Michelle Goodridge - Librarians Guide to Games and Gamers

Librarians Guide
to Games and Gamers

Librarians Guide
to Games and Gamers

From Collection Development
to Advisory Services

MICHELLE GOODRIDGE AND
MATTHEW J. ROHWEDER

Copyright 2022 by Michelle Goodridge and Matthew J. Rohweder

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Goodridge, Michelle, author. | Rohweder, Matthew J., author.

Title: Librarians guide to games and gamers : from collection development to advisory services / Michelle Goodridge and Matthew J. Rohweder.

Description: Santa Barbara, California : Libraries Unlimited, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021026454 | ISBN 9781440867316 (paperback) | ISBN 9781440867323 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: LibrariesSpecial collectionsGames. | Readers advisory servicesUnited States. | BISAC: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Library & Information Science / Collection Development | GAMES & ACTIVITIES / Reference

Classification: LCC Z692.G36 G66 2022 | DDC 025.2/896dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021026454

ISBN: 978-1-4408-6731-6 (paperback)

978-1-4408-6732-3 (ebook)

26 25 24 23 221 2 3 4 5

This book is also available as an eBook.

Libraries Unlimited

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ABC-CLIO, LLC

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Santa Barbara, California 93117

www.abc-clio.com

This book is printed on acid-free paper

Manufactured in the United States of America

Matt would like to dedicate this book to his MomI wish you could have read this. You always rolled your eyes at my love for video games, but your unwavering support got me to where I am. Thank you.

Michelle would like to thank her Dad who spent countless hours playing Diddy Kong Racing with her and didnt mind always losing and to her Mom who taught her how to play Canasta.

Contents

Writing a book is never a single player experience and can sometimes take a whole cast of non-playable characters (NPCs) to make this a reality. The authors would like to acknowledge the following people for helping this book evolve into its final form. To those people who spent time talking to us about gaming, games, and gaming in libraries. To those who patiently listened to our ideas, read sections of this book, and offered sage advicewe thank you. The list is many: Nick Walker, Joe Fahey, Darryl Andrews, Michael Rogowski, Blair Beveridge, Lauren Bourages, Meredith Fischer, Darryl Blake, and Lee Puddephatt.

A big thank you to Emma Cross, who started on this journey with us and got us thinking about VR in the library.

Matt would especially like to thank his husband, Ian, for always being an encouraging ear and being willing to watch him play countless hours of video games over the last couple of years.

In keeping with traditional readers advisory techniques and tools, this book will help librarians and library staff develop an ongoing relationship between themselves, their patrons, their gaming collection, and the larger gaming (gamer) community. This volume will make gaming, and its numerous genres, accessible to library staff and create a larger understanding of gaming in libraries. It is intended for librarians, future librarians, and any member of library staff who might find themselves working in a library with a gaming collection or patrons interested in gaming. This volume can also be used in any library environment: public, academic, or special. In particular, this guide will look at how libraries can adapt readers advisory for the gaming community. Because the community of patrons that will be served through this volume have their own unique needs and characteristics, we are stepping away from readers advisory as a terminology and instead establishing gamers advisory in its place. Whereas the majority of literature on gaming in libraries looks at developing a gaming collection or assisting gamers in finding similarly themed reading material, this volume moves beyond that and looks at how to serve library users interested in gaming and gameplay.

Although games have been present in library collections for several years, this is one of the first comprehensive resources for library staff in assisting patrons in discovering game materials in the library. There has been little done in the area of readers advisory in relation to gaming collections at libraries. Jin Ha Lee et al. recently surveyed the literature on game readers advisory with little luck.academic libraries) and some articles written on helping game enthusiasts find game-related reading material that is either based on the game or follows a similar genre or story arch. But again, this does not broach the topic of helping patrons find or engage with a gaming collection. This volume will begin addressing this gap by providing library staff with some of the necessary tools and ideas to help bring concepts of readers advisory to the world of gaming and games. The collection will cover a wide range of gaming genres, including digital games (video games and virtual reality), board games, and other tabletop games such as role-playing games, miniature tabletop role-play, and card games. We hope that through this volume, libraries will find greater engagement between their gaming collections and their patrons using the principles of gamers advisory.

Before moving into a discussion of readers advisory and gaming, it is important to consider how to best build up and maintain a gaming collection in your library. Furthermore, to best serve your patron base, it helps to understand some of the fundamental issues behind gamer behaviorexactly as you might when thinking about how to best serve readers. Therefore, this volume will briefly address fundamental concerns as collection development, cataloging, programming, and user behavior. We hope that you find this volume informative, useful, and enjoyable as you begin the process of opening up your library to gaming and gamers.