The Sentient Search Engine

I’ve been reading a lot of articles lately about gaming in libraries. As an avid gamer, I have to say that recent developments in this area are very encouraging. At the same time, I’m afraid I must confess that the articles I’ve been reading have been as frustrating as they are exciting.

On the one hand, the rising of gaming in libraries is an heartening sign that:

• my hobby of choice is loosing its negative stigma
• libraries are increasingly open to “non-traditional” (whatever that means) services

However, I the more I read about gaming in libraries the more discouraged I am by:

• the perception of gaming as a programming alternative, rather than a service libraries provide
• the intense Teen focus of articles on this topic

Looking through the literature, one can easily find a ton of articles of the “How to put on a Teen Gaming program without really trying” variety. Such articles are very helpful to the vast majority of librarians who’ve never picked up a game controller in their life. However, there seems (so far as I can tell) to be very little literature on how to implement gaming as a service. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great to use gaming to get teens in the door, thinking of libraries as “cool”. I guess I’ve just become spoiled. I want more!

In my mind, a program will leave, at best, a short-term impression on library customers. Customers (especially the 12-17 set) will think, “Cool! That was fun!” and promptly forget it ever happened. A series of programs does somewhat better as it stretches over time, but it still falls short in my mind. As a gamer, especially one that has a job, school work, and a personal life (trifles, eh?), I want to be able to partake when I ever have the time and inclination and don’t want to have to schedule it around when the library wants to do it.

This touches on my second concern, the focus on teens. As it turns out, I am not unique among gamers. Many of us are employed, socially mature adults with full lives. The ESA’s industry data shows this:

• The average age of gamers is 33 (alas, it turns out that we don’t grow out of it).
• Sixty-nine percent of American heads of households play computer and video games.
• Fifty-three percent of game players expect to be playing as much or more ten years from now than they do today.

These data indicate that gaming is not a fad (as should be obvious by now without the data) and that grown ups (those of us who first started in the Pong – NES period) are playing them just as much as we always have. So why exactly are all the gaming programs for teens? Well, partly its the youth focus of many libraries. This is understandable, because because of all the “mom and apple pie” and “children are our future” reasons that I support that fully. I just wish we could give adults some time at the controls. It would give them a chance to be social and enjoy themselves. More importantly, it may bring a new group of adults into the library who may not have traditionally have even known where we were. This is, after all, one of the sets of the population most likely to look to Google for their infomation needs. Why not refamiliarize them with our existance?

So the next logical step in public library gaming as far as I am concerned has to be the long-term allocation of space for gaming. Libraries really serious about gaming need to factor it into their space planning. You don’t need a huge amount of space, but it does need to be enclosed (noone will come if you keep shushing them). I think that this approach has considerable advantages.

• It’s available on the customer’s terms.
• It will be more of a draw over time, as it will have time to build momentum as a service.
• It encourages staff familiarity with the medium, so they’re aware of both the good and bad sides to it.
• It will actually be a boost to the gaming programming, as it will provide a space to advertise the “special events”.

It is worth mentioning that there’s nothing wrong with a library not being serious about gaming in my mind. We have so many confilcting priorities as it is, that I can hardly blame a library for saying that gaming is not one of them. I just wanted to mention it I guess (I seem to have a talent for starting things).

Gaming is a multi-billion dollar industry and it continues to grow despite the current economic slowdown. Gaming is here to stay and the first generation gamers are adults now, so we need to be thinking about how this service will need to mature as the medium matures.