Sometimes you have to consider the source when someone starts in about whether video games belong in a library. It's bad enough when you're braced by someone off the street challenging you. Although my personal experience has been one of library patrons expressing interest more than hostility, it can happen. Maybe they explain that their high school friend's brother-in-law ruined his life playing video games. In the annals of urban legend, that’s called a FoaF — the friend of a friend, the one you point to when validating a story that angels prevented a good girl’s rape or the idiot who talked back to someone using a cell phone in the other toilet stall.
Or maybe they just heard some right-wing extremists on the radio ranting about how games kill and create satanically-inspired killers, or inspire young boys to turn gay, become foul-mouthed alcoholics, and drop out of school. Consider the source.
THE OPPONENT BESIDE YOU
But it's harder when it's one of your own. Your co-worker. Your boss. Your administator. There are some legitimate issues surrounding video games in libraries when we all have limited staff and budgets. We make hard decisions daily; I am revealing no secret when I say libraries face horrible budget conditions right now, but then we always have. It’s part of the job to look at and think about evidentiary material, to weigh costs and the return on investment of staff time and money, about what impact your work has on the communities around you.
When thinking about what the benefits of gaming are, I hope you’ll look back on some of my previous posts. Take the time to click through to the many resources I usually include, and look elsewhere too. I make a serious effort to give you tools and research, background and anecdote and perspectives that are more than my personal rant, including opposing viewpoints. Yes, I find gaming in libraries to be a good thing and I endeavor to make my case here. But I’m not here just to get on a soapbox and blow smoke up your skirt.
THE MANY MISSIONS OF LIBRARIES
I do find gaming consistent with our library missions — of not just the obvious answer of being a source of entertainment, but in support of our goals about literacy, connectivity, and the deep social benefits of encouraging self-education, about fostering teamwork skills and leadership. It might be fun to have someone give a program on the health benefits of massage and offer short massages as part of the program, but I don’t see leadership training coming out of that. I do see leadership and critical thinking emerge when watching a gang of kids work through the challenges encountered while playing a tabletop role-playing or online game.
Others see it too: people at IBM talk about it, RPG Research skims over a variety of positive game-supported characteristics which Ph.D games researcher Nick Yee goes into great depth with in his Daedalus Project, and there are comments in the pages of our sister publication, School Library Journal. This doesn't scratch the surface of links I could post. I note these to support my statement that it isn't just one or two people saying these things, faceless nobodies talking out of their hats.
And while you’re thinking about budgets over benefits, look at the ALA gaming toolkit. Gaming doesn’t have to be all that costly.
DISSENT AND DISCOURSE
So I take issue with someone parroting a diatribe that made it into one of your professional journals, obstensibly in the name of fair and balanced reporting of issues. I don’t have a problem with the fact that not everyone in Libraryland finds worth in video games, nor that some are pretty vocal about it. Intelligent debate rooted in disagreement over issues is at the core of a healthy and mindful community, whether it’s within the hallowed halls of our profession or our political system. It’s not always a popular activity in today’s society, but worth pursuing nevertheless.
So I find it sad how often the anti-gaming arguments are poorly conceived, badly written, and rife with flawed rhetorical distractions that divert attention from the actual questions at hand. We are a profession of literacy. It’s deeply ironic for gamer-librarians to be castigated as anti-intellectual and quasi-literate by MLS-trained Librarians who talk about dog bowels instead of bowls, “nats” proliferating from the potted plants in the branch, or when ostensible professional discourse sinks to repetitive ad hominem name-calling and straw man argumentation.
As with any topic, bring on your critical thinking skills. You assess value in what you read every day. (You do, don't you?) You consider and evaluate, weigh pros and cons, and make determinations of relative worth against the evidence of your personal experience and by comparing differing arguments. Hopefully you have time to examine more than one source, just as we encourage patrons to do. You’re smart enough to take note of not only the content but the tenor and tone, the logic and the rhetoric, fallacious and otherwise. You assess whether facts averred come with supporting data, or whether what's on the page or the screen is any different from the run of the mill (and always anonymous) Internet troll throwing a firecracker into the middle of the chatroom just to be argumentative and snarky. Is simple provocation masquerading as insight, or can you strip off the mask to expose the troll underneath?
THE TROLLS AMONG US
Mind you, the trolls out there are only too happy to watch you get up on your high horse and attack. True, you are well-armed with your Blade of Incisive Knowledge, the Tomes of Verifiable Research, the Shield of Critical Thought. It doesn't matter. Trolls mock you for trying to talk to them, because you just draw more attention to them. On the Net, the admonition of “don’t feed the trolls” is about restraining yourself from arguing with such folk, much as you’d like to. It’s a waste of time. After all, any gamer knows a D&D-type troll will just regenerate unscathed, and have to be slain once again with the Light of Tomorrow. Or to put it another way: you can’t teach a pig to sing, especially when the pig is already annoyed. The people who matter are those who think about what they hear and read, who take the time to evaluate and to look around without entrenched prejudgment and come to a thoughtfully reasoned conclusion.
Even if, in the end, they disagree with me.
Game on.
