American Libraries

Lawrence Kutner: Lots of kids play lots of games in lots of ways. There is no clear predictive relationship between getting into serious trouble—the sorts of things you see on the news and you hear politicians and pundits talk about—and playing games.

Seann Dikkers: There's a teaching style that we're finding with games, clubs, game activities, and that is that you really need to think about how to ask questions, as opposed to telling kids things. And a lot of times in education, we give the lecture and then we expect kids to master that lecture. What we're seeing a lot more of is that what happens naturally or organically with kids is that they master the material by playing with it and then they're willing to talk about it.

Lindsey Wesson: A simulation video game is going to have elements of nation building, choices, decision making, sometimes there's a historical content to it. So a book like Nation by Terry Pratchett—you have two teens that are now in charge of rebuilding a nation that has been completely destroyed. And so, much like the game Civilization by Sid Meier, you have to decide what traditions you are going to adhere to, you have to decide how you’re going to rebuild your nation and what consequences those decisions are going to have. It's the same in the book as it is in the game.

Amanda Lenhart: Learning about staying in touch with current events; asking people, talking to people about how they might vote; being engaged with your community and politically engaged with your community; raising money for a charity. So all of these things we consider to be offline civic experiences. We find that you have online gaming experiences like that online civic gaming experiences that you're more likely to be engaged with your community offline.

Rick Bolton: What we're doing is a quick demonstration of how Library Mini-Golf, which is a charitable foundation that I founded with a couple of friends. We support libraries in fundraising. So what we'll do is we come to your library and turn your library into a miniature golf course for a day. Every time I've done this, two things have happened: it's been the biggest event in the library's history and we’ve raised a minimum of $10,000 for the library.

Larry Lewis: How do we take a gaming type of experience to a nonvisual playing field? And so I brought along some technology with me that allows for us to do that. It's a product called The Talking Tactile Tablet. And it is a tactile device that connects to your computer. It is accompanied with software. So you load the software on the computer, you connect the device, and you can actually play multimedia games. But instead of focusing specifically on visual aspects of the game, you have three-dimensional tactile access.

Eli Neiburger: One of the most transformative things—anecdotes—that I've seen happen at a gaming event is we had this kid come in and he's kind of a smaller kid and kind of meek and little bit concerned. And his mom was staying very close. And she's like, "He's never been to anything like this before; he's little nervous." And so she came and sat him down and he threw out some unique Pokémon and a couple players came and gathered around him. And he won a battle with a very exiting ending and everyone was cheering for him. And he didn't win the tournament overall, but he did pretty well and he had a good day. And the next time they came to his tournament his mom came up to me and said, "I just want you to know that day changed his life. He's coming out from behind his shell because he hadn't really ever been able to experience competitive success in front of his peers before. And having that opportunity—especially at the library of all places—to have that success and get some of the credibility and establish a social group has really put him on a better footing because unfortunately, he wasn't able for number of different reasons to find those sorts of opportunities in school.”