Gaming Symposium Wrap Up

Finishing up my conference blogging with some final thoughts. Liz Lawley's closing keynote, "Games without Borders: Gaming Beyond Consoles and Screens," though threatened to be overtaken by Vista and the projector not playing nicely, was a fitting end to an exciting event. What stuck with me most was her appeal to all of us to use our librarian evaluation skills to create selection tools to be used to recommend the best games. When we think about our own collection development standards in the library, those are the same issues faced by parents as they ask "What games are best for the child/teen/adult in my life?" Any libraries out there building selection tools for videogames yet?

As we are build up our gaming groups, we need to document all of the successes--pictures, anecdotes, and stories--so that the adult community can better understand what the tangible benefits of gaming are, and to make sense of their childrens' lives, and to gain support for this type of programming in the library. It would be really fun to have a non-librariany Gaming & Learning workshop for our own community. Having expert speakers present on the positives of gaming AND offering a non-threatening environment in which we're encouraging adults to play--this could go far in getting buy-in from those folks who keep our doors open.