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Getting in the Game
Do video games belong in libraries?
There's no shushing at Charlotte's central library on Saturday afternoons. That's when the downtown branch holds its weekly free-for-all for video-game enthusiasts. At one recent "Gaming Zone" event, the lights are down and three game stations are set up with projectors beaming the video against a white wall. A dad and his son are boxing on one screen and two teens are racing cars on another. But the big draw, and most of the noise, comes from three wanna-be rock stars who, for the moment, are working hard to emulate the Clash.
The teenagers are playing "Rock Band." The game is an eye-opener to anyone who assumes that video games are violent and to be played in the basement, alone. One kid is rocking out on a mock guitar, fingering plastic buttons and earning points when he follows the notes correctly. A drummer pounds his sticks on a pad, raising his score when he nails the drumline. The job of the third player, the singer, is essentially precision karaoke. He does better in the game the more closely he's able to channel the vocalizations of Joe Strummer.
Darling you gotta let me know
Should I stay or should I go?
If you say that you are mine
I'll be here 'til the end of time
So you got to let know
Should I stay or should I go?
A small crowd gathers to watch, play along and occasionally hoot. Some are hard-core gamers who come to play every week. Others are curiosity seekers, drawn from more bookish library activities to see what the commotion is all about. A.J. McNeill, a 24-year old who comes to the library most Saturdays for the video games, says he often picks up a book while he's there, or uses the library's computers to get on the Internet. "I've got a PlayStation 2 at home," McNeill says. "But I come to the library to be around other people."'
Staging video-game events may seem like an unusual turn for a municipal library. But a growing number of libraries are catering to gamers these days; the American Library Association even declared last April 18 as national "Gaming @ Your Library Day." Many librarians are coming to believe that offering video games is the best way to draw in demographics that are largely strangers to the stacks: teenage boys and young men. Says Mark Engelbrecht, the Charlotte librarian who directs the Gaming Zone, "If you can get them in the door, you're halfway to showing them what else the library can do for them."
It's often said that libraries are a community's common ground. That never seems more true than at a video-game event. In Charlotte, black kids play with white kids and teens play against adults. According to Engelbrecht, the Gaming Zone is one place you'll see workers from the national banks headquartered nearby socializing with non-bankers.
Still, the idea of playing video games in libraries remains controversial. Some librarians are openly hostile to it, believing video games to be anti-intellectual and a waste of time. Others simply believe that libraries have other more important priorities. "I'm not sure that video games are our mission," says Mary Dempsey, commissioner of the Chicago Public Library. "I'm more concerned about providing equal access to the world of information technology and verifiable databases. Let's focus on that before the gaming thing. Kids get enough gaming elsewhere."
Supporters of gaming in libraries feel misunderstood. They say video games suffer from an unfair bias. One of the biggest supporters of gaming in libraries is Jenny Levine, a technology strategist at ALA who also writes a popular blog called The Shifted Librarian. "Gaming in the library is not new," she says, noting that kids have been allowed to play board games in libraries for years. "Nobody will say you can't play Candyland in a library. Well, what's the difference between that and a video game? Or take chess. Chess is all about strategic planning, understanding the rules, knowing what the pieces do. Nobody will say kids can't play chess in libraries."
As Levine sees it, contemporary video games are complex, social and even educational if you allow yourself to think broadly about what educational means. Pokemon, some versions of which now are played online, is a sophisticated game with hundreds of characters whose attributes kids memorize by heart. Even some war games, such as World of Warcraft, present players with complicated situations that require sophisticated levels of multi-tasking-good skills for the modern working world. "There's a narrative and storytelling going on in video games," Levine says. "If you think of video games as Pong or Pac Man, it's evolved."
One question gaming-friendly libraries grapple with is whether to allow violent games. When Charlotte began the Gaming Zone, the sci-fi game Halo 2 had just come out. Engelbrecht found himself in debates about whether shooting up aliens was less bad than shooting humans, on-screen anyway. There was also some profanity in the game. Charlotte eventually came to a policy that took advantage of a rating system for video games that is similar to the familiar one the movie industry uses. Any games rated "M" for mature audiences are simply not allowed, even at adult gaming events. That still leaves the library open to 85 percent of games on the market.
No library system has bought into video gaming more than the one in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Four years ago, Ann Arbor began hosting video game tournaments. Each one is a mini-NCAA tournament of video games, complete with bracketology and championships. The events have grown so popular with teenage boys that it could be said that video games rival basketball, football or any other sport teens might try out for.
In the Ann Arbor setup, kids join teams of six. These are called "clans." A clan can earn extra points for bringing a new player to the library, which is really the library's way of getting some free marketing. Clans also earn extra points for having a girl on the team. That's more of an attempt to keep the tournaments from being completely overrun with pubescent boys. Tournaments are held one weekend a month, and the winners of the various bouts face off so that a champion of Ann Arbor can be crowned at the end of the video-game season.
Eli Neiburger, the Ann Arbor library's gaming guru, thinks that hosting video game tournaments is a natural extension of other social activities libraries might offer, such as a book club or story time for children. "The foundation of public library programming is that you take a piece of content that people normally consume individually and you make a social event out of it," Neiburger says. "You allow people to experience it in a way that they couldn't themselves, and allow them to participate in a network of like-minded individuals who want to consume the same content."
This summer, Ann Arbor is taking its tournament national, in a sense. The library is giving away software it has developed for managing the tournaments to other libraries. The idea is that libraries around the country will run their brackets and keep score in the same way, thus allowing the best gamers from one library to compete against those from other libraries. "It's the foundation of a free national gaming league based in America's public libraries," Neiburger says. That may not sound like a big deal to adults who aren't into video games. But to kids who are hard-core into gaming, Neiburger says, the ability to compete to be the nation's best at Super Smash Brothers would be really cool-and a huge draw for libraries.
"Gaming is a way for us to live in their world," Neiburger says. We don't have to worry about the kids who love learning coming to the library. They're already here. It's the other 70 percent we have to worry about. Gaming is a way to say to them the library isn't lame. The library doesn't suck."