Do you find people coming to your gaming events with questions? "What is going on? Why are you playing games in the library? I'm curious. I'm concerned. I don't understand."

If you've been doing gaming awhile, you probably have good answers already. However, you might not always have time to give a thorough explanation, or maybe people don't want to interrupt you to ask. (We never encounter that elsewhere in a library, do we?) My suggestion, assuming you don't already have something like this, is to make a one-sheet handout available to the curious, the questioners, the concerned.

Here are some points you might include:

• Games enhance literacy, learning, practical and cognitive processing skills. Games teach these skills "under the radar." Players may learn math and statistics, scientific methodology, logical deduction, and complex economics while playing but not even realize it.

• Games self-motivate a person of any age to learn new skills. The "21st Century skills" are highly desirable in today's and tomorrow's workplace and schools, and it seems that games encourage them.
  

• Games help a library build community. All ages and all ethnic groups play games, online and off.

• Games are highly social. Players must have opponents and fellow aficionados to enjoy most games, and good challengers are always in short supply.

• Games today outsell movies, TV, and music as the preferred mode of entertainment nationwide. Nintendo alone took in $16.85 billion-with-a-B in 2007.

• Games bring people into the library who otherwise believe we have nothing relevant to offer them.

• Geek cred vs street cred: 100% of MIT freshman played video games (2006). First-time entrants into the penal system often are not video game players. Certainly there is more to the story, but the contrast is striking, regardless.

• Games fit the library mission: they fulfill the recreational needs of our customers in the same way that reading a casual novel does. Only the medium has changed.

• The demographics may surprise you. The average age of gamers is 35 and rising. More women over 40 play games online than boys under 18. In fact, slightly more females play Web-based games, today, than males of any age. (Women play a lot of Tetris, Bejeweled, and other basic games.)

• Games and books have many connections. A lot of games have been developed out of existing fictional worlds. In turn, many books are written for and about games, gamers, and gaming.
  

Don't let the paper do your work for you. Look for the opening and the time to talk with your people, one on one. You will be a far better advocate than any sheet of dead tree parts. But if time or opportunity gets away from you, this can serve the purpose.

Game on!



(In the interest of full disclosure, most of the information here is material I put together writing about Online Gaming for Pima County Library's Baker's Dozen a year ago. Baker's Dozen was a self-paced Web 2.0 learning initiative for librarians in Arizona, run in cooperation with the Arizona State Library Archives and Records. PCPL is preparing "The Next Batch," to be launched at AzLA in December, in coordination with WebJunction but you can still enjoy the first batch!)