I blew my time limit talking. I tend to do that… and I have done so here. I planned to post these last words on December 31st, but the website had other plans and I could not log in. I myself had other plans for January 1st, so here I am today, January 2nd, here to have my final say.

Tomorrow, this blog will be archived. Josh Hadro of LJ assures me it will remain accessible at this web address for awhile, and will actually be easier to find and refer back to (should you wish to do so) in its new server-home as the magazine reconfigures its blogs and website.

As I said at the beginning of the month, it is time for me to move on. But because I always blow my time limits, with more to say than time ever allows, I want to mention a few things you might find it worthwhile to explore on your own.

LEMONTREE, VERY PRETTY
I’m dating myself by even knowing that song, but so be it. I couldn’t resist making the reference.

Although sometimes written as one word, sometimes as two, Lemontree is a game every librarian needs to follow and watch closely. Their aim? “Lemontree seeks to increase the use of library resources through a social, game based elearning platform.” They’re not alone in this; Bibliobouts has a similar goal, to increase players’ literacy skills and effective use of the library. Interestingly, both games are built for academic libraries, which have a captive audience and a scholarly focus on hard data and trackable outcomes.

This is not to say that all public libraries fail to attend to the results of programming initiatives, but our audience is fluid, making many details too ephemeral to capture easily. What a public library might do is learn from our academic cousins, and consider ways to adapt a game like this to our uses. Gamers constantly make “house rules” from complex games; why not here? Perhaps, Summer Reading might be redesigned to provide more intrinsic motivation and peak experiences than can be had by receiving a library-logo pencil and a sticker.

OUR TOWN
While Thorton Wilder’s play can be pretty bleak, the chances are that even the bleakest areas of your community have some interesting features. It’s likely that there are places in your community that library constituents would be agog to learn about. Even more likely, there is somewhere everyone says “I always meant to go check that out.”

Some live-action games help do that, and libraries should play (if their towns have such games) or consider developing a version for one’s own library and community, based on what games are out there. Let me suggest two.

The Human Mosaic Project started in my hometown of Tucson, Arizona not long ago. The game is still in beta and, being the brainchild of Warner Onstein (who has a lot of other irons in the fire), I haven’t seen an enormous amount of activity there yet. But I have high hopes, because I’m pretty jazzed about the idea.

To play, you take up a challenge to go or do something in your community. It might be little: research community gardens in your area — or somewhat more challenging: commit to five acts of random kindness to strangers. You could “dice walk” to discover a new neighborhood: carry a six-sided die with you, roll it at every intersection you come to. On a 1 or 2, turn left; 3 or 4, go straight ahead; 5 or 6, turn right. Do this ten times (or twenty or fifty) and see where you wind up. Then, really take in your new surroundings. This can be done on a bike, or in a car if you carry an equally adventurous friend as your passenger with die in hand.

Doing the challenge is only half the point. Talking over your experience with others is the other half. The game asks you to do it online, but what if a library had a bit of wall space devoted to people’s answers to “How did that challenge work out for you?” Host a gathering each weekend or once a month, letting players talk about what they did, and then have everyone brainstorm some new challenges.

Warner did not invent this idea out of the blue; he’d seen it at play in San Francisco. Check the SFZero website to see how San Francisco residents are meeting new people, exploring their city, and participating in non-consumer leisure activities.

TABLETOP GAMING
The fantasy role playing game Pathfinder is the game of choice for gamers who might otherwise be playing Dungeons & Dragons, having been based on an earlier (sometimes preferred) edition of that game. Arguably, Pathfinder has surpassed D&D in popularity; it has definitely done so in sales if not yet in name-recognition. Librarians considering an RPG club should consider both systems, which are well supported by their respective publishers, and have an enormous community online to solicit for support and ideas. Pathfinder is by Paizo Publishing; D&D comes from Wizards of the Coast.

While I was at GenCon this August, I picked up some of Paizo’s NPC and Plot Twist card packs from their Gamemastery line. I mention them because I know many libraries support teen writing programs, and I see the Plot Twist cards, in particular, being a fun way to set one’s imagination in motion.

Certainly the cards are useful for a game master preparing a scenario for the RPG club to play, and there are Compleat Encounters in the game aid line, “designed to help GMs run interesting games quickly and efficiently.”  But if you have a writing group instead of an RPG club, and a budding writer says “Plots are hard” (as so many do), have her draw a Plot Twist card at random and imagine ways to massage the idea into something for the story-in-progress.

New York Times bestselling author John Vornholt says “If the story starts to falter, bring on the Klingons with phasers blazing.” The cards might be just the ticket… minus the phasers.

There are many solid role-playing games out there. Talk to your friendly local hobby store for suggestions and insights. Got an older gamer crowd who play online RPGs? Look at the Dragon Age rules from Green Ronin. (That’s the game I want to play, personally, since I already enjoy the digital releases.) Want something rules-light but solidly well-designed? Fudge, from Grey Ghost, fits that bill. Slightly more substance and a plethora of support material to take you to every imaginable fiction genre or historical period? GURPS from Steve Jackson Games must be your choice.

NOW ABOUT WHAT’S ON YOUR SHELVES…
This has been a sore point among gamers for a long time. It can be a sore point for librarians too.

On a RPG forum, a poster recently asked “Why aren’t RPGs in public libraries?” I can see your eyes rolling from here; stop that. “They’ll get stolen” is probably the first thing that comes to mind, along with “They’re expensive” or “I don’t think many people would use them” or you think they’re not well made or they aren’t available from Baker & Taylor or… whatever. You’re making excuses, aside from the couple of hundred libraries with copies of (for example) the core D&D rules listed in WorldCat. We can do better.

A lot of our most popular material gets stolen, as well as a lot of niche material. How is your Wicca collection looking? Dream interpretations? Erotic Asian art? Maybe the books about JFK and Marilyn Monroe stay on your shelves; they haven’t in the libraries I’ve worked in. Your movies and music CDs? Your GED books? I thought not. Yet you buy replacements regularly.

Poorly made? Some of them, yes. But gamers use their books heavily when they play with them, and many are better made than more conventional tomes coming out of New York. The Pathfinder Core Rulebook is printed in China with properly stitched signatures, 575 pages in dense 8 point type(!), hardbound, full color throughout, and it weighs almost 4.5 pounds. You can’t get your teen boys to read? They’ll read this.

Adventure modules might have a better chance of being returned. As was noted on the forum above, core rulebooks disappear because unlike our regular books, players don’t read them once and then never again. They need to refer to the books repeatedly during play, and that’s why some of the rulebooks might never find their way home to us. But if your library has an RPG club, clearly communicating the value of the book to others in the community who might enjoy playing together, you’ve made a step in the right direction. And in the end, refusing to buy otherwise-desirable materials primarily because they are theft-bait is a rotten reason to deny access to publications your patrons and customers might legitimately want to get their hands on.

Like every entertainment industry, the gaming industry has good years and bad years, ups and downs. The past couple of years have been very good: exciting new technologies, great games, and more entry points to the hobby—both digital and tabletop—than ever before.

This year saw some great digital games released, and tabletop gaming continues to make a quiet comeback (as if it ever went away). But we’ve got to take the good with the bad: those quality games were almost all sequels, signaling the threat of creative stagnation in the industry.

And there is one great big problem with gaming right now. Although digital rights management seems to be growing less obtrusive, with fewer publishers requiring constant online authentication for their titles, and many publishers (including the well-loved Polish developer CD Projekt RED, famous for The Witcher series) are releasing their games without DRM, publishers everywhere are assaulting the sale of used games.

GAMER TREASURE, PUBLISHER TRASH
For years, gamers have been able to enjoy recent releases and reliable classics at a comfortable price through the secondary market. Stores like Gamestop have offered trade-in for credit on other games, and re-sold those traded-in games at a reduced price. Used games were generally $5-10 cheaper than their shrink-wrapped counterparts. For older titles, the savings were usually fantastic: great titles could be had for as little as $1 in some stores. Frugal gamers dived into many a bargain bin, hunting down the titles they missed the first time around, or building up their catalog of games for a newly-purchased console. It was a comfortable economic arrangement that extended the shelf-life of older titles, especially when the sale of used gaming consoles was considered.

Then digital distribution caught on, especially for PC games, and things changed. Titles bought digitally cannot be traded in, and even boxed releases are rendered obsolete as soon as they are registered with the digital distribution service of a gamer’s choice (usually Steam), at least for those titles that required the service for multiplayer or—more recently—anti-piracy authentication.

Publishers and developers realized how much money they were losing on the secondary market. When a gamer purchases a used game, the retailer selling that game gets 100% of the profit. The publisher sees none of it, and the creative teams get no royalties. To recoup their losses, they had to adapt.

ADAPT OR DIE?
This adaptation came in the form of the online pass. For many recent releases, new copies of a game are bundled with a code to receive bonus content via download. The code can only be used once. Thus, acquiring this content without a usable code—necessary if one buys the game second hand—comes at a price. The secondary-market buyer must fork over a premium, paid directly to the publisher and/or developers, even though the game has been entirely paid for once already.

Recent titles that come with an online pass include Batman: Arkham City, Mortal Kombat, Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception, and Battlefield 3. Many sports games require an online pass simply to access any of the multiplayer features. This means that gamers who buy a used copy of these games must pay another $10 if they wish to play the game online with others.

Retailers were already scaling back what they pay for used games as trade-ins. Thus, used games are worth less and less, especially to the consumers whose savings on used games get gobbled up paying for the features and content once native to most games.

WHY THIS MATTERS
Libraries should care because this severely impacts collection development and circulation of games. Should a library invest in what is essentially an incomplete game? For now, the content requiring passes is largely bonus material not integral to the core game play, but many gamers are still crying foul.

But even setting aside the practice of charging extra for content, think about those sports games that require passes for online play. That’s like selling somebody a used book, but having the publisher charge an extra $10 for the right to talk about it with people outside their homes. It’s an undemocratic process that libraries need to take very seriously.

This is not to say that libraries should no longer develop their game collections—there are classic games out there that were published long before an online pass existed. But going forward, librarians must do their research. We have to accept—and this is really hard for us librarians—that in order to be fair, we are going to have to deny patrons access to the total relevant content for the material they check out, and let the patron decide if they want to spend their own money for those extra features. If you leave the online pass with the game on the shelf, then the only patron who will get to use it will be the first one to check it out. When it comes to an online pass for multiplayer, one must wonder if a librarian should even carry such games in their collection at all.

Of course, one could always wait for the inevitable Game of the Year/Complete/Gold/Supreme edition of big-name games, which often includes all downloadable content at a lower price point. Our ability to provide current media is hampered by that solution, and even then? That content is usually claimed with a code or pass that is only good once.

TELL ME DOC, IS IT SEQUELITIS?
Sequels are as “new” to the video game industry as they are to the movie industry. Sequels are easier to make, often built on existing game engines, and they are easy to sell because they use well-loved characters and play mechanics. Still, completely novel characters and stories pop up in brand new games. Sometimes those new intellectual properties soar, sometimes they don’t, but they are almost always a welcome change.

Recently, though, gaming’s sequelitis has gone terminal. Every single major release late in 2011 was a sequel: Batman: Arkham City, Uncharted 3, Battlefield 3, Modern Warfare 3, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Gears of Wars 3, and Sonic Generations.

Is this really a big deal? Should it matter as long as we’re getting great games? Speaking honestly, we want awesome games first, awesome stories second. So even considering how much potential these games still have for telling great stories and giving us great characters, the answer to “Is it a big deal?” has to be “Not really.” Unlike movies and books, a gamer usually doesn’t even have to have played a previous release to enjoy a subsequent one.

Is this a bad thing? It can be if a gamer comes into your library wanting something new and fresh, and equally as frustrating if a gamer who has played every warfare shooter or superhero team-up game out there wants more of the stuff that feeds their habit and the only thing on the shelf are the games they’ve already played. But as we so often say in libraries: this shouldn’t be a challenge, it should be an opportunity!

Sequels and spinoffs and copycats establish familiarity and provide in-roads to backlist titles, and that’s a good thing in its way. If a gamer has played every Modern Warfare to exhaustion, maybe they want to give the Halo series a try? Or if a gamer really loves Batman: Arkham City, they may want to give the darker, grittier predecessor Batman: Arkham Asylum a try, or maybe another open-world title such as Crackdown or Red Dead Redemption.

And if the game-play well is tapped out, a savvy librarian can suggest they start looking at narrative genres. Gamers who have saved the Earth from the Covenant more times than they can count might want to give Mass Effect a roll. Both feature a galactic sci-fi setting, but Mass Effect’s role-playing game plays differently from the first-person shooter that is Halo.

As when conducting readers’ advisory, research is key to connecting gamers to good games, even in the face of a seeming deluge of similar titles and annual updates. Sequelitis can be a frustrating thing, but you can put some of its apects to good use. It’s definitely no reason to stop or slow down the collection development.

A WORD ABOUT TABLETOP GAMING
Tabletop gaming never truly went away, but it certainly has taken a back seat in recent times to its flashier offspring, video gaming. That may not be the case in years to come.

Wizards of the Coast, publishers of the long-loved role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons and the highly-competitive trading card game Magic: the Gathering, tried something different this year: releasing Dungeons and Dragons board games. The designers use the same mechanics and monsters from the role-playing game but are adapting them into a more familiar board game format—at least, the set-up is more familiar to those who never played a role-playing game. Most notably, the board game version of D&D allows everyone to play at the same time, and doesn’t require a Dungeon Master (the game’s narrator and rules arbiter) to run the game. These new games can be a great way to spread the love of the game to a new generation of gamers, offering a taste of these kinds of heroic adventure before getting into the rich narrative and complex rules of a true D&D campaign.

A very exciting development in the board game industry is something I like to call the Great European Invasion (mostly because it sounds epic). The board game industry in Europe is absolutely booming, and some of the best board games in recent years have come out of Germany and Eastern Europe. Settlers of Catan is probably the best known, first released in 1995.

European board games (“Eurogames”) are becoming more and more mainstream in the US. Dedicated gamers and hobby store shoppers have been playing them for a long time, but now families who enjoy a Casual Game Night are cracking open Settlers instead of Sorry. Some fine board games are now available on big-box store shelves, where those who might never set foot in a hobby store can pick them up. This will bring more quality board games to more people, and the public will find it easier to understand that all games are not just “kid stuff.” It will be much easier to attract patrons to library game nights using such Eurogames, so keep an eye out for what’s available in your community.

[I must interject that librarians ought not neglect their friendly local hobby store, with their knowledgeable proprietors and staff. Games stocked in the big-box stores increases basic awareness in the general public, but for in-depth knowledge, an independent game store has as much more to offer about games as an independent book store offers about books.—Liz]

What’s more, people are catching on to the fact that gaming that doesn’t require technology is cheaper, easier to implement, and has the potential to be more engaging on a creative level. Take advantage of this renewed interest with some great board games for your library.

PROGNOSIS
Video games are enjoying technology that seems downright futuristic. The Internet is making it possible to buy games and play them with the whole world, while sitting at our desks in our pajamas eating pizza rolls straight from the pan. It’s an exciting time of change and innovation. But difficulties come along with those changes, putting those who make the games we love, those who publish them, and us gamers that buy and play those games on opposing sides.

So, what should we do as librarians? We persevere. We stick with it. We continue to offer our game nights and RPG clubs. We keep stocking the stacks with games that patrons ask for. We keep playing games in our own time and teaching others how to play. We do this because—when all is said and done—gaming still matters. Games still matter, for the same reasons they have mattered all along.

We do this because publishers and developers are more than just corporate entities trying to maximize their profit—they’re working people with a passion for games as deep as our own, and they’re trying to adapt to changes in culture, economy, and technology. These are the same challenges we deal with ourselves. It is a time of growing pains all around, and we will hit the sweet spot of modernity sooner rather than later. As long we remain vocal as librarians and active as gamers, we’ll be able to not only adjust to change, but influence it as well.

So, in the words of my dear friend Liz Danforth: Game on!

I have a Christmas wish for libraries: Steam-powered lending.

Who else out there in library land would love to see Steam offer an Ebsco/Wavesound/Overdrive style subscription service delivering PC games to library users?

It’s pretty clear that electronic games are an important part of contemporary culture. However, PC games in particular are increasingly impractical to lend, because the digital rights management (DRM) that impedes piracy outright prevents legitimate sharing – including lending – by locking games to a particular user account.

This is a real shame, because a great deal of innovation and independent game development happens on the PC — in fact, the PC is the platform of choice for avant-garde and experimental game design. If part of libraries’ objective is not only to facilitate access to culture, but to promote intelligent and critical engagement with it, the PC is a key platform for us to support.

Valve Software’s Steam platform could be a remarkably efficient way for us to do this – and it has the bonus of already having an excellent reputation among gamers.

WHAT IS STEAM?
Steam is a PC, Mac and Linux program that allows users to browse its well-curated and high-quality catalogue of games; to purchase and download games they like, and also download free games and demonstration copies of paid games; and keep those games updated. It allows multiple accounts on the same computer, and for the same user to access their account on multiple computers.

What’s more, Steam has a proven capacity to manage time-limited use: many titles have weekends where you can play for free but thereafter have to buy the game to keep playing. Its makers, Valve Software, are willing to engage with people’s expressed needs, and offer cheap (and sometimes free!) tournament licenses. These licenses allow people to install a game on multiple PCs for a few hours, or even a full day of multiplayer fun. It also has amazing metrics and a rock-solid user interface.

Pretty much the only things Steam doesn’t have are the ability to authenticate to a library management system, and age-locked ratings by jurisdiction. However, our library management software can block loans by borrower age, so solving the former gives us the latter.

WHAT DO WE GAIN?
The benefits to gamers are clear: your local public library enables you to try out that title you’ve been curious about — awesome. It doesn’t matter if it’s an indie game or a new author, the library puts it in your hands.

For libraries? How much easier would it be to run book-club-style games clubs, where games are not only played but discussed intelligently with other game-lovers, if the library had the ability to ensure that everyone could access a copy? How good would it be to enable access to not only the expensive AAA console titles, but some of the amazing independent work that will never get a console release? With libraries focused on console games to date, it is hard for us to provide this cutting edge content to our users. This is how we could generate much more interest about our services, and at the same time develop intelligent, critical discussion about the increasingly important artform of games (as I discussed in my last post).

And for anyone concerned about the future of our culture: how much more opportunity will there be for genuinely creative, intelligent, affecting, interesting games to succeed in an environment where libraries are fostering discussion and play?

POSSIBILITIES LIE AHEAD
I’ve already floated the idea informally to Leslie Redd, who is an Education Officer at Valve and doing some amazing work with games in schools. I’m now floating it to all of you to gauge how much interest there is in the library profession, and specifically the gaming contingent. Please leave a comment below to tell me what you think – and, if you like, email me at euchronic@gmail.com and/or pminchin@portphillip.vic.gov.au. I’ll collate everyone’s responses and pass them onto Valve and to relevant library groups.

Thanks everyone!

Disclosure: This piece has been published in tandem with a companion piece aimed at raising awareness of these possibilities among the game development community on the author’s Gamasutra blog.

Phil Minchin is a library IT team leader at the Port Phillip Library Service. He recently won a travel grant from the Spydus Users Network (sponsored by Civica Library & Learning) to visit the US to study games in libraries. He attended GenCon, WorldCon, and PAX, and spoke to representatives of local libraries from around the country, researching everything from the nitty-gritty of stock management to big-picture issues of games and their cultural context. For more information about the trip and/or his findings, contact him at pminchin@portphillip.vic.gov.au or euchronic@gmail.com.

Edited to add: Phil’s blog post on Gamasutra, one of the best recognized venues to talk to game designers and professional developers, was given a Featured posting today, 20 Dec 2011, placing it on the front page of that site. — Liz

I feel that in many ways, what I set out to accomplish almost three years ago, has been accomplished. What I  have written, blog and print alike, has helped make gaming in libraries as understandable and logical as having Storytime, the analogy Eli Neiburger (AADL) raised when blazing the trails with his book Gamers…in the Library?!

Many others have contributed to that overall achievement but I think some of my best efforts have been to strip away the unexamined assumptions and negative stereotypes about who and what gamers are, what the preponderance of academic research tells us about the results of someone engaging in gaming as a regular hobby, and introducing people to the rich variety of games that exist beyond Monopoly and Rock Band.

A FRESH VOICE
Games are welcome in most libraries, both for their entertainment value and their ability to foster meaningful learning (especially the important 21st Century learning skills). With the recognition that games have a natural place as a service to our communities, it’s time for me to move on.

Librarians need a fresh voice delivering what LJ is best known for: the nitty-gritty reviews of new releases in all the popular genres, the practical discussion of programming with games, and yes, someone able to continue offering substantive rebuttal to challenges leveled against games. My frequent guest-blogger and ALA Emerging Leader M. Brandon Robbins (WCPL) is taking up the banner as your voice for gaming in Library Journal, starting in January. I was thrilled to hear he had accepted the post, and could not have wished for a better replacement.

MORE TO COME
I hope to post a few more things here on the blog before the end of the year. I want to draw your attention to the amazing Lemontree Library Game project, and some of the other innovative projects that show “gamification” at its best and brightest (despite “gamification” being a word and practice I mostly disfavor). Phil Minchin, who wrote a great piece about how games might flourish in libraries in Australia last month, has followed up with another guest post about the idea of developing a partnership to offer game downloads the way Overdrive offers e-books to our patrons and customers. And my friend and colleage Brandon Robbins has a look at the state of gaming today, and a vision of its challenges and potentials tomorrow. That will be a fitting round up to the end of my stint here in Library Journal’s pages, so I hope you’ll find time during the crazy holiday season to check in again before I bid you all farewell.

Until then, game on!

The overlooked importance of games
Libraries have evolved a lot in the past few decades. Our core mission — providing a place where the community can meet and gain access to culture, entertainment, and information — has not changed in that time, but the formats in which we offer that access have expanded dramatically. Movies, music, talking books, TV series, comics and graphic novels, online services and databases — all are now normal library materials.

There is, however, one major and ancient cultural form which has received less attention: games.

Where games are included in collections, it is usually only electronic games being chosen, and the integration is pretty perfunctory. Cataloguing says nothing meaningful about the type of game you’ll be playing, describing only the thematic elements rather than the gameplay elements. While many games are problematic to include in a lending collection, even those that are not are neglected. Tabletop roleplaying games, for instance, are fundamentally books like other books, and can be catalogued and managed as such. Yet very few libraries stock more than one or two token titles.

There are reasons for this blindness. Libraries originally formed around written works, skewing heavily towards books as solitary pursuits rather than materials for appreciation by social groups. Electronic media are evolving rapidly, and terminologies and taxonomies take time to spread, making it hard to keep up. “Games” are widely devalued by the culture as a whole. Yet none of these are actually good reasons when you look at them clearly.

In fact, there are many excellent reasons why libraries should be doing a lot more with games. Here are five sound reasons.

Games are important elements of culture
Games have been part of human culture about as long as there’s been human culture. Given the number of oral cultures that play games, it seems likely that cultures become ludate before they are literate.

Games are not merely trivial ways to while away time. Some can be, but given some of the books libraries stock, triviality is not a sufficient objection in and of itself. Games share an ancient history with books. As with literature’s origins in ritual drama and recital, games are closely linked to the sacred, particularly to the divinatory. For example, the four suits of modern playing cards are derived from the suits of the tarot: spade (in two syllables) is the Italian word for sword, clubs are staves or wands, diamonds and coins are both associated with wealth, and the suit of cups was always linked to affairs of the heart.

Games have moved a long way from those mystical roots, as has literature. But it is hard to imagine European intellectual culture without considering chess, or modern American culture without poker, or Chinese scholarly culture without go. Even among people who have never played them, these games are instantly recognisable. Indeed, to be an exceptional player is to embody key cultural virtues iconic to one’s native culture.

Games foster community
The power of games to establish and reaffirm community is attested throughout history. Herodotus recounts how the Lydians used games to keep their nation together through eighteen years of grinding famine and hardship. Today there are extraordinary three- and four-day festivals of games, where tens of thousands of supposedly “antisocial” or poorly-socialised geeks come together to create an extraordinarily warm, accepting and fun community. Over 37,000 people gathered in Indianapolis this year for GenCon. Twice that many met together in Seattle for PAX (Penny Arcade Expo).

Anyone who has successfully run an open all-ages games event can attest to the power of games to get people interacting across every conceivable boundary: age, gender, ethnicity, culture, and sometimes (where the game is already known to both parties) even language itself.

What could be a more natural fit for the library? Are we not the community’s gateway to culture and information, the “new village square,” one of the last bastions of genuinely free, welcoming public space in an increasingly partitioned world? We should embrace the cultural forms that, by their basic nature, bring people together.

Games are art (the poetry of system)
Perhaps the least understood aspect of games is the nature of their poetry.

The film critic Roger Ebert proclaimed that games were not, and probably could never be, great Art, because their outcome was in the hands of players. He failed to recognise that, as with a musical instrument which must be played, or architecture which must be explored, the poetry of a game lies in the possibilities it opens for exploration and how well it does so. Decisions and random inputs and tests of skill can be arranged into something expressive and surprising and true just as easily as tone and pitch, or colour and shape, or word and plot.

Paintings can express truth in ways that books cannot, and vice versa. The artforms that are games ultimately consist of the choices its audience makes and the actions taken—and these can say things that no other form can. One need only look at the work of Brenda Brathwaite, or Jane McGonigal’s extraordinary Find the Future at the New York Public library, or the brainbending twists on time and space in Braid and Portal, or consider Ian Bogost, or the indie art-games movement… Pick any one and be persuaded. Experience many and be convinced.

Subjectivity is difficult to describe or depict in a game, whose palette relies on concrete verbs. But skilful game designers can do more than express a subjectivity: they can induce it. The best game designers put their players in the position of making decisions and taking actions which might be quite alien to their normal nature—often quite unwittingly. The result shows us sides of our own humanity we may never have encountered, or challenges assumptions we make about ourselves, our capabilities, and the consequences of our actions.

Ancillary benefits: literacy, vocabulary, numeracy, spatial awareness, socialisation and social skills
In an artform as varied as games, it’s impossible to generalise about which other important life skills you pick up along the way. But unless you’re playing a game of pure chance, most games carry a side benefit of learning or skill development.

Role-playing gamers point to the high-falutin’ words they learned in their games as the source of their rich vocabulary. Understanding the need to manage rolls and modifiers, and how to assess probability develops their numeracy skills.

Tabletop gamers of all stripes have to read the rules to work out how to play. Literacy and comprehension can get a real workout in the process.

Even games with no apparent educational value—the fast-paced action games like first-person shooters and racing games—develop hand-eye coordination and spatial awareness. Speaking from personal experience, I can affirm that this is not trivial: five years ago, the training my reflexes and threat anticipation received from action games saved my partner and I being from sideswiped and crushed by a semi-trailer that swerved to avoid an unexpected obstacle on an interstate highway.

Any multiplayer game – especially tabletop, face-to-face games – develops social skills as players learn that playing nice produces more fun more consistently than completely selfish behaviour. The feedback loop to taking turns, respecting rules and gameplay conventions is firm and effective.

Yes, there are some dishonourable exceptions, especially online. But a great many shy people, and people with autism-spectrum disorders, have said that games have helped build their social mindfulness and confidence. It’s not by chance that libraries offer board games to give rowdy groups of children or teens a way to channel and express their energy in ways that reduce their negative impact on other users of the space.

Core benefits: systems literacy and theory of mind
Important as literacy, numeracy and the rest are, though, not every game necessarily fosters every benefit any more than every book serves every reader. However, there are other benefits inherent in all games.

First, given that a game is a poetic system, playing games develops systems literacy – the ability to “read” a system, think about the ways in which the components interact, anticipate outcomes and make decisions accordingly. Humanity has always been dependent on its ability to analyse and understand the systems around us— it is fundamentally pattern recognition, a key element of our human intellectual prowess. But as we continue to urbanise, mutable social systems increase in complexity. Purely physical (and immutable) systems are challenging enough, but the ever-shifting demands of living effectively in vast social systems can be daunting. I can think of few more important skills. Whether in our work lives, in our personal lives, or in our lives as citizens, that ability to spot patterns and predict consequences is essential to any true freedom and happiness.

Games, and superficial game-like systems, are becoming integrated into commercial and political propaganda, making systems literacy not only a highly transferable skill, but vitally important to be able to identify. Some of these systems are being used as substitutes for actual management and motivation in the workplace, and some games themselves exploit players, milking them of their time, attention and money. Learning to identify dubious game-like manipulations is a life skill of enormous benefit, even as positive adaptations of these systems enhance our enjoyment of and success in life.

The second inescapable benefit of any game played with another person is in some ways much more profound. Playing a game with someone forces us to engage with them in ways no other activity can. Although (pace Palin) Plato never actually said “You learn more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation”, it’s undeniably true that games are an excellent way to develop theory of mind. The ability to put oneself in other people’s shoes is a crucial skill of emotional intelligence for any adult, for compelling reasons both moral and practical. However, most situations in which one can practice this skill either have nothing at stake–so there is no particular incentive to go beyond socially expected forms–or there is too much at stake for experiment or play (being the best ways to learn) to be comfortable and/or ethical.

It’s no coincidence that games can foster interaction across cultural boundaries, as noted above. On the contrary, it’s a concrete manifestation of this deeper, less tangible benefit. I also believe that part of the reason that games build social confidence (also mentioned previously) is that they build social skills. As the industry begins to publish video games like L.A. Noire, which uses realistic facial motion and microexpressions as part of its core “spot-the-lie” investigative gameplay, this becomes explicit. Multiplayer games have always relied upon the players’ abilities to infer intention and interiority.

These five points constitute a compelling case for libraries to review how and why we integrate games into our collections and services.

Phil Minchin is a library IT team leader at the Port Phillip Library Service. An occasional featured blogger on Gamasutra, he recently won a travel grant from the Spydus Users Network (sponsored by Civica Library & Learning) to visit the US to study games in libraries. He attended GenCon, WorldCon, and PAX, and spoke to representatives of local libraries from around the country, researching everything from the nitty-gritty of stock management to big-picture issues of games and their cultural context. For more information about the trip and/or his findings, contact him at pminchin@portphillip.vic.gov.au or euchronic@gmail.com.

He has also been busily trying to turn National Gaming Day @ your library into International Gaming Day (which it turns out was happening anyway, so it’s not proving terribly difficult!). He is hosting an all-ages open gaming event in his home town of Melbourne, Australia. Details below:

Facebook URL: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=267614226594645
Saturday November 12, 10 a.m. – 4 p.m.
Experimedia Room
State Library of Victoria
La Trobe & Swanston Streets
Melbourne

NGD2011
November 12th, 2011 is National Gaming @ Your Library Day. Your library has signed up, right? You’ve already got plans to participate? Great! I would expect nothing less of you.

If you’re shuffling your feet and thinking “I meant to but I’ve been busy” … well, as I said above, I can relate too well and sympathize. Follow my lead here: you too can play catchup because it’s not too late! Here is the ALA blog about NGD, with linked information. You can sign up here, and if your patrons and stakeholders have questions about the program — now in its fourth year — you can point them to http://ilovelibraries.org/gaming/.

MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER PROTEINS
It was hard not to notice the sheer quantity of news reports in the middle of last month, that gamers playing Foldit (“Solve Puzzles for Science”) solved the structural puzzle of “a protein causing AIDS in rhesus monkeys that hadn’t been solved for 15 years … resolved by Foldit players and confirmed by x-ray crystallography.” (quotation source) For many decades, rhesus monkeys have been the research animal of choice when doing studies of human biology and pathogens, so this is significant. World-changing, even. It’s not even the first protein unravelled by dedicated gamers.

Is it Gears of War they’re playing? World of Warcraft? Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder maybe? No, Foldit is its own game, ostentibly in beta (which is a commonly-accepted way of saying “We’re constantly looking for ways to improve this but it’s working pretty well for now.”). Hundreds of thousands of players around the world are engaged, from 13 year old prodigies who think “it just looks right that way” to systematic visual thinkers determined to head up the scoreboard. Many contribute their computer’s unused processing power to assist, much like the SETI project.

Understanding the biochemical structure of a protein is an essential and necessary step toward battling this disease into submission. Unless you’re someone who thinks AIDS only afflicts those who somehow “deserve” it, or who just denigrate anything positive that others endeavor to do, this is a good thing.

Which game is being played is almost beside the point. This success in FoldIt is rooted in the mindset of gamers around the world: the conviction that problems can be solved, that individual action can make a valuable difference while facing seemingly hopeless conditions with all the odds against you, and that evil can be fought. That sometimes, maybe, we can win.

I personally find that a laudable, honorable, and even heroic effort. I hope in the future, there may there be many more foes vanquished by the sharp wits of citizen science and FoldIt.

HONORING THE PAST
At the start of last month, the Videogame History Museum received its initial funding through the crowdsourced Kickstarter site, raising over $50,000 to archive “Every game made for every system, every piece of promotional material made for each game, every revision of every console with specific notes as to the differences, the design progression….” In short, they seek to be the one-stop source documenting the societal seachange that is video games.

(For the record: I prefer to use two words where they use one, for the same reason we speak of “soccer games” and “baseball games” but not “footballgames” or even “cardgames.” They’re all games, and “video” is the descriptor, the adjective modifying the noun.)

They sought only $30k in funding, so it was nice to see them exceed it substantially. But why is this any more than a casual “yay, games?” There is already the International Center for the History of Electronic Games after all, one of the Strong Museum Partners in Rochester, NY.

Arguably, a museum and archives dedicated to video games serves as a benchmark recognizing the impact video games have had on American culture, and on the modern zeitgeist worldwide. Link and Mario are characters recognized, beloved, by millions in every corner of the planet.

Yet as far-reaching as gaming culture is, it is at the same time as ephemeral as the last release, the latest console, and the most recent patch. Preserving our history is an important factor to helping everyone understand and accept what this culture is and has been — perhaps what it might become. Museums are fundamentally teaching institutions, capable of setting their collections in front of the public in a way that explains context and impact. It doesn’t matter if it is a national natural history museum or a museum of postage stamps.

In the same world where we have music museums and baseball halls of fame, I think this is a very appropriate effort. I look forward to seeing more from this group now that their funding is secured.

Game on!

As we talked, Aramis mentioned a game called “1000 Blank White Cards.” Apparently if you’re a few years younger than me(!), you may have played this idiosyncratic party game in college or at social get-togethers with your friends. Somehow, the game had never hit my radar and I didn’t know a thing about it.

Aramis felt it would be something simple, low-cost, and possible to adapt into a library setting (with caveats). After looking into it, I decided he was right about its manifest possibilities — being both Fluxx-like and creatively inspiring at the same time — and I asked him to write it up.

I have to note that those “caveats” include a gigantic warning notice for libraries: because of the freeform nature of the game, anything goes when the game is played in a party atmosphere among adults who mostly know each other. There are sites online you can find examples of cards, and some can be inappropriate for all-age library gaming events. Engage your good sense and professional acumen when looking further into this game and when bringing it into a library setting, but don’t let that stop you from doing so. — Liz

Aramis is a Reference paraprofessional and library school student with five years experience  creating library gaming programs, and a lifetime of experience as a hardcore gamer. His media cabinet is full of video games and his guest closet is stuffed with board games.

You understand gamers. They may play video games, bridge, chess or Scrabble, but there is no denying that some of your patrons love games. You have another set of patrons that is just as familiar to you: the painters, the knitters, the writers and inventors — the makers. Maybe it’s time you brought these groups together.

WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE
One way to bring The Gamers and The Makers to the table together with 1000 Blank White Cards.  Often shortened to just BWC, this is a card game the players create as they play. Supplies are easy to come by: a stack of unruled index cards, and pens to write and draw with.

Every card has three parts: a name, a set of instructions and a point value. The name uniquely identifies the card. The instructions tell the players what happens when the card is played. The points add or detract from the score of affected players.

Players draw the cards including instructions that range from the conventional directions you see in every card-based game (discard a card or skip your turn) to the bizarre (compose a haiku, name two famous people born on your birthday, do the hustle) and can encompass anything the players feel comfortable with. When explaining the game, it’s best to have some sample cards on hand. (Here are a few!)

HOW TO PLAY
If you have a good crowd coming to your event, break the players into groups of no more than six or so, to speed up the games. Give each player five to seven blank cards to create before the game begins, then shuffle those cards together with a roughly equal number of blank cards. A good-size playing deck will use 50-100 cards for a game.

Decide who starts — base it on age, hair length, the roll of a die, or who is wearing a color no one else is wearing. (It doesn’t matter: just pick someone!) Everyone should have something to take notes on about how rules might change during play, and to keep track of their score.

Play proceeds clockwise. On their turn, players draw a card from the shared deck and play it, or they can hold it and play a card from their hand. Cards can be played on the player who drew it, on another player, or on every player. If they draw a blank card from the deck, players should create a new card on the spot. When there are no cards left to draw from the deck, the game is over.

AND AFTERWARD?
After the game have the players talk about their experiences and the individual cards. Were there cards some players enjoyed but others didn’t? Those are worth discussing. If some cards were universally loved, try to determine why. If some were universally reviled, discuss ideas for how they might be fixed. With this increased understanding, the next game will be a fruitful ground for revisions and new experiments. In turn, this will lead to another round of discussion after each subsequent game.

Cards remain available from week to week, and the deck grows month to month. Using a selection of the most enjoyable cards mixed into new games keeps improving the experience over time.

GAME DESIGNERS IN THE ROUGH
This is Liz writing again. I see considerable value in the post-game conversation, although it does not have to be a protracted discussion. Encouraging players to reflect on what it means to make a game, and to collaborate on elementary game design takes this game from just something to have fun with — a worthy goal in its own right, and perhaps all you require of it — to being a real learning experience. What makes things fun for others? What can reasonably be done in the setting? How do cards interact with each other, and how much should they do so? If the game includes a mix of ages — and there is no reason it should not — the conditions should make it possible for everyone’s contribution to be valued, constructively criticized, and for players to learn how to leave their egos at the door while simultaneously taking pride in what they created.

I’ll also suggest that you as the organizer-host of the game provide props and accessories in the room. Bring out the Storytime beanbags and the puppets, the box of crayons and blank sheets of paper, or set up a display of the best or the cheesiest novels you have on the shelf. Seed the room with ideas for the players. They’ll soon vault past your “seeds” with crazy ideas of their own, but some may like to have an “approved” jumpstart. Freeform creativity like this is given more lipservice than genuine encouragement for many people, and offering a little direction at first may help them get past such concerns.

If you read this column, chances are you are one or several of these. And if so, this is your week to speak out, to reach out, and to geek out.

SPEAK OUT WITH YOUR GEEK OUT
Sometimes it is said that geek is the new chic but honestly, nerd-baiting is still a popular pastime in some circles. A few weeks ago, there was yet another case of deliberate public mockery of someone who can readily be called a geek.

Bullying and cyberbullying get a fair amount of critical attention these days. But is it somehow still okay to pick on the weird kid? No. It’s not.

A world-champion player of Magic: the Gathering (a card game I illustrated at least three dozen cards for, in my day) was held up for ridicule in a public forum for which the author gets paid every time someone clicks the link. Geeks are all over the Net and easily aroused, so making them mad is… a good way to increase your paycheck. That’s why I am not linking it, but honestly, that’s not the key story here anyway.

Instead of allowing this event to escalate into a flamewar of negativity, author and game designer Monica Valentinelli saw an opportunity to make something positive happen instead. She put out a call to create “Speak Out with Your Geek Out“ for the week of Sept 12-16. For this week, geeks are enjoined to share their passionate enthusiasms in a positive uplifting way. If what makes your geeky heart thrill is your collection of Star Wars action figures or if it’s heirloom vegetable gardening, if it’s old-style Dungeons & Dragons games or family history and genealogy — this is the week to talk about it, to wear your geekiest t-shirt, and to celebrate your fandoms. But most of all, to write about it, on blogs and Tumblr, in LiveJournal and Facebook, to tweet with the hashtag #speakgeek.

To quote from the Speak Out website: this is about “being empowered to be who we are in the happiest and most positive way that we possibly can. To inspire others to share in what we love, to mentor those who want to learn, to support those who are afraid to be themselves. I look at Speak Out with your Geek Out as a way to be part of a community that blows the lid off of negative stereotypes on both sides of the equation. We’re not geek elites. We’re not victims who’ll take the bait. We are something new. We are Geeks who Speak.”

Quite rightly, she refuses to limit what “geek” means here. Narrow stereotypes are for tearing down, not building up.

GEEK THE LIBRARY
Why am I writing about this crazy fringe topic here in the hallowed pages of Library Journal? Because OCLC’s “Geek the Library” is a community-based public awareness campaign “to inspire a conversation about our incredible public libraries and their urgent need for increased support. We hope you tell people what you geek, how the public library supports you and your community, and that everyone in your community benefits from the services your local library provides.”

The emphasis is my own, to make sure you don’t miss my point. Sound familiar? Consider their tagline: “Whatever you geek, the public library supports it all.”

SPEAKING GEEK
I have long maintained that my particular brand(s) of geekery and my passion for libraries complement each other. Here is a chance for me to enjoin you to engage similarly. Find an opportunity to Speak Out with Your Geek Out for yourself. Blog, tweet, converse, and update your status with the things that you are a fan of, that make you silly-happy, that enthrall you like nothing else.

Next, talk to your geeky patrons, the anime-readers and the Halo players, the Potter fans and the Twilight fans alike. You don’t have to embrace everyone’s brand of geek personally, but you can — I think you should — support them in their enthusiasms for what they love. Not merely by passively not-disapproving, but by being positive and supportive. Maybe the overweight guy who checks out Star Wars book would really respond to you saying “Hey, I had someone else asking about which are the best authors writing in this universe — maybe you can tell me?” Maybe the elderly birdwatchers would relish the chance to tell you more about the varieties stopping in as autumn progresses. Maybe that tall, dark, handsome fellow would be glad to talk to you about which play he’s auditioning for this week.

Tell the teen girl who hides behind long bangs in her face about Speak Out with Your Geek Out. Maybe she needs to know there are others out there who managed to grow up happy and successful despite finding more friends on the written page than in the school yard — maybe because of the friends they found on the written page. Tell her she will find a whole tribe of others who love books the same way she does. Tell the boy shuffling through his Yu-Gi-Oh! cards that he’s got lots of company out there, and that the games he’s playing today prepare him to take on the world — and win — tomorrow.

This is a solid and powerful way to connect with your patrons — something most of us do with greater or lesser success and willingness. In this case it’s timely too.

Frankly, my fellow librarians, this should be a no-brainer for us to embrace. OCLC makes it crystal clear, it’s part of our job to support the entire community. Even the geeky ones.

Marian Call has even granted her work as an official anthem for the Speak Out with Your Geek Out week: “I’ll Still be a Geek After Nobody Thinks it’s Chic.” How geeky is that?? The music is perfect, and the lyrics are priceless. Give a listen. Take it to heart.

Game on and geek out!

I’ve mentioned the RU Game events several times previously in this blog, and Ellen Forsyth always brings forth excellent speakers. The meetings take place inside the World of Warcraft game, approximately once a month for about an hour. Either of the links above will lead you to the information needed to catch the next one.

If you cannot attend or simply miss one as I missed Eli’s visit, Ellen always sees the transcripts put up quickly. Eli’s talk was a particularly good one, and I encourage you to read it.

ELI WHO?
Eli really should need no introduction to those of you reading this column. Just in case you’re new to these parts, I’ll hit the highlights. He is widely recognized as the author of  Gamers … in the library?!, which is surely one of the books to have the greatest impact on this niche of our profession.  Eli moves and shakes, being one of the Tech Leaders in this year’s Movers and Shakers selections, and very rightly so. As Toby Greenwalt notes in that article, Eli’s track record as a visionary able to “predict the ways technology and web culture are going to impact the library world” is matchless. Eli is, at turns, a very entertaining guy with a dry clever wit and an intensely passionate advocate for his views. If you ever get a chance to listen to him at a convention or conference, I hope you’ll take the opportunity.

GAMIFICATION
As I read the transcript, I found Eli’s talk to be particularly cogent in terms of what games can become in a library — arguably what they should become. While there is a ton of wild-eyed hype out there about how gamification will change the world, most people are (in my not so humble opinion) doing it wrong. Slap game mechanics onto everyday life and work. Manipulate the victims, I mean the players,  into doing something  that does more to benefit the puppet masters than it helps those trying to play along. When you’re not actually doing anything for yourself in a fun, engaging way? Doom, doom, doomed to fail in the long run.

Eli knows better. He understands gaming from the inside, and the Summer Games he developed for this year’s summer reading program at Ann Arbor District Library is much more than superficial “gamification.”

READING. OKAY, AND…?
He’s not afraid to look at the bigger picture of what libraries do over the summer. As he says in the transcript, “promoting reading to 21st century kids is a little like promoting swimming to healthy young fish. it’s a nice thing to do…. but they’re SOAKING IN IT.” People of all ages read for fun, for work, for recreation. The fact that they’re reading from a screen instead of a sheet of paper ignores the truth that this is all reading. “More humans are writing and reading [than] at at any point in human history and the body of written work is growing at rates beyond exponential.”

From that perspective, Eli and his team took a long look at what they could be doing, and what the library patrons would really benefit from. He says this: “…we wanted to make a game that incentivized the behaviors that 21st century kids really need to develop…like searching, tagging, reviewing, rating, and being a positive member of an online community and make it open-ended so that people could play all summer long.” And they made it for all ages.

What’s more, AADL’s games didn’t stop when school started, either. Have a look at how a leader leads his community using games with serious results that never lose sight of the fun challenge of the intrinsic rewards.

GREAT MINDS THINK ALIKE
This is timely. Nancy Ledeboer, current president of AzLA and Director of Pima County Public Library (my employer) recently used her AzLA newsletter “Message from the President” to challenge the state’s libraries to re-envision summer reading. Sparked by Daniel Pink’s Drive, Nancy realized that the pattern of “read for rewards” that libraries have taken for granted as a means to encourage reading through the summer may be fundamentally flawed. Pink’s information on the research about what motivates us discusses several counterintuitive points. Among them is that the ordinary reward systems we take for granted — do X behavior to Y benchmark to get Z reward — actually disincentivizes activities initially and predominantly done for enjoyment. It becomes a chore, a job, and ultimately not as much fun.

Moreover, Nancy recognizes that 21st Century skills and literacies go well beyond words in print. Eli makes this point himself.

Drive is a book I’ve been pushing at friends and colleagues since I ran across it earlier this year. I mentioned it during the Play Learn Innovate talk I gave last June. Understanding that autonomy, mastery, and purpose drive people’s best qualities at work and play — more than a bigger paycheck, more than a sweet parking spot or a corner office — applies everywhere except in the most routine tasks and jobs. Those unimaginative, routine tasks are being handled by computers, or they are outsourced overseas today. The people in our libraries (on both sides of the desk) and in our communities are the self-same 21st Century citizens that Eli Neiburger is addressing with the summer reading program he initiated this year in Ann Arbor.

The people who will thrive in decades to come will be those who engage fully, with creativity, flexible thinking, and they are likely to be working best in unusual and sometimes challenging environments. They won’t be just taking orders from bosses, they will be demanding a chance to have their say in order to achieve the best results for all concerned — sometimes things the bosses didn’t even know they wanted or needed. That is the power of 21st Century skills.

YOUR ASSIGNMENT
Call it my suggestion if you prefer, or call it your new quest — is to look at what Eli has to say, and think about the possibilities. Yes, he spoke in the persona of an avatar lecturing in the great Ironforge library while logged into World of Warcraft. Pay attention to what he said as much as how and where he said it — content trumps all. Nevertheless, I think it telling that Eli’s “Treasure Quest” game references the new book, Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, which I also highly recommend that you read if you’re a gamer, a geek, and/or a futurist. The erasure of geographic limitations through virtual worlds is in its infancy, but I have no doubt it will grow increasingly part of our everyday world.

Think about the games Eli developed, and think about what Nancy Ledeboer said to challenge Arizona libraries. In turn, I challenge you all — around the country or around the world — to take the ideas these two people are working with. See how the tools they’re toying with fit into your hands. Read Drive, think on the implications, and be persuaded that we can do better next year. Because I’m sure we can.

I’ve just come upon the reference to a new Tumblog about “How Games Saved My Life” and thought it worth sharing here. When Ashly Burch posted about how playing Harvest Moon helped her deal with the stomach pains of crippling anxiety on her own blog, she ended the piece by asking her readers whether a gaming experience helped them get through a difficult time. So many people responded that she started a separate Tumblr feed of “testimonials to the positive, life-changing power of video games.” The comments there are worth reading in addition to the Tumblr feed — not everyone has a blog from which to add to Tumblr.

I’d grumble about the positive effects of non-electronic games not being asked to the party, but Tumblr’s demographics skew strongly to the younger crowd who nearly all play video games (per the Pew research). So it’s really not a surprise she didn’t extend the invitation to the smaller proportion of people who might also play tabletop games. Perhaps someone will take this hint to start another Tumblr feed, or maybe Ash Burch will make a point to open the door a little wider.

I’d definitely hope some readers of this blog might have tales to share to Ms Burch, or can recommend some of their acquitances consider doing so. I can’t imagine there aren’t some amazing stories happening in libraries that offer games.

In any case, these are the unvarnished stories told by the people who lived them, about the people around them. It’s a short feed right now, because it has only just begun. I’m betting it will grow and thrive, and the stories will only continue to shed new perspectives on the value and benefits of games in people’s lives.

Game on!