Librarians need to play more games
At the annual American Library Association Annual Conference, a session was held about connecting with "digital natives," people who are used to doing things on computers, and who have in fact learned some information-gathering strategies from playing video games.
One suggestion for reworking library services for gamers is to design tools and software to be explorable. Libraries currently have an obsession with thesauri and manuals and all kinds of stuff you have to read before you can do anything right. The best searches are the most complicated ones. But games teach us to learn new tools by messing around with them, and, according to James Paul Gee, a University of Wisconsin at Madison linguist.
The session offered a list of suggestions for making the library more digital-native-friendly. The most obvious one, and the one that gets this on a game blog: play more games. It's totally the best way to understand the gamer mindset!
As the picture above illustrates, some librarians were already on board, offering Guitar Hero and unspecified Wii games (no doubt Wii Sports) for free play at the conference.
One final, vital suggestion, from us. libraries should hire more gamer librarians. And pay them extra.
[Via Game|Life; picture from The Shifted Librarian's Flickr pool]
