American Libraries

Jenny Levine: I'm going to introduce Liz as a colleague, but she's really been an inspiration for me. We met virtually through blogging. There's a handful of people in the world that I want to be when I grow up and Liz is one of them. Her formal title is Director for the Lab of Social Computing at the Rochester Institute for Technology; she's an Associate Professor for Information Technology. But I really think it's in the social technologies area that Liz is well-known and does a lot of great work. You're on sabbatical at Microsoft right now? Just there for the summer. You did a sabbatical last year. When I was there at Search Gems a year ago I could see that they were starting to think about libraries more just because of Liz being there, which I think is really great. So I encourage you to meet Liz's main blog, her personal one, mamamusings.net. And she writes for a couple other blogs that are really great. And what level are you in World of War Craft?

Liz Lawley: Seventy.

Jenny Levine: So she knows had a she's talking about. I'm very, very honored and happy that she could be here to help us close this today. (Applause)

Liz Lawley: I hate to break it to you, but I am not yet grown up, not even close. I don't know what half these Vista settings mean, but when you're work for Microsoft over the summer, you have to carry a Vista connection. It's actually not true, but it seems Troll-ish of me to refuse it carry my Macbook Pro. Let me just say my Macbook Pro gives me more trouble with WiFi on the road than any computer I have ever owned. And so much as I'm a Mac fangirl, it really has not been ideal for me. We are just going to have to live with the flicker and I hate the fact that it's flickering because when I teach multimedia to my students and we do animation stuff and I talk about how awful it is to put permanently animated stuff up on their screen because it will force people to look at it. So if it's constantly moving—our brains are hard-wired from back in the days of when we used to chase and be chased by other animals—if we see something moving, we have to look at it. We don't have any choice. Our hindbrain says, "It might eat us!" so we have to look at it every time it moves because it might be something bad.

How many of you were in Tom Gillespie's talk a few minutes ago? He told stories. How important are stories? We did such a bad job in so many conferences of telling stories, rather than showing slides because the stories are what are compelling, the stories are what make things real for us. And so hopefully I'll be able to tell some stories today that will make some of the things that I'm talking about a little more real to you. I apologize for not having been here for the whole conference. Normally I don't like to go to a conference, just show up to do my talk, and then leave because first of all, I'm missing out on the opportunity to hear about all kinds of cool stuff that other people are doing. Second of all, especially if you're going last, it's really embarrassing if you get up there and say, "And then you should know about this really important thing," that you've already heard six times at the conference. So I prefer not to do that. I also wish I could walk around because standing still is really, really hard.

This is my life measured out in blog posts, rather than coffee spoons. This is the way my professional life presents itself and the first one is my personal blog. The second one is a group blog on social competing topics. The third is a now defunct —but I'd really like to resurrect it—blog on the topic of women and technology. And the last, how many of you are familiar with Terra Nova? It's a web blog on virtual worlds, but it's intended very much—observations on and analysis of virtual worlds and it seems like I ended up there kind of accidentally. It seems like I ended up almost everywhere accidentally. I ended up in library school accidentally because I went to a seminar on searching dialogue when I was a secretary back in the 1980's. And I said, "Where did you learn to do this?" and they said, "Library school." And I said, "No, really—where did you learn to do this?" And the next thing I knew, I was getting an MLS at Michigan. And then I went on to actually get a PhD in library science. And then I ended up accidentally in an IT department because there were no jobs to teach in library schools when I graduated. Everybody kept saying, "If we get a line, we'd love hire you." And I said, "Well that's not going to feed the two kids that I just created while I was in grad school."

So I ended up in an IT program and the IT program has developed a game design program. So I keep falling accidentally into these things and what's so wonderful for me to be at a conference like this is that the threads converge. My library life and my IT life and my-computer's-not-working-for-me-life. That's not plugged in. So that's a little bit of context for where I'm coming from on all of this. And I am at this from the lowest level as a librarian, someone who cares passionately about libraries and librarianship and role of libraries in society. And it makes me really happy to able to start to look at some of the other things I'm passionate about and how those can come into the library world. Is this person still here? Are you still here? I saw you on the schedule. Is he still here or did he go home? He had to cancel? Oh, man. I was so excited because I use the slide now in almost every presentation I give about gaming. And I was so happy that he was actually going to be here. I don't know how to say his last name. That's why I say "this person" because I didn't want to do that awful mangling of pronunciation that people do with names that have too many consonants in them.

This is the quote last year that made me realize that the threads really were all coming together and I loved this post. First of all, that it was a blog post by a university librarian was in and of itself a wonderful thing, but that he was able to talk about why we would want to make our library systems more like games was really important because I see a disturbing trend in the world of Second Life where we're trying to make our games more like real life. And I'm not so sure that's really the direction we want to go in. I'd like to make real life more like games instead of the other way around. And so I thought this post was really indicative of an interesting direction and thinking, and of course the fact that he talked about World of Warcraft piqued my interest. So that's Galatea, she's my level seventy priest in World of Warcraft. I also have Malefecent.

This is a really interesting graph from Forrester Research that talks about—based on age range—Generation Y is down here. What can't you live without—your computer, your cell phone your television? Here's seniors, here's my kids. Actually, my kids are over here because they're ten and thirteen and they could totally live without the television. In fact, my son just said, "Why don't you just take my television out of my room because I can watch T.V. on my Treo." I mean, this is the totally different version of technology and this is something that is really relevant to the whole issue of what media people are using. We've moved forward in libraries and we're checking out videotapes. There's still this whole rack of VHS tapes in the libraries that I go to. I'm like, "Who checks those out? Who even plays VHS tapes anymore?" But there's all this great stuff that's happening. And this is just a few of the little things that I've pulled out from different Web sites on libraries and gaming. There's really good stuff happening in terms of gaming and libraries.

I want to do what I hate when my students do it: they start out every PowerPoint presentation with “Webster's Dictionary defines—insert topic here—as—” and then they go on. But every now and then a definition is sort of an interesting thing to think about to reshape what we're doing. So I've got a couple of definitions here of what a game is: "A form of play with goals and structure; a form of art in which participants, termed 'players' make decisions in order to manage resources through game tokens in the pursuit of a goal or an activity with some rules engaged in for an outcome." That's a little broad for my taste because that's kind of life, right? There are rules and outcomes. But let's think about the games you already do, even those of you who don't think of yourselves and gaming librarians.

What's this? You know what it is. You've seen it all the time. It's a summer reading program at a library. How is that not a game? My kids sign up for these every summer, my kids who don't go to the libraries, who don't think of themselves as library users. They sign up for this because there's a prize. Why would they not sign up when there's a prize and they could get points for something that they're doing anyway? It's a game. We already know how to do games, we're just too used to thinking of games as something else. But they're already hard-wired into what we do in libraries. One of the things my kids loved most in their elementary school was a game that the school librarian ran every week—which I didn't realize until this week when I was doing some research thinking, "Why did I not take a picture of the school library?"—that this is actually a program that people do all over the country. Of course, libraries are so good at sharing stuff with each other. I love that.

This is the game called Super Sleuth. And every day a new clue goes up on the bulletin board. And the kids walk past the bulletin board and think, "I bet I could figure that out." And they go look it up and they find the information. Super Sleuth is another game I watched kids play really enthusiastically. Learning 2.0. It's a game: it has rules, it has objectives, it has steps that you go through, it has a prize at the end. We know this on some low level that games motivate people. We use them all the time, but we started thinking about games so much as just this other thing that we could bring into the libraries and have forgotten how much we already do.

Greg did a great talk this morning about the whole Come Out and Play thing, of what some people here call augmented reality games. I don't like that term. I like the term that gets used in Europe more often which is "pervasive gaming" because augmented reality sounds too much like heads-up displays, like you've got to augment what's real. And that's not really the concept that a lot of these games have to do with. They're more about being pervasive, about going over boundaries and borders, that you're no longer playing the game in one place—that it extends its tendrils into other areas.

I got this picture of Stephen Abram, one of the worst pictures ever taken of Stephen, and I apologize. But it was at this conference with where he had just said this. And I should have at least tried to take it into a program and get rid of the devil eyes. Somehow it does capture some of his spirit: "Follow me." But he says some wonderful things and at this conference—Jenny blogged this—that he talked about context being key, not contact. He talked about unfettered experiences and immersive experiences in libraries and that's really important. But as I was reading that I thought, "Where did I see this before?" And you've heard Jane McGonigal mention this a couple of times as well and I'm going to actually show a picture of her in a minute. But this is from the Web site of the company she used to work for—42 Entertainment—which did I Love Bees and other pervasive games.

Experience is queen and content is king. It turns out that this is a theme that goes across multiple contexts. So a couple of weeks ago I gave a talk at UC Irvine and on the airplane on the way there, I was reading The New York Times. There were these amazing stories, so I grabbed a bunch of them. This is one of them. The point here is basically that as physical stores make their environment more pleasing to be in, online sales are starting to slump. It turns out shopping online feels like work, but hanging out in Borders or Barnes & Noble and having a cup of coffee and enjoying the pretty music and browsing the shelves is an experience that people actually enjoy. They would rather do that than something that feels work-like. And they also talked about a woman who wanted to buy stuff for her computer, but wanted to do it in a store. Here's the money quote: "I trust it more. I want to be sure there's a person there if something goes wrong." Think about all the lessons of libraries in this, in terms of physical experience, immersive experiences, providing a space where there's trusted authorities. There's still—no matter what you hear about the wisdom of crowds—a place for wisdom and authority in the sense of trusted knowledge.

There's Jane McGonigal, who you've heard about a little bit and on the right is Cory Ondrejka, the Chief Technical Officer for Linden Labs who made Second Life. And these are pictures taken at Foo Camp, which is a small cross between summer camp and informal conference that Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly and Associates puts on every year for 300 of his closest friends. And Jane ran a really interesting game there and it's a game that I think has real relevance in education and library environments because of the way it can be used. And it has no computers associated with of any kind. There's no technology necessary for this game. It's Reverse Scavenger Hunt. What happens with the Reverse Scavenger Hunt is you break up into teams, like a regular scavenger hunt and you're given ten minutes to find eleven items. That's all the instruction you get: bring back eleven items. You don't know what items. You have to go bring back the eleven most versatile items that you possibly can because when you come back, you're going to be given the list of what you were supposed to find. And you then have to tell the judges how an item on your list matches each of the things that you were supposed to get. You can't reuse anything, so you have to find some way to match each of your items to one the items on the list. Now what makes this interesting is that the list is things that have to do directly with topics that the conference was covering. So one was a spiritual computing device and one was a third generation virtual world. Well, we made a sleeping bag become the third generation virtual world. You can use your own imagination to think at 11:00 o'clock at night after an awful lot of drinking what kinds of virtual worlds you might get with that. But we know what drives innovation in technology and it was a pretty plausible argument, I think. We had a plastic bag, which Cory Ondrejka is holding. And I can't remember what we used the plastic bag for, but we had some really compelling argument. It forced us to really think about the items on the list because how are you going to make the case that this Life Saver you picked up is a spiritual computing device? Well, you have to know enough about the topic to be able to do that kind of improvisational explanation really effectively. Wonderful, engaging game that I came out of feeling much smarter than when I went in. It was a wonderful experience.

Here's another game that Jane created because Jane is really interested in something that Greg mentioned briefly this morning, which is the idea of reclaiming public spaces that have fallen into disuse. Hmm. Can you think of any public spaces that are falling into disuse as we sit in this room? Why, yes in fact. She did something here for cemeteries. This is called Tombstone Hold'em Poker. And you can see on the top are shapes of tombstones. And the shape of the tombstone—rounded, pointed, squared off, or any other kind of shape tell you what suit the card it. And the year that the person died tells you the number of the card. If there's two names on the stone, it's a jack, three is a queen, four or more is a king. So you have to build a hand. And you see what these two people are doing here, how they're reaching with a foot—like Twister—and a hand here. You and your partner have to be able to touch two of the cards in order for them to be in your hand. So this requires you to go into the cemetery, but not just be in the cemetery, but look at the tombstones, be aware of what they look like, what they say, what the names are on them. This idea that the space then becomes alive with people who care about what they're looking at is really important.

Greg gave you great ideas this morning for ways that you can create these kinds of engaging games in a library environment. They don't have to be technological. Games don't have to mean computer games. And that's something I'm hearing a lot through the things I've been at today and I'm really happy to hear that. Here's another one that's good to know about called Cruel 2 B Kind. Fabulous game, it's one of these big games played in New York City. I think it actually debuted at last year's Come Out and Play Festival. How many of you have heard Cruel 2 B Kind? Oh, wow. How many of you have played Cruel 2 B Kind? One. Okay. Cruel 2 B Kind—what happens basically is you divide up into teams and each team has a weapon and a weakness. And both the weapon and the weakness are kind gestures. So your weakness might be having somebody give you a flower and your weapon might be telling somebody they look great. And you have to walk around, trying to find other teams out, but you don't know who they are. And you have to use your weapon: "You look great," and if it's someone who's playing, you've then attacked them successfully; they have to join your team. If it someone who's not playing, you told them they look great. How wonderful is that? So think about the ways that this is disruptive in such a positive way, that in order to kill people you have to literally kill them with kindness. It's a beautiful concept and it works and people have a great time running through big urban areas and handing out flowers to random strangers, in hopes that they're going to kill them and put them and recruit them onto their side. So these are some of the kinds of games that are out there that have real potential.

Now here's another one that's well worth watching and I'm not going to try to bring it up in the browser right now. But I will talk a little bit about what it is – Passively Multiplayer Online Gaming. It's created by Justin Hall, who's a student at USC. And the idea behind Passively Multiplayer Online Gaming is you should get XP for everything you do. In this case, he's talking about XP for surfing the web, not just surfing the web, but building quests to surf the web. So check out all these sites on this topic and when you're done, you'll get XP because you've completed the quest. As you do more and more quests and level up, you can do things like leave landmines on pages for people or leave little prizes or portals where they can jump from one place to another, all using the simple extension sidebar in Firefox. So right now this is still very alpha. It breaks a lot, that's the reason I'm not going to show it to you because I don't want it to keep breaking. But the idea behind it is really powerful, which is: How can we embed playfulness into things that people already do? How can we make them feel a sense of accomplishment for basic tasks that otherwise feel tedious and boring?

How many of you have watched somebody play World of Warcraft? It looks really boring when someone else is doing it. They're killing the same thing over and over and over again in order to collect six of something and take it back to somebody and then they do it again and again and again. I found myself in the grocery store the other day in Rochester because in Rochester we have deposits on cans. In Seattle they just get recycled because in Seattle they trust you to recycle. And in New York they figure unless they give you a financial incentive, you'll just throw them way. They may be right. So I'm at the grocery store and how many of you ever used these machines that you pop the cans into? And so I've got a lot of cans because now that my kids are also soda drinkers, we go through an embarrassing number of cans of diet soda on a weekly basis. So I've got my two shopping carts full of cans and I'm putting them into the machine. And every time I put it in it goes up five cents. I'm like, "Cool, making more money." It's like I've got this incentive to put these cans in. I'm grinding cans, right? This is the gaming terminology for it. But I'm getting a reward in the end and then I go to Starbucks to cash in my reward for really good coffee. And I love it, I'm happy. I'm happy during this ridiculous thing. So there's something to this level of small rewards and they don't have to be monetary; they're recognition rewards. It's telling people, "Look what I did—I returned 735 cans today. I'm better than you." It's silly but we respond to this.

How many of you have you ever to a Tupperware party? Be honest. I'm not asking you if you actually held one, just whether or not you've been to one. So Tupperware parties are amazingly good at getting people to do stupid things for free pieces of plastic. And it's amazing what people will do for a free piece of plastic. It is astounding. And I know this because my husband was a Tupperware man. And so I got to go to a lot of parties and it never ceased to amaze me how people who make $100,000 a year will make utter fools of themselves to get small, free plastic container just because, "I won! I won! I got it for free." This is huge. Watch librarians in the exhibit hall at ALA and tell me that stupid little free things aren't a huge motivator. We will stand in a huge line of 150 people to get the T-shirt. It's a free T-shirt. Hello? You can buy them at Michael's for a dollar and screen print whatever you want onto them. All right. So there are some libraries that are taking advantage of what I see as a really interesting trend and particularly these games like this that don't have computers.

Foo Camp has the highest concentration of alpha geeks of any gathering in the world. And when you go to one of these things, nobody's got a computer out. And the reason they don't have a computer out is because they are so deeply engaged in this experience. It so immersive and it is so engaging that they don't need the computer as something to distract them during the boring parts. There aren't any boring parts. Increasingly I'm seeing libraries respond. And this is Cuyahoga County. Is there anybody here from Cuyahoga County Public Library? So I was really impressed because last night I was looking for pictures of Yugioh Tournaments because what I wanted to talk about is why Yugioh tournaments are all being held at card shops and not in libraries? And I couldn't say that to you because it turns out they are being held in libraries. And I was so totally delighted to see that they run Yugioh tournaments and I'm guessing Ann Arbor does, too. No? Okay. How many of you have kids in the middle/school elementary school age? Any of them play Yugioh or Pokemon or any of that? Can I tell you how much I hate going to those stupid card stores and sitting there while they play these stupid tournaments? Where the only thing they want to do is buy more cards while they're there and there’s is nothing for me to do—nothing. Why couldn't these be in our library where there's actually something for me to read where they could look up reference materials? I'll talk about the resource materials in a second.

This is another thing from that same issue of The New York Times: Next in Child Prodigies—the Gamer. And it was kind of a joke op-ed piece about how there are now these game tournaments where people can make money. So instead of making your kid go to soccer practice, you should be making them practice Halo 2. And that was kind of silly but it turns out it's really not so silly. Here's a Wired article about John Seely Brown and Doug Thomas from USC about how World of Warcraft and the leadership skills that people can get in them can significantly improve their ability to get hired.

I want to tell some stories about how World of Warcraft has helped my kids because we did something that made a lot of our academically-minded friends really appalled, my mother probably most of all when we moved to Seattle for my sabbatical for a year. Which is we took off all the restrictions on our kid's gaming. We were home schooling them that year. Once they were done with their work in the morning, they were allowed to watch T.V., play video games, do whatever they wanted, and we didn't put on limits. One very interesting thing that happened with this is that both of them picked very specific bed times that they wanted to always go to bed by without us ever having to tell them that. Another thing that happened was when their friends came over they asked them to make up rules about limits on computers and television because they said, "It's so boring. All they want to do is do stuff on the screen. And we want to do stuff that's more fun," because it was no longer a forbidden thing for them. They limited themselves because it got boring after a while. But when their friends came over, their friends didn't want to do anything but play those games. So we've been really delighted with the result.

I've also been really delighted with some of the things my kids have learned. So how many of you play World of Warcraft? More than I would have expected. So this is a small egg. This is actually a screen from a Web site called Thottbot. It a reference site that lets you look up information on every possible item in World of Warcraft and small eggs sell for four copper to a vendor. But they sell for between eleven silver and one gold—that's a lot of World of Warcraft money—if you sell them in the auction house to other players. The reason for this is that at Christmas time you have to make gingerbread cookies for Santa and the gingerbread cookies require small eggs. Small eggs only drop very low-level characters in Nube areas where level seventies don't particularly like to spend their time. So my son—at age ten—figured out that if he went into the Nube areas and offered to buy these eggs from other players who would otherwise only get four copper for them from a vendor because they're too new to know about the auction house, he could then resell them in the auction house for over one gold each.

Now let's think about the sophistication of the economic lessons going on here and the conversations. And this is the important part: It's not that he did this, it's that it gave us this jumping-off-point for talking about it. I said, "So do you feel like you're exploiting them?” "Why would I be exploiting them? Well, they could go make that money themselves.” "Well, they wouldn't know to go make that money themselves, they're only going to get four copper." “So they're getting more money than they would if I didn't buy these from them." He had thought through ethics issues and then it got us into the issue of middleman and why the things cost more in the store than they actually cost to make. And why do these sell for so much in December and so little in January? Seasonal supply and demand issues. That's really sophisticated economic thinking for a ten-year-old.

Now my thirteen-year-old, week before last spoke at Games+Learning+Society in Madison. And the reason he spoke there is that he has become a builder and scripter in Teen Second Life. But more importantly, he has also become an outspoken critic of the adult presence in Teen Second Life. And he came to the attention of some of the people who were running the Global Kids' site in Teen Second Life when he built a globe that hovered in the air on that land and said, "Non-Linden adults, please click here." And when they clicked on it, it gave them a little piece of paper that said, "Go home. We don't want you here." And this idea of civic action in virtual space, I mean thirteen-year-olds don't have a lot of chance to speak out against things they think are unfair. Try it in middle school and see what happens. I've been to the Principal's Office enough times now that I can tell you in pretty clear detail what happens when your son tries to speak out against injustice in a middle school environment. But in Teen Second Life he was able to affect change. They changed some rules about where adults could be on the teen grid because his protest trickled all the way up to Linden management.

So that's a pretty powerful lesson in civic engagement and what happens when you actually talk to people. When he gave this talk, he said one of the things he learned is that you have to be willing to listen to people who you don't agree with because sometimes they'll turn out to be more reasonable than you expected. He's thirteen. Took me till I was, like, thirty to learn that. So this is, to me, a really powerful lesson that kids are getting, but my kids are lucky because all this stuff is in their house. Where are the kids who don't have this in their house going to get this from? More importantly—and I want to talk about this in a second—where are other people going to hear the stories that I’m telling you? How are they going to know what's good and what's not good, what's helpful and what's educational, what the lessons are that are embedded in games? Because we don't have good resources for that right now.

I'll talk about one thing: one of the books that my younger son got most excited about this year was the Zelda cheat book for his Wii game. He doesn't read manuals, but he sure reads walkthroughs and cheats and all that stuff. And so we had to order like three copies this: one for him, one for his brother, and one for the friend who always wants to borrow it. Why isn't this in the library? Do you want to know how many libraries there are in WorldCat that have this book? Anybody want to guess? One. Well, it's not in WorldCat. Because look —King County Library System is the only one. (To audience member) Well, then you guys got to get WorldCat to make sure it knows you have it because when I searched, this is all I found. And I was so unhappy. Right now we actually live next door to a King County Library branch, so that's really nice. But when we go back to Rochester—not so good. So there's the one library. Now here's another one, this is a beautiful book—has anyone seen this? Gorgeous, gorgeous atlas. It's a beautiful hard cover map book of all of the areas of World of Warcraft. We have books in our libraries about Tolkein's world, why do so few of us have books in our library about World of Warcraft—that eight and a half million people play right now? Even if only for the historical value of going back and saying, "What was this game that people were so interested in?" I'm going to show you my most favorite Firefox extension here, although I'm going to show it as a series of static images.

I use Amazon to search for books because it's better than any library catalog that I know of. It's much quicker to search for stuff I want, has everything, but I don't want to buy everything. So I had this wonderful little tool here called Book Burrow. I was a judge for the WorldCat Software Competition this year and I so wanted this one to win. I argued so hard for this one to win because I think this is a game changing extension. This is something that changes the way people might use libraries. So here's what happens: when I go to Amazon, or Barnes and Noble, or any Web site that has an ISBN embedded in the URL, this little unobtrusive little thing that says, "Book Burrow" shows up in the top left corner. And when I click on it, I've given it my zip code. And it finds for me the five WorldCat libraries that are closest to me. Now, it's kind of sad that the closest one is 964 miles away that has this particular book. And with mass-market stuff I usually have better luck, but this particular book—not so great.

Think about this: so many people start with a bookstore search. And then they think, "Well, do I really want to spend $30 on this?" If there's a little thing right there on the page that says, "Click here and you can see the libraries that are within X miles of you that have the book," that's a really powerful thing. Notice it also shows you where you can get stuff used, what the prices are, all of that is configurable. There are certain library catalogs that are tied directly into it, so you don't have to do WorldCat. You can just say, "I want it to look in Seattle Public Library," or, "I want it to look in whatever specific library." It's a wonderful little tool and it's free. And I use it all the time. And it's easily quadrupled the number of times that I go to the library in a given month because I forget. I forget that the library is there. And so, this is a wonderful regular reminder for me.

Now here's the part that I think is my most important message for you, and this is the part that I really want you to think about. I'm going to show you two searches that I did last night. First one is, "best books for kids," and not surprisingly, look at the stuff we have here: there's ALA; there's nypl.org; there are teachers groups; there are wonderful authoritative, impartial, sources that tell us what are the best books for my kids. It's obvious that that would show up. What happens when I do, "best video games for kids?" Look at the second link there: Parents Played Video Games as Kids Starved. This is so typical—the best you can get in terms of recommendations is written by gamers for gamers, not written by librarians for parents, not written by teachers for other teachers or parents. Why are we not treating these resources in the same way that we treat books and other media? Why are we not the ones creating the impartial resources that people can go to?

I went to Games+Learning+Society last week and I talked to people and they said, "Where would I go to get all this information?" And not one speaker could answer them, not one speaker could say, "Well you can go here, to this wonderful, authoritative source of reviews and guides and what the best things are if you like this game, you probably like this game." We need to be doing that. And one of the things Tom Gillespie said is: "In order to do that, you have to play it; you can't analyze without knowing it." So first you have to play it and then you have to think about it and then you have to find ways to tell other people about. You have to tell the stories. You have to explain how this is more than just getting good at video games.

The night before last we went to dinner at a friend's house and my thirteen-year-old came along. Imagine you bring a thirteen-year-old to a dinner party with all adults, no other kids. And I said, "Do you want to bring a book? Do you want to bring your DS?" He's like, "No"—he's going to bring his sketchbook. The reason he brought his sketchbook is that he builds stuff in Second Life. He's learned that to build good stuff in Second Life, he has to sketch it first because building 3-D models is really hard, unless you've drawn a picture of it first. This is a kid who's hated to draw since he was in kindergarten and now he's carrying sketchbooks with him everywhere he goes so that he can sketch new 3-D models. Tell me that's not a valuable learning outcome. My ten-year-old, who hates to write because he has poor fine motor skills and of course, elementary schools were not real big on letting him type or dictate everything—it drives me crazy—but he started writing fan fiction about Club Penguin. He doesn't call it fan fiction; he calls it the story that he wrote about what his character and Josh's character might do in Club Penguin. It's not a story about what they did. This is a story about what they might do, which is really important because he's becoming more creative, not less creative—more creative because of the games.

How many of these stories do we hear of Parents Played Video Games as Kids Starved? We hear these horror stories, we hear the terrible stuff because that's what makes news. We don't hear the important, good stories about the values and the benefits that go beyond. Now my kid is really good at Counter-Strike. Until I listened to James Gee talk about transgressive behavior in video games, it used to freak me out when my son would play Grand Theft Auto and kill everybody. And I would say, "I don't want you to do that." And then I heard other people talk and I was like, "There's actually value in that." And it's very upsetting to him now. We've had this amazing thing going on the past few weeks. He'll start up the game and go, "I'm really sorry, Mom, I'm killing people." and I'm like, "It's fine, I don't mind." “What do you mean you don't mind? I could be a good person, too.” I said, "No, you don't have to be a good person, it's fine for you to kill things." He said, "Well, no, look— I can be a good person." And then he'll try to play the game for forty-five minutes without killing anybody, all because I said, "No, it's fine, don't kill people." Fascinating. You think I would remember this from when I was thirteen, but apparently I had forgotten that whole impact.

So here's what I want to ask you: A year from now, when I do this search, can I see some libraries sites on here—what the best games are? Because that doesn't require you to spend a lot of money, it requires you to spend some time. But it simply requires you to spend time evaluating resources, which is what we do. That's what we do. And that's what people don't often realize that we can do—the whole idea of collection development. All the thought you're putting into what games you want to put into your library—share that because parents are making the same choices: What games we want to bring into our house? And they don't know who to ask. They don't come to these conferences, they don't go to GLS, they don't read the journals, they don't know that there's research on this stuff. Here I'm preaching to the choir, but you can preach to everybody. When I talk at a conference I reach a very small audience, but you have the ability to reach the broader audience, the people who need to know this who don't have a trusted information resource. Do workshops in your libraries, not just games for kids, but games for parents: Want to know what your kids are playing and how it works? Bring them in, show them the game, explain to them why killing people in Grand Theft Auto doesn't mean that your kids are going to become serial killers anymore than playing Cowboys and Indians when they were kids meant they were going to grow up to be genocidal. You can't make that jump.

Until somebody with some authority says that to them, all they've got is the CBS news story that says, "Games are evil, they'll rot your mind, they'll make you starve your kids to death." We have the ability to change that because we have that soapbox, we have that trusted authority. They look to us for recommendations on books; they can look to us for recommendations on games. So that's what I want to leave you with: Is help other people understand the things that I know you already understand; help them make sense of this brave new world of gaming; make it less frightening; make it more accessible; tell them stories, don't site statistics; don't give them bullet points; give them pictures and stories and anecdotes in ways that they can make it real. When I tell people things like the small egg bartering story or my son carrying a sketchbook or any of these things, it makes it real. It makes it so the people understand there are tangible benefits beyond the kinds of, "I'm just a better gamer or my hand-eye coordination is improving," that there's actually something more going on. You've got the power to change the way people think about this stuff and should use that. And thank you so much.