan­dards (much love in the room for this)

Wendy was sup­posed to defend the grant to the school board because they weren’t sure they wanted to accept “gam­ing” money, but they had already accepted it by the time she got there

exam­ples of com­puter strat­egy games — Spore (although her older com­put­ers won’t run it), Civilization

showed ALA’s Online Toolkit for librarians

free online games, which often have a cause-related theme (hunger, jus­tice, etc.)
in her dis­trict, any­thing that has “game” in it is auto­mat­i­cally blocked, so she works with them to let cer­tain ones through

Games for Change
Gene­see Valley’s data­base of games let you search by game time and ROI