Scott Nicholson - Everyone Plays at the Library: Creating Great Gaming Experiences for All Ages

Games have always been an important part of my life. As a child, I spent many hours staring at a Chess board, engaging with others over board games, and controlling pixels driven by the Atari 2600 and TRS-80 Color Computer. In high school, I continued with these games and also got engaged in role-playing games, and during my free time in college, I got heavily involved in live-scale role-playing along with other forms of gaming. As I moved into my career, my time for gaming decreased, so I focused more on board and electronic games that took less time in one sitting.

I firmly believe that much of my success in life can be attributed to my gaming hobby. Different games test different skillssome mental, some physical, and some social. These games are similar to exercising in the gym: While you may not have the need to do an upright row in real life, the exercise helps strengthen parts of the body that may not get a regular workout so that your body can respond to real-life situations. Games work the same way: While you may never need to know how to run a plantation in Puerto Rico, that gaming activity stimulates pathways of thought that then help the mind respond to a variety of life situations. The same holds true for the social aspect of gaming: While the activity may not seem like something directly applicable to life, it does allow you to improve your social skills so you can be more flexible in real-world situations.

Gaming has also taught me how to analyze a situation for the underlying rules. In many electronic games, not all of the rules of the game are presented up front; players must experiment within the world to learn the rules. Going through these different worlds, scenarios, and rule sets helps me to navigate the many unstated rule sets that govern life.

At the 2007 American Library Association (ALA) midwinter conference, I first saw Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) applied to a library context by Jenny Levine at the ALA TechSource booth. After we danced, we chatted about how libraries are using games. The rest of that show was a blur, as my mind raced about what was happening and what the potential was. I knew there was much more to gaming than teens and DDR, and I had a lifetime of experience to tap to explore it. After several days of contemplation, I decided to change the path of my research to focus on gaming in libraries.

To have a home for my exploration, I created the Library Game Lab of Syracuse as a part of the Information Institute of Syracuse, run by R. David Lankes. The goal of the Library Game Lab is to explore the intersections between gaming and libraries. Our first project was to gather some baseline data to get a better idea of how many libraries were supporting gaming of all types. We randomly selected 400 public libraries and called them to learn how they work with gaming. We also did a census where we put out a call for libraries to tell us more about their gaming programs.

The data from these studies allowed us to pursue funding. Gaylord, a company that provides libraries with supplies, furniture, and archival solutions, provided considerable assistance with a startup grant that allowed us to purchase the games that are most typically used by libraries. This allowed us to build up the portable Game Lab, which we then used to work with groups of librarians to teach them about the variety of gaming experiences. Taking this lab on the road also helped me to better understand the needs and typical questions that library staff who are new to gaming have.

Gaming continued to grow within ALA, but these discussions tended to take place in a number of small channels specific to a type of library or age of patron. I knew a lot of these different groups could learn from speaking to each other, so I started a Members Initiative Group for Games and Gaming at ALA (connect.ala.org/node/66247). This group brings together people from public, school, and academic libraries to talk about all sorts of games. I wanted to capture the same atmosphere with the Games in Libraries podcast (www.gamesinlibraries.org), and many of the people active in the Members Initiative Group are also voices on the podcast.