American Libraries

I'm Scott Nicholson. This is actually my first presentation on data that we've been collecting over the last six months, trying to get a better handle on what's going on with gaming and libraries. I want to talk a little bit about myself, actually. This is a bit of a coming out occasion for me, again, where I'm coming out as a gamer. I just got tenure at Syracuse in May. (Applause) So now, for the last thirty years of my life, I've been playing games. So now I can actually step back and let my personal life and my professional life merge together and really take a look at gaming in libraries. And I actually want to thank Jenny. Jenny has actually been my inspiration, seeing how she has dedicated herself to looking at gaming and understanding that and being out there inspired me to say, "Yeah, it's okay, I'm going to join her in this exploration." So thanks a lot, Jenny.

Anyway, brief run through of my gaming past before I get on to the data. So this was my first-ever gaming machine, the Sears Super Pong Four. It had four different games on it: Pong, basketball, hockey, and foosball, which was all pretty much the same thing, but I started with that. I moved into doing a lot roleplaying games and LARPing—live action roleplaying. This is actually a book I co-authored when I was in college. Again, I didn't put this on my application for tenure; this publication didn't quite make the list. But I've been heavily involved in that. I moved on to working for the company that did magic and did some magic work. I spent many an hour on EverQuest and World of Warcraft and now I'm heavily involved with board games. As I mentioned earlier, I did board games with Scott, which is a video series. We’ve got forty-two online and each one teaches you a different board game. And with Don Dennis and Erik Dewey we've been doing the Online Board Games Podcast, where every couple of weeks we talk about the board gaming world.

I've been involved in gaming alongside of my normal research at Syracuse and now I'm combining those two together with something called The Library Game Lab. So we started out just calling ourselves The Game Lab, and thought, "Oh, there's 18,000 Game Labs; we need to do something about that." So Library Game Lab at Syracuse, we're part of the Information Institute. We're trying to explore the intersection of gaming and libraries. And right now we're really looking at recreational games—games for recreational purpose. There are a number of researchers, as you’ve just heard, looking at games and education. And we said, "Let's try looking at games and recreation, understanding games in libraries for recreation." We've been through this before, perhaps some of you were around when we brought in movies—recreational movies, not just educational films—but actual recreational movies, maybe some of you were around when we brought in popular music—not just classical stuff. Who was around when we brought in fiction? No one? So we've been through this a few times before. We bring in something—"Oh, what are you doing?" It's like, "Okay. We support recreation." So we're really looking at that.

Now the overall goal of the Library Game Lab—I don’t know if you’ve seen this term up here: Ludology, the study of games and play. That’s the formal, fancy term. But really, we're looking at recreational games in libraries compared to educational. We're trying to use science and trying to step back. The advantage of being a research center and not in the library is that we can fail. We can try a gaming program in the research center and we can screw up and it's okay. We're not going to annoy a tax base. I can make mistakes because, well, I've got tenure; I can screw up. "We'll screw up so you don't have to." So that's what we're doing.

Now, how do we see gaming? A lot of what you've been seen about gaming has been electronic gaming. You've seen jumping around, dancing pads, and things like that. But we've also got console games. We're starting young, I understand this, but it's the whole cradle-to-grave philosophy of gaming companies. Actually, one of the large game companies does have that—they want to focus on folks from cradle to grave. So we start early. And we've got the collectible card games. We might be used to seeing that in with gaming. And web-based puzzle games. Some of you may have seen that statistic out there that women over forty are the heaviest users of web-based games and they usually use it from 12:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. And so there's an audience out there that’s beyond people jumping around on dance pads that we need to be aware of.

We're trying to actually look at game a little more holistically—bringing in card games, board games, traditional games like that, looking at party games, things like Apples to Apples, Wits and Wagers, and you'll hear a little about that later. But also roleplaying games, whether it be live-action roleplaying games like the Vampire Series or Dungeons and Dragons, or even miniatures game. That's a fantasy miniatures game, there’s historical miniatures games. We're trying to look at the wide spectrum of games here.

Now there's one type of gaming we're not focused too heavily on yet. (Indicating to screen) But I think we have the answer to dealing with our library funding issues. I don't know why we haven't thought of this: library and casino. (Laughter) You know, we've got the space. This is the Library of Congress; I just envisioned it. The banks of slot machines, you can bring people in, you can gamble for your late fees. It will be great. Actually, on a serious note, originally when I was talking about this, I wasn't thinking about gaming as far as if you search for gaming online, you'll find this kind of gaming, but then when I started doing some surveys, I had a school librarian write me and say, “We do Bingo and we give out books as prizes.” I think we're actually not too far off from this. So anyway, if you've got some funding problems, we've got the solution for you.

Anyway, gaming is bigger than many of you may think and we're trying to look at the Library Game Lab at the whole spectrum of games: console games; computer games; board and card games; roleplaying games; historical games. We're trying to look at that wide spectrum and take a holistic view of games. There's been a lack in the library world of basic research. We've got some stuff on best practices. The journal that you got in your packets is a great exploration of some best practices for video games. The problem with looking at anecdotal evidence like that is we have small pots that focus in specific settings, but it's difficult to generalize a lot from them. So we're trying to answer the basic research questions and the things that are hard for you to answer. Frankly, you're too busy answering patrons' questions to step back and run a nationwide study to look at how libraries use games. And that's where we come into play as library schools—we do still call ourselves library schools. Yes, I'm a library scientist, it's okay.

So I'm going to talk about two studies that we’ve done today. The first study is trying to get a handle on the state of gaming. And when you leave today, actually, we're going to be releasing a white paper with the data from this so you can take that back to your library directors and say, "Look—we need to do this, too." It's got a lot of the data you'll be seeing here. It's the grand unveiling of the data. I even told The New York Times reporter they couldn't have it early because I wanted to announce it here.

What we did we is took the database of 9,200 public libraries and we randomly selected 400 and we called every one of them. And we got to talk to all of them but eighteen. That response rate is pretty phenomenal. I think it's indicative of how excited people are about understanding what's going on in gaming when you have a 95% response rate. Out of those eighteen, seventeen were libraries that were open very short periods of times or hours and we couldn't get in touch with them. One refused to call us back and one refused to talk to us. Bad people. We asked them basic questions: "Do you support gaming?" And we did explain to them this wide variety of gaming we want them to think about. "Do you run gaming programs, and if so, what types? Do you have policies about computer use for games? What are your plans for the future?" Our goal is really to provide a baseline for how much gaming goes on in a library, to give us this basic data.

The second study that we did is the gaming census. Now this one is not yet written up fully, you'll get some of the data for this today, but there will be a white paper coming out for this as we get it analyzed. And the goal of this was to collect information about gaming programs run in libraries in 2006. Many of you probably participated in this. If you're here, you probably saw the call, we put it out, and we had the survey online. We said, "Come and tell us about a program that you've done." We asked basic questions about what you did, why you did it, what happened. And our goal at this gaming census is actually to repeat this study every year. So we can begin to build this set of studies to say, "Here's how gaming is changing, here's what we're up to." So I'm going to present the results from these two studies today.

So the first study, again as I mentioned earlier, we had 400 libraries we called. I did not do any sort of separation by size. In that big database there are a lot more U.S. public libraries that are small than big; and this shows that. And the thing I used for size was actually the number of patrons the library supports. So 112 of the people that we talked to were small libraries, supporting up to 3,000; from 3,000 to 10,000 was 121 libraries; from 10,000 to 50,000 was 106; and above 50,000 was 43; and then eighteen were the people that didn't want to play. Almost all of the eighteen were in the small category, except for the one that said, "No," and they were in the biggest category. So the reason why we split up the data like this—and you'll see all the results I split this way—is because I want to make something useful for you because if you're sitting out there as a library and you want to take some data home, that applies to libraries like yours. So if I just did one big average, that wouldn't be too useful. But now you can say, "Other small libraries like—this is what they're doing." This is why I've split the data this way, to give you all the benefit the having stuff that will help you.

So I think I talked about this already—one thing that we did is for the people that said "No," to us, in order to have a more accurate figure and make the numbers work, what we did is we took a conservative approach and we assumed that anyone that weren't able to reach did not support gaming. Now I realize that the numbers that we present are a little on the conservative side, but I'd rather do that. If we're going to step forth and say, "Hey, here's the data," I'd rather assume that people that were open very limited hours aren't supporting gaming. That may be a little incorrect, but you have to make some assumption. I could throw them out, but I felt that whole group of eighteen probably all didn't support gaming. I'd say this was a pretty safe assumption. So this is the assumption that we made in moving forward.

I have to say right now we're not currently a funded project. And one of the goals of doing this is to try and get some funding for the research that we're doing. So think of this as a large pilot study. It's really an attempt to get some basic numbers out there so then we can go to the funders and say, "Can you help us do this bigger and help us understand these people that aren't saying anything, help us understand what's going on?" So a lot of what this is going to do is pose more questions, as good research should. So the big question we asked each library: “Do you support gaming, traditional, digital, any sort of supporting gaming—do you do that?”

You know, I think I'm going to interrupt this talk, however, for a little bit of Board Games with Scott. I want you all to get out your packet. You should have a sheet of paper that looks like this. Because you know, I couldn't get away with this without actually having us play a game. We're going to have a big party game to talk about the big number, “What percentage of libraries support gaming?” I figure what a better way to have you engage with this statistic, rather than just throw it up on a slide. Actually, we're going to play with it a little bit. So this is a game called Wits and Wagers. Wits and Wagers is a party trivia game and they've done some clever things. The idea behind Wits and Wagers is you can either know the answer or you can know who knows the answer or you can just play the odds and place a bet. What you have in front of you is actually a replication of the Wits and Wagers game board that you get with the game. It looks like this. And that's what you've got.

So the way this game starts—does everyone have out your sheet? You'll need a pencil. At the top there will be a place for you to put a guess. I want you to guess the answer to the question: "Out of 400 libraries surveyed, how many said that they supported games in libraries?" So everyone take a moment now to put a percentage number there. This isn't a trick; just take your best guess. Watch out, I'll have to dig out the sand timer. Does everyone have their guess? Again the question was, "Do you support gaming in libraries?" What percentage said yes?

Audience Member: Any kind of gaming?

Scott Nicholson: Any kind of gaming. We defined it as I defined it for you here, broad spectrum of gaming. "Do you support gaming in your libraries?" Everybody just take a numeric guess. Everyone have a guess? All right.

Let's run out to the crowd, shall we? What did you say? Fifty-seven. What did you say? Ninety. What did you say? Fifteen. What did you say? Sixty-five. What did you say? Twelve. And over here, what did you say? Forty-five. I need one more. Seventy-five, all right. Now, when you actually play the game at home, you're not quite going to do all that. But what you do is you play with up to seven people and you have each person take a guess, so I took seven answers. Now I'm going to put them in numeric order—and be out of breath—"How did he pass out?" “I don't know.” All right.

What I want you all to do now is take your sheets and you're going to write some numbers in each one of these spaces. So in this row where it says "smaller," write twelve, that was the smallest guess; next one over, fifteen; the next one, forty-five; next one, fifty-seven; then we had sixty-five; seventy-five; and ninety. When you're actually playing the game, what you do is you write your guess on one of these sheets, throw them all in the middle, put them in numeric order, and then put them out on the pad.

Now the way the game is going to work, so this is the first part is everyone takes a guess. And the second part is place bets. In the actual game it's the betting that helps you win points, not so much the answering. So what you're going to do is you're going to take a guess as to which one of these is the closest, without going over like The Price is Right. And you can also bet here, which means it's lower than twelve. Now the way this works is you get two bets. Each one of these little chips you would have if you were playing the physical game is worth five points. You get to bet on two of them, kind of like a Craps table. And the way it works is if you bet on the middle answer, then it's only going to pay one to one. But if you bet on the next ones out it pays two to one, bet on the furthest one out, it's three to one, and larger if you bet on ninety, it pays four to one. So it's a bit more extreme but the payout is bigger.

So you all get two bets now. What I want you to do is put a check mark in one of these boxes. You can bet them both on the same one, if you want to try and go for double or nothing. Oh, and I should say there will be prizes awarded, so think carefully. Place one bet in one of these and one bet in the row below it. You're going to place two bets. So you should be X-ing out two boxes. If you want to bet on fifty-seven, you put an X in that box. If you want to bet on forty-five, you put an X in that box. And again, the fifty-seven bet means anything between fifty-seven and sixty-four. So it goes from this, but not bigger than that. Does everyone have two guesses, two bets? You should put a bet on wager one and a bet on wager two. All right. Are there cheaters out there? Everyone check your neighbor. No cheaters. So we all have our guesses, shall we see what the actual number was?

Now before we do this, how interested are you in this number? How did I just engage you in statistics? I just got you thinking about something. And now this comes into the beginning when I said, “Well we're looking at games and recreation.” Guess what? I just snuck some learning in there. So I've just engaged you now into this number in a way that I wouldn't have if I had just thrown it up, like how I’m going to throw up with the rest of my statistics—I'm not going to physically throw up. Anyway, seventy-seven percent of libraries support gaming. Wow. Yeah. Isn't that pretty amazing? So those of you who placed bets in this column, the sixty-five column, just got paid. This wager paid you ten points and between seventy-five and ninety is this column. So that would pay fifteen points if you check there and that one paid fifteen points if you checked there.

Let's find out how people did. Anyone that got both wagers right, please stand up. All right we have five. All right, stay standing. Anyone that got one wager right, please stand up. That's nice, good. Anyone that got no wagers right, please stand up. Everyone stay standing. Anyone who got nothing right, stand up. All right, let me count here. I think that's about right. Guess what? Everybody wins a game. (Cheering) We have donated enough games for everyone to have one. (Applause) The folks at North Star Games are always trying to give some of their proceeds to charity and they decided to make this their charitable donation for you. These are all donations to your libraries because now you know how to play the game and now you get to take it with you. If you want to learn more about this game, by the way, during the Open Board Gaming from 5:00 to 7:00, I'll be teaching the full game of Wits and Wagers and other games as well over in that area. And you'll have a chance to win more.

But anyway, back to the whole research stuff. So 77% of libraries said they support gaming. That's pretty darn exciting, actually. It stunned us. And part of what we did is we wanted to ask why. We want to see what's going on. We found that this total came mostly from two areas: one was from a children's section where they had games for the kids to play, games sitting out, or you also had your chess clubs or bridge clubs and things like that; and the second was the use of public computers to play online and web-based games. So we had a lot of public libraries that would let people, during their computer time, play web-based games.

What's funny about that is most of those web-based games are the same games sitting over there in the children's section in electronic form. They're playing puzzles, they're playing bridge and hearts. It's interesting in that you have this spectrum of activities, this combination of analog and digital, this traditional and the modern games coming together in the libraries. We've been supporting this for a really long time; we're not supporting anything new. And that's one of the messages I really want to get across to you. It's a mistake for us to go to our communities and say, "Hey, we've got this new thing,” because in reality, those kids thirty years ago that were playing chess club when they were eight, they're now thirty-eight and you're still supporting their recreational activities. What we're doing is nothing new and that's what our data is that righting to show.

Again, if we split that up by library size, we can see the larger libraries, 10,000 and above and ten more percent of them supported gaming than the smaller libraries. Now, we also looked at libraries that ran gaming programs and we found that 43% of our data had libraries that run gaming programs. Now, I should say given the size of the population and the size of the sample we talked to, these numbers are plus or minus 5%. That's our margin of error, that's bigger I'd like, but we don't have money. So fund us and we'll make that smaller. So 43% got gaming of libraries, run gaming programs, and 52% don't. This stratifies that same number—that 43%—by size, so again, you can see the larger libraries. The smaller libraries—up to 10,000—is about the same. And above 10,000 it jumps up quite a bit on the percentage of libraries that run gaming programs.

What do they run? This actually shows you the type of gaming program. We asked the libraries to tell us, "What sort of gaming did you do?" and about half of them did board games and forty-five of 172 ran gaming programs. Half did board games, forty-five traditional games, then it goes down—console games, physical games, like summer program, and we had summer reading program games, things associated with reading activities, and down to card games, collectible card games, then computer games, and role playing games. All this data is in the white paper that you'll be getting. Traditional games would be like chess or bridge, Go, something like that. So what we did is we took their answers and bubbled them into these categories. And just like with data, anytime you do that sort of thing, you're making assumptions about the different groupings. So we're still in the process of playing with different groupings that make sense. But this really shows that if we bring our message about gaming as a holistic message, saying, "You're already supporting board games, here's other stuff you can support, too," we're going to bring a lot more people along on supporting gaming in libraries.

Libraries that circulate games: 20% of libraries said they circulated games. That's a little lower. We've got a little more than 70% that say they support games, 40% have gaming programs, and 20% circulate games. And again, if you look at that broken down by groups, an odd thing happens and again this—I'm sure this is just because the sample size—libraries in the 10,000/50,000 range have actually the highest level of circulation, which is a small percentage. Remember I talked about that margin of error of 5%? Because of that margin of error, these aren't statistically different.

So what do they circulate? We found out of the libraries that circulated, thirty-nine of them circulated board and card games, thirty circulated PC games, fifteen circulated puzzles—we're including puzzles as a game-like activity because it does involve, in a library setting, a many similar things to a game—and six said they did console games. So again, we're seeing that more libraries are circulating board games and then PC games are next.

Are the patrons allowed to play games on the computers? Eighty-two percent of libraries allowed patrons to play games on the computers, which is interesting if you think back to the first number where 77% of libraries said they support games. It's a little disturbing. That means you have 5% of libraries that say they don't support games, but they still let people play games on the computers. I think that's an interesting statement for us as researchers and advocates of gaming to say, "Hey, are people playing Bejeweled on your computers?" Then guess what? You're one of us. And again, looking at that by size, we can see almost all of the libraries above 50,000 allowed patrons to play games and it went down. The smallest library is about 80% of small libraries allowed patrons to play games. So it’s pretty big difference there.

So the facts to take home with you: about 75% of libraries support gaming; about 80% allow patrons to play games on computers; about 40% ran gaming programs; and about 20% circulate games. But support is stronger for analog games, as compared to digital games. Both programs run and circulation and the larger the library is, the more likely it is they are to support games. So what you see in that book is all available in the white paper and you'll be able to pick up as you leave. This one isn't. This is the second survey. So this is where we contacted list serves that supported public, academic, and school libraries and said, "If you ran a gaming program last year, please come and tell us about that program." We also announced it in American Libraries Direct in a press release. And I know a number of people sitting in this room actually did participate in this survey. This is the makeup of the people who talked to us. So we had 315 people respondents to that survey: about two-thirds were public; a big chunk of the rest were schools; smaller; academic; and special. Still, it's interesting, though—ten percent of the respondents were from academic libraries. That's a number that probably some many of us didn't expect to see, that there are academic libraries out there supporting games. So it's interesting to see it's not just a public and school library thing.

This was a division of what type of library they claim to be. About half or less than half were from suburban libraries, 30% from urban settings, and 24% rural settings. And we asked them to classify themselves into small, medium, large. So medium was the largest group. Half were medium-sized libraries and the others were split between small and large. And what I find interesting is what we've got here are representative of the fact that more medium libraries are doing gaming programs, so there were more folks out there to respond to the survey, as compared to the first one where we just randomly picked people. Because there's a lot of small libraries out there that don't have the resources to be able to run gaming programs.

These were libraries that ran gaming programs. We asked: Did they circulate games? Forty-four percent of those libraries said they circulated games. The reason I like that number is that correlates very closely to what we found from our random sample, but the breakdown is different. So of the libraries that said they ran gaming programs, many more of them said they circulated electronic games. I think what we see here is a lack of discussion of games as a holistic activity, trying to get everyone thinking they're doing gaming, even if they're having games in the children's section, they're supporting gaming. We want them here, too. It's not the just the people doing Dance Dance Revolution, but it's a much bigger audience than that. And this data is suggesting to me we need to be much louder and much more careful about how we present that message, saying, "If people are playing games in your libraries, come and talk with us because you're dealing with the same issues that we are."

Now one thing I want to talk about is what was reported as the users that were served by gaming in libraries. On the survey we had 3,400 gaming programs reported. Now that does include duplicates. We asked people: "If you ran a program, how many times did you run that program?" So including those duplicate times, we had 3,400 gaming programs that were described, 179 unique programs. So what we saw here is once libraries get a program that works, they run it frequently. Some of the school libraries actually had their duplications at 350 because they said, "We ran it every day and in the summer." So that's this idea of if something is working, they're incorporating it into their regular service. On average, people said they ran a program twenty times. So again, what that's showing us is we've got a big chunk of people out there that get something to work and they run it again and again.

On average, thirty-three people participated in these programs—pretty good size there. So if you multiply this all out, we had 90,000 people that we have documented as participating in gaming programs in 2006. Now, 56,000 of those were unique people. I asked them to tell me, "if they were repeat people, how many of those people came through were unique? How many were new?" And so 56,000 unique people users and 90,000 total participation. And that's just the people that responded to my survey. So those of you sitting out there that didn't, when you see this come up for next year, please respond so we can get more and more of this data.

I asked people if the games were educational in nature, were they primarily educational? Ten percent of games that were offered in gaming programs were educational. That was interesting to me because that's telling me that the approach I'm trying to take at the Library Game Lab saying, "We're going to look at recreational gaming. Is the right approach to help libraries with their needs because that's what libraries are doing?" Now you see if you break that down by type, half of the school libraries were running educational games as their program and then it's a smaller percentage for public, and academic is nine percent.

Then we asked the people if there was a competitive element involved. So was it competition or was it just play? And half of the programs were competition-based. And again, we see if we break that down, academic libraries actually had more competitive gaming, school libraries a little bit more, and public was actually a little lower than average. So we're doing recreational games and sometimes they're competitions. I guess we have that represented tonight. We're going to have competitive gaming on one side of the room and noncompetitive gaming on the other. Actually, it is competitive gaming because if win, you get stuff. Oops—did I just say that?

Now asking what people what they did in their gaming programs. Sixty-two percent of the gaming programs involved console games. So again, an interesting comparison to the first data where we just called people up. So we've got a lot of people out there that if they see themselves as doing gaming programs, there's a good chance it's going to be some sort of electronic gaming. And people that aren’t doing electronic gaming aren't seeing themselves as doing gaming in their libraries. About half are doing analog games and 17% are doing computer games as gaming programs.

Now, getting a little more specific on what they were actually doing. About half did console dancing games, so that would be Dance Dance Revolution in that category. About 30% did traditional board games where they specifically said something like chess or Go or bridge. About 30% said modern board games where they were specifically naming things like Monopoly, or Scrabble, or Settlers of Catan, or some sort of modern gaming. Then you've got console musical performance games, like Guitar Hero games. Then it goes down from there. Console racing games are about the same as Guitar Hero style. It goes down from there—modern card games, console party games, below 20%, console shooting games, and then the statistics drop. War games are the last half of a percent.

Anyway, I also asked them to tell me specifically, "What are you doing?" This is breaking down out of 179 folks that told me, seventy-nine were doing something with DDR, thirty-nine with Guitar Hero, chess was the next, then Mario Kart, Madden Football, Super Smash Bros., something in the Halo series, then Uno, Scrabble, checkers, Monopoly, and it just continued like with Zipfian curve. With the Zipfian curve, you have a whole bunch at the top and then it plummets very quickly. This study is hard to generalize because I can't say it is really representative of a good population because it's representative of the people who saw my email on one of the list serves and decided to respond. So this one is more for our knowledge, knowing what's going on it's also going to help us in our Game Lab, as I'll talk about a little bit later.

Now we ask "Why? Why do you do this?" Eighty percent of the libraries say they do it because they are providing a source of entertainment. So again, that helps us realize it's okay to focus on gaming for fun; we can look at that. Seventy-nine percent almost as much providing additional service for group of active users and a little less than that, seventy-six percent, said they were attracting an underserved group of users to the library. The next one down is to increase the library role as community help. And then there's a pretty big drop.

So those top four are the big four reasons why libraries are doing gaming: Entertainment, providing something for current users, bringing in new users, and being a community hub—trying to prevent people from bowling alone, if you want to use that analogy. Then it goes down, about half said they were recognizing the culture significance of the gaming medium and participating in it. And this list, by the way, came through doing pilot studies on this survey and getting different outcomes from libraries until we kind of got settled on a set of them and putting that out in the big survey. So it continues on down from there.

Then we asked them, "What is the single most important goal?" The first one was you can pick multiple goals. Then we said, "What's number one? What's the top reason?" The top reason, with the third, was to attract an underserved group of users to the library. So a third of the gaming programs said it was because they want to bring new people in the door. About half of those folks, about 18% said, “We want to be a community to help,” and also about 16%, very close said, “We want to provide a service for active library users.” And then it drops down. Ten percent of the people said the single most important goal was providing a source of entertainment. So I thought this was interesting in that more folks said that, "we want to provide a source of entertainment if it's one of many goals," but when I asked, "What's the most important goal?" only ten percent said providing entertainment. So that says something else that's going on here. And it's telling us that we're really user-focused. We're trying to either draw new people in, make our existing folks happy, or serve this community, be this community hub. And it all drops down from there.

Now I also asked people outcomes: "Tell me happened. So you had your goals, now tell us the outcomes." So the top outcome was the reputation improved with participants. So 77% of the people said it got better, but if you flip that means about 23% of the libraries did not say that the reputation of the library improved with participants. That's a bit of a concern. That's a number that I think should go higher, and perhaps with more guidance on figuring out what sort of games to offer with people that can go higher. Seventy-six said people went to the program and they came back to the library for nongaming services. That's one really exciting to me; that's really neat. And as a little aside—I should say when I step over to the side, I'm Tangent Man, because he goes off on tangents.

And so I've actually been talking with some ILS vendors about how they can better support gaming in the libraries. And one of the things that's come out is they want to be able to help libraries to run LAN parties and things like that, to be able to use the ILS to help and facilitate gaming activities. And I said, "You know what's really neat about that? If you've got that built in where people come in, they've got to sign up for a library card for a gaming activity, it runs the brackets and things like that for them, then you get to get the data from the second point here. You then know if someone came back and checked out a book and if someone came back to do something." So that's the last six years of my life has been focused on something called bibliomining, or datamining for libraries. It's all about trying to use your data to make good decisions. So actually interspersed through my research is going to be little things stuck in there to help us collect data along the way, so we can make better decisions.

Seventy-three percent said they attended the event with friends and improved their social connections with those friends. This was an outcome in almost all the programs. Sixty-eight percent said they attend the program and used other services while there. So this is very interesting because now what we've got libraries telling us is there's fewer people using their services while they're here than there are people coming back another time. That's pretty exciting. If the gaming is getting people interested in library services and they show up another time and use other services, that's pretty neat. Sixty-five percent of users have improved their social connections with other previously unknown members of the community. Some of these games have the ability to link people from different demographic groups together, to allow kids and adults to play games together, to begin to socialize and have interesting interactions that they wouldn't have any other place. And that's not always going to be electronic games. Sometimes you want to look at traditional games as a way of bringing different demographic groups together. It's all about thinking, "What am I doing and who is here to do these things?" Fifty percent said the library got additional publicity. Forty percent of the users asked for more participatory services. It kind of goes down from here. Thirty-eight percent requested new services, improved their skills and knowledge.

One interesting one is about 10% of the librarians said that their gaming program had patrons indicating annoyance with the program, that people who are not involved with 10% of the programs had people complaining. That also is a concern to me. And that's an area of research and exploration. How do we create programs in a way that it will not annoy the patrons who are there to do other things? Because we don't want to bring in one type of patron and send out another, we need to figure out how to balance that, so I thought that was an interesting outcome. And only half a percent said the reputation of the library declined with participants. So that was good.

So the take-home message from this survey—we're still exploring this data—part of the exploration now is to look at these parts of the database based upon library type and understand how the gaming activities done in school library media centers are different from the gaming activities done in public libraries and that's where we're at right now. But we got many users involved with gaming. From this survey alone, we had 90,000 participants that were in our gaming programs. About half of the programs are competitive and few are purely educational, except in school library media, where about half are educational. Console games are poplar programs that people have done. And PC games are circulated heavily amongst this group of folks. Entertainment is important, but it's not the primary goal. Libraries all saw what they were doing as providing entertainment, but it wasn't the main reason for doing the games, it was focused on the patrons. That gaming programs can improve the reputation of the library, encourage the use of other services, encourage the patrons to return, and improve social relations.

So what's next? What are we going to do? Well, one thing we’ve got in this particular study is we got a lot of comments in boxes. So tell us more about this program. We're trying to put that data together, we're trying to divide things up by library type. The next bullet: Get funding. This is really been a sort of part-time labor between me and group of students at Syracuse, as we've been trying to put this together and hopefully now we can step forward and try and fund a student to help us with this—have a Gaship, have someone fund it to help us explore this stuff. We want to repeat the random sample for other library types, so we did that random sample study for public libraries, but we also want to look at school libraries, academic libraries to try and get that baseline data. We want to repeat the census every year.

There's a couple of other projects going on with the Library Game Lab. Is Dave Dubin here? Back in the corner there is Dave Dubin from Illinois. And what he's working with us on is creating a classifications system for games, a thesaurus for games if you will. One of the challenges we have in talking about games is, “Are they digital games, video games, electronic games, console games, PC games? How do we talk about this stuff?” And so Dave's part in the Library Game Lab is trying to put together a classification structure for the variety of game types. Ian MacInnes, who is an economist who is on the faculty at the High School at Syracuse. He's looking at the public good of gaming. He's not from the library field. In fact, I took him with me to meet George Needham at OCLC and it was his first exposure libraries stuff and it was an eye-opener for him. He's helping us to understand gaming as a public good because libraries, at their core, is a public good. This discussion came out from the fact that we were talking about, "How do we help libraries justify that they do gaming?" One of the common justifications that many of you use is, "Well, it's in our policy that we support the recreational needs of patrons." He said, "That's not good enough. Just because it's in your policy, that's not going to hold up too well. That's not going to hold up to the argument of why you should receive funding for this." So he said, "Libraries are public good. Public good is where people money together to try and get something that you can't afford individually." So he's trying to understand the public good of gaming and look at where that will map with the public good that libraries are trying to fulfill. So the result is going to give us some good arguments as to why libraries should be involved with this, based upon the concept of public good.

Don Dennis is a recent grad from Syracuse. He's going to be heading up this project to create the Library Game Lab Nexis. One of the things that I found as I've talked with people about gaming is I'll get individuals who will come to me and say, "Well, I'm interested in this but my library really isn't," or, "I'm interested in this, but my organization is not convinced yet." So we want to create a hub online where folks, librarians, researchers, students, gaming industry, and library folks can come together and talk about these issues. We really see ourselves as being this connecting point through the Library Game Lab. But it's going to be focused on the individual because at this point there's a lot of individuals that we want to encourage to come to us and say: "I'm not representing my organization here, but I'm here to talk about this because I plan to take back to my organization someday." We'll also invite organizations that are supporting gaming to step up and talk about what they're doing to get involved in these discussions. So this will be the next thing we'll be putting together is try to create this place where we can talk about these different concepts, we can disseminate data, and explore issues.

So are games appropriate to what we're doing here? Well, we're not sure. We need to figure this out. That's what the research is all about. We're finding that in the looking at it from the economic point of view, some aspects of gaming are appropriate and there are some aspects of gaming activities that are maybe better supported by private interests. And that's where that public good argument comes from is we say, "All right, what aspects of gaming are better supported in the private sector and what aspects of gaming are for the public good and is the library the right place to do that?” And that's what we're trying to look at. If games aren't appropriate we want to explore it. How do you know if it's working and how do you improve?

Our long-term mission of the Library Game Lab is actually to set up a lab at Syracuse, with different gaming activities, to bring in users from different demographic groups into the library, and have them do different gaming things. And then use these intended goals to develop measurements. For example, if the goal of game is to increase the social interaction between people, well, we can look autism research because they have ways of measuring social interaction. So what we'll do is we'll use those methods of measuring as people play games so we can come back to the libraries and say, "All right. If you're trying too increase the social interaction, and your demographic group is this, and you have $20, here is the gaming experience to do. Fifty dollars—here's what you do. Two hundred dollars—here's what you do.” And that's going to be our long-term goal of the Library Game Lab, is try to create collection development guides to help you go in with your goal and your demographic groups you want to support and understand the best activities to do. And that's what we hope to get funding to support that.

Now, preparing people for the future—one of the things this is also some neat news—I've been approved to teach in the Spring of 2008 the IST 600 Gaming for Libraries, a three credit graduate level MSLIS course. I'll be teaching it. It's through Syracuse and it's an online course and we'll be meeting for three weekends in Syracuse, the rest of it's going to be online. And the focus is first talking about the roles of games in society. The students will experience a variety of game types at Syracuse. And after they get together and play games, then we're going to talk about, "Well, what sort of patron groups would be best for this game? What would be the issues in running this as a program? How would you advertise and assess if this is doing well?" We'll do programs for the first two weekends and the third weekend, student groups. We'll actually run gaming programs for the community. We're going to invite folks from the community to come in and play games. The students will have to present marketing materials, run the game activity, and do an evaluation. And so it's going to be focused on helping to put out student who can run gaming programs. So this is pretty exciting. I'm going to be writing a book alongside this and this is how we're preparing our folks for the future of this. So you can take classes and it would be great. So anyway, if we're going to do this gaming stuff, what I hope my message is, "If we're going to do it, let's do it right." Let's figure out what we're doing and provide a good variety of stuff to bring in a wide variety of users into our libraries. For more information on this, you can go to gamelab.syr.edu.

If you want to talk with me, the best time to do that will be this afternoon because tonight at 11:00 I get back home because I'm teaching a week-long residency library boot camp for seventy-nine brand new MSLIS students at Syracuse who are scared out of their gourd because they've never done this before and they’ll go off and be distance students. So I have to go and teach tomorrow morning at 8:00 a.m. Oh, Dear God.

I think we actually have a few moments for some questions. (Applause) Or applause. (Inaudible question) Sometime between now and midnight it should pop up there. But the print copies of white paper will be in the back of the room if you want to pick those up. (Inaudible question) What we did is whoever answered the phone is we first said, "We're not vendors; don't hang up. We're not trying to sell you anything; we're not reporters.” So it took a while to explain to folks what were doing, that we were really good guys. And then we let them send us to whoever they felt would be most appropriate to talk to us. In many cases it was in the children's library section. Other cases, it was a reference librarian. We asked very general questions. They are the sort of questions that anyone in the public services side should know, “Did you run anything with gaming last year?”” We let the library decide to send us where we thought was most appropriate.

(Inaudible question) The harder thing to argument about for games is games are fun things to have as recreation. So we are trying to take that. We're going to try and focus on that issue and argue it. There are many other scholars focusing on the educational value of games. We're saying, "Let's look at the recreational value of games," because any answer we get for that applies to educational aspects or educational games. And the answer we get on the recreational side will help us on the educational side as well. We've had a lot of people ask us, "Are you looking at education in games?" and things like that. You know, we're going to take on the question of "No, let's look at games for the sake of playing games and see what we learn from that and then we'll expand our research." But that's the basic approach is just to understand that question, which I think is a harder argument, as many of you probably tried to bring games into your libraries. It's easy to say, "Can we bring in learning games?" "Sure." "Can we bring in games for fun?" "What?" So we're trying to tackle that one first because we see that as the hardest one. Then we'll kind of expand and grow from there.

(Inaudible question) We didn't branch out that far. On the phone survey we really didn't want to take up much of people's time, so we tried to make it a five to ten minute phone interview. So it was really like, "You're doing gaming tell us what." And the most common answer was, "Games in the children's section." That was from that random survey. And that's again the sort of thing we want to explore if we can get some funding to try and explore this more deeply and understand where that break is between children, teen, young adult, adult? What's going on with games in those different areas? So that's a future research question.

Any other questions? (Inaudible question) And that's the next exploration to take, is to try and understand—I think the fact that we had more people who allowed people to play games than said they support gaming is evidence to that fact. That would be a neat next study to try and understand what libraries perceive as games versus the activity of gaming, or giving someone a box and saying, "Go play this," or giving someone a computer terminal, as compared to shepherding them through a process. Again, this is stuff we want to explore. We see this as our first pilot study, just to throw up a few flags and say, "Hey, there's something interesting here. Let's look more."

Question: We've been targeting towards teens, but we see grandparents coming in and we see younger kids and it seems like there's a really interesting opportunity there. We haven't figured out how to get our hands around it.

Nicholson: And I think a big part of that is the game type that you put on the table. As we put forth these electronic games, people that can't dance, dance are going to look at that and say, "That's not for me." But I like the idea of you run a game in the evening where you have different types of activities. Something like Wits and Wagers would be a perfect game to play with different generational groups. I would love to put together a program where you run a family game activity where you ask families to come in. And as a unit they go from table to table, exploring different gaming things together. But it's that chance that we have the ability to make that hub in a way that it's really not out there for a local community. We saw that with data with LiveJournal. I know I have a LiveJournal blog and I'll have teenagers post to it, I'll have older folks post to it, and it's a place where we have this inter-generational meeting ground. So a library could provide that for members of a local community. There's some neat value that can occur there with people who are all living in the same space and you're making some of those same connections. So that is very much a goal of programs we want to put forth is, "What would work if you want to draw in different generations of players together? And what precautions have to be put into place to allow that to happen?" As anyone who has worked with kids knows, there maybe some nervousness, like, "Yeah, we're going to put your kids together with various random adults that came in." So we need to think about maybe not lumping them all in together.

Question: When do you think you will have your Library Game Lab Nexis up?

Scott Nicholson: I will say it will probably be a few months. That's an idea that has been recently hatched, as I've been having discussions with various folks, and I said, "You know, there's a lot of people out there that feel they are lone wolves in their organization and want some support." So really, at this point, we're going to be figuring out what platform is best and get it out there. At gamelab.syr.edu there's actually a mailing list you can sign up for there and on that mailing list, you'll get the notification then when we’ve got the nexis up and going.

(Inaudible question) One of the things that's going on in the board game community where I live is many board game groups are actually going to libraries as a place to go and meet. Don Dennis is giving a talk tomorrow on how to get your library ready to make it a gaming-friendly environment. So part of it is you need to be aware of the different issues that your gaming groups have in order to give a space where they can come in. I'm excited about working with some of library vendors who want to trade multifunctional furniture and systems to make it easy for a library to shift the space over into a gaming space. That's one of the things you're going to see coming out. That's pretty exciting stuff. All right, I'll take it upon myself to call a break. So Eli will be talking at 3:45. Jenny's coming up, so don't break yet. Break? All right, go and pee!