Eli Neiburger, from Ann Arbor District Library, MI shared his expertise about games in public libraries and talked about his public library is using games - Incentivizing the 21st century reader: AADL's Breakthrough Summer Game. Eli was named as a 2011 Library Journal Mover and Shaker, and is the author of Gamers ... in the library?! : the why, what, and how of videogame tournaments for all ages (which is an excellent read). You can also follow him on twitter. Talk took place 12 August 2011.

Franticread (Ellen Forsyth): Hello and welcome to this talk. My name is Ellen Forsyth and I work at the State Library of New South Wales.

I would like to acknowledge all the traditional owners of the land.

It is great to see you here today.

How about we all introduce ourselves - if that is okay

Illich: Hi Everyone, I'm Mike from the University of New South Wales. I'm an educational technologist in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

Stefwynn (Mylee Joseph): I'm Mylee from State Library of NSW here in Sydney - I work with the public library folks across NSW

Xeneelk: I'm Sarah from University of New England - academic developer in the teaching & learning centre.

Ranganathan: I'm Melissa Cardenas-Dow from Redlands, California. I am a technical services/reference librarian at University of Redlands

Elvabelle: Hi I'm Sam from Randwick Library in Sydney. I'm the Youth Officer here. There will be a few more sitting in from Randwick, but they're running late due to traffic.

Reyn√¢rdine: <---- BWS Johnson, boring Library Consultant.

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): Salvete Reynardine! =)

Reyn√¢rdine: heh salve quid agis?

Franticread (Ellen Forsyth): Today we will here from Eli Neiburger, from Ann Arbor District Library, MI who will be sharing his expertise about games in public libraries and talking about his public library is using games - Incentivizing the 21st century reader:...

Eli was named as a 2011 Library Journal Mover and Shaker, and is the author of Gamers ... in the library?! : the why, what, and how of videogame tournaments for all ages (which is an excellent read). You can also follow him on twitter…okay - over to Eli/Ulotrickus

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): thanks Ellen!

I'm going to type spontaneous, couldnt bear to paste it in, so please excuse any typos.

Reyn√¢rdine: \/\/00+

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): so I'm Eli, and I'm the associate director for IT & Production at AADL, we serve a population of about 150,000 with 5 branches, we're a district library which means we're an independent government unit with out own tax, so our director answers only to a publicly elected board.

I'd like to talk a bit today about our new Summer Game which turns the traditional library summer game upside down a bit but really positions the library in a place of value for 21st century minds.

So here's my secret weapon: I'm not a librarian. I don't care about reading. I don't love books...I just want to provide great service to our taxpayers.

Stefwynn (Mylee Joseph): fair enough ... I suppose

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): while I understand the value of the focus on literacy and reading, in this century, Reading is EVERYWHERE. More humans are writing and reading that at any point in human history and the body of written work is growing at rates beyond exponential.

Illich: I knew that was leading in to something :)

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): the web is the best thing that ever happened to reading. It's become even more of a base required skill of humans in this century than it was in the last one.

Stefwynn (Mylee Joseph): true

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): so we get to the point where 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

Stefwynn (Mylee Joseph): LOL

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): some of the feedback that we had from parents about our traditional paper summer game...was that their kids would tear through the required reading to complete it and then be disinterested for the rest of the summer. So the Summer Reading Game was incentivizing reading, up to a certain point, and then it ceased to be any incentive at all.

So 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

Elvabelle: can i ask what age group this is aimed at? we find the under 12s tear through books for the entire summer holidays

Stefwynn (Mylee Joseph): reading over summer is very important so kids keep their literacy skills up - your game would help them keep their "digital literacy skills" up too?

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): this is for all ages! And generally, the under 12s you see at the library are tearing through stuff... but what percentage of the community under 12s are you seeing at the library?

Elvabelle: we're quite lucky, we get a pretty high number and over all percentage in.

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): I know that reading in the summer is important, but I wonder if the research has been updated now that so much of what kids do for fun all summer involves intensive reading

Stefwynn (Mylee Joseph): Game for all ages / families would be a great way to encourage boys particularly - Dads are important role models in reading.

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): most online participation is ENTIRELY reading; by moving the focus away from READ READ READ we reach a larger audience and engage a wider range of users

Franticread (Ellen Forsyth): yes - what are we all sitting and doing now :D reading

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): meanwhile, as a result of this game, parents are telling us that their kids are reading, writing, and using the catalog like they never have before

Reyn√¢rdine: this game teaches databases if they use Wowhead, too :)

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): the basic idea is that players get points for tagging, reviewing, rating, commenting....

Franticread (Ellen Forsyth): sounds great - really like that the catalogue is getting used more :D

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): plus points for finishing books, movies, or music, or checking out items...or attending events, or playing scavenger hunts in the catalog. there are badges for fulfilling certain conditions, like MEGA TAGGING MASTER etc and badges you earn by completing missions in the catalog or in the community.

Ranganathan: so it seems the larger point is to move away from reading a particular format (print books), correct? that reading can be done/found in other media?

Franticread (Ellen Forsyth): and to intereact more widely...

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): no, it's that reading is the carrier for the activities you actually want to incentivize.

Xeneelk: Currently trying to convince academics that reading can be done in other media :)

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): by incentivizing skills that require reading as a prerequisite, you get a huge increase in participation and escape from the school / learning vibe

Illich: lol

Ranganathan: carrier for activities...ok

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): reading is parsing text from symbols.

Stefwynn (Mylee Joseph): how long would a session in the game take? eg. how does it compare to sustained reading?

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): so by gamifying use of the library, we've seen a huge boost in participation, contribution, and engagement, without alienating the considerable audience that doesn't like to read or learn directly

Illich: cool

Stefwynn (Mylee Joseph): more engagement and participation is great

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): well, because every action is scored, we can see that a lot of teenagers are putting in 8-12 hour days on this thing, but the idea of "sustained reading" is a false distinction I think

Reyn√¢rdine: oh wow

Stefwynn (Mylee Joseph): wow ... that is more than they would be likely to read (unless they're reading addicts)

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): using the web for 8 hours is sustained reading

Franticread (Ellen Forsyth): so it must be fun, or the incentives high enough to do this

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): points can then be spent in a summer game shop, filled with library promo items, many of which are utterly ridiculous

Xeneelk: I so need to reference this transcript. I really wish people (read: academics) would think about adult reading in this way too.

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): but the feedback we get, from players as young as 3 and as old as 80 is that they love playing the Summer Game and are having fun using the library all summer!

Illich: that's fantastic!

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): to me, "sustained reading" just isn't a majority activity.

Stefwynn (Mylee Joseph): Great feedback

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): but I'm amazed at how much time and effort players (about 5000 this summer) are putting into the game. You can see the game at play.aadl.org

Illich: excellent :)

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): or the premium shop at play.aadl.org/shop

Stefwynn (Mylee Joseph): Will the game be able to be replicated next summer or will you need to add new challenges etc. to make it fresh?

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): be sure to check out the leaderboard, we add new challenges every week. The slow trickle of stuff has been what keeps people engaged

Elvabelle: a question here has been raised if you are able to make a distinction between quantity and quality of reading eg age appropriate/deeper meanings and texts?

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): This is the old what they want vs. what we wish they wanted argument. I'm in the what they want camp, besides, the summer context of this game is to incentivize leisure reading and make participation in the library part of their leisure lives.

Stefwynn (Mylee Joseph): public libraries usually take the angle that "at least they're reading" and "it's supposed to be fun" so wouldnt stress to much about the reading choices kids made in a regular summer program ... though some do count minutes spent reading, the game would meet those desired outcomes easily

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): I heard of a library that said you had to read two Graphic Novels to count as one book and I almost threw up.

Elvabelle: that's just mean

Franticread (Ellen Forsyth): totally - that is mean

Stefwynn (Mylee Joseph): that sounds like a police state rather than a library

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): In schools it's different, but a public library's job is to meet the needs of the community, not to judge them

Elvabelle: or as someone said here: it's being textist

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): LOL Textist, that is righteous. I am going to totally steal that.

Reyn√¢rdine: there certainly seems to be an attitude that the mouldier it is, the better.
Xeneelk: Absolutely!

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): well, here's the rub; this is a very dangerous time for control of libraries to wrest with the people of the book

Ranganathan: Eli, do you have some thoughts for us where sustained reading printed text is the expectation

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): well, like it or not, the majority of today's kids are going to spend their entire working lives looking at some sort of a screen to earn their livelihood…and the notion that learning is somehow tied to sustained print reading is undermined by how crappy the results of that approach are for the general public.

Stefwynn (Mylee Joseph): Can I ask if the game was developed 'in house'?

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): yup, my team developed the game. It's a module for drupal, you can download it now at http://github.com/aadl

Illich: open source rocks :D

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): but you need some skilled geeks to get it up and running.

Xeneelk: Hear hear :)

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): if you read a few posts down at play.aadl.org you'll see some posts from our dev team about how it all works and what tech is involved; the cutest is all the players gawking in wonder at our acronyms, but the big thing here is that when we realized that "knowledge is its own reward" has a very limited audience, and showed players that there was actually something in it for them, contribution & participation has just gone CRAZY. seriously, my inbox is like a war zone

Illich: lol

Stefwynn (Mylee Joseph): have some incentives been more popular than others?

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): yeah, the water bottles have been very popular, as have the sport sacks;

Reyn√¢rdine: nice. Water bottles are cheap!

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): the SUPREME SUMMER GAME MASTER SET sold out all 20 copies for 100,000 points each

Illich: wow!

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): you get 10 points for a tag or a rating, now we're adding old buttons from reading games past, and we've got teens clamoring for library buttons from the 80s.

Stefwynn (Mylee Joseph): retro and vintage .... cool

Illich: sweet

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): but what I love the most is how many households are all playing together; there are kids in the top 100 as young as 6 and at least one in the top 20 in her 70s

Illich: that's fantastic

Xeneelk: Awesome.

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): so the takeaway has been, by dropping the reading push, our users are reading and writing more than ever! and also, BADGES WORK.

Stefwynn (Mylee Joseph): Useful insights!

Illich: fun is a powerful force

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): our next steps are adding points for moderating all these tags and reviews we've got

Reyn√¢rdine: Fun drives Open Source development. Just remember that.

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): and then giving points for correcting OCR from our digitization projects

Reyn√¢rdine: are you meta moderating like Slashdot or what?

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): there's a badge this year called COVER IMAGE AVENGER, you get it by reporting a wrong cover image in the catalog, no, we need a much simpler system, there are basically queues of things to be reviewed, you'll choose what you'd like to do like upvote tags, downvote tags, etc

Illich: cool :)

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): but if your tag or review gets downvoted too much you lose the points you got, it really a powerful force, and we plan to use it for good and not evil if you check out the blog at play.aadl.org be sure to check out comments, there are a lot of them (at 50 points a pop =) but they are fun to see.

Illich:most definitely :)

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): did anyone have any other questions?

Illich: I'm gonna check out the blog :)

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): you can also sign up and play yourselves, a library card isn't required;

Elvabelle: question raised here: did the game still allow scope for those who wanted to read print materials?

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): totally, we have hundreds of thousands of pages of print reported and scored at 1 point per page / minute, plus 100 points for each bok you finish plus, if you still want to play the paper game, you can, and you get 1000 points online for finishing it =)

Elvabelle: okay ta for the clarification

Swayed: will there be a push to get this game out to a wider online community?

Franticread (Ellen Forsyth): it all sounds great- and very accessible

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): it's been super fun running it and coming up with ideas.

Illich: I bet :D

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): if you earn the zelda badge, it plays the zelda shop music while you browse the shop

Illich: rofl

Stefwynn (Mylee Joseph): lol

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): I think the big thing is just to move to a more expansive definition of reading

Stefwynn (Mylee Joseph): It is such a great program - thanks for sharing with us!

Illich: sounds like an awesome initiative

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): and realize that incentivizing what is already a critical skill is not good fun

Franticread (Ellen Forsyth):Eli - thank you so much for this - it sounds a great game building critical skills

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): you're very welcome! It was very fun! and you guys all have to read 2 books:

Stefwynn (Mylee Joseph): ok

Reyn√¢rdine: do we get badges?

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): 1. Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge. IF you haven't already, it's the most realistic near future i've read

2. Ready Player One, just coming out now about a huge quest inside an MMO based on 80s culture

Franticread (Ellen Forsyth): Rainbow's end is a great read

Illich: 80s :) totally awesome to the max

Elvabelle: So if we're reading two, does that count as four graphic novels?

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): LOL

Franticread (Ellen Forsyth): The next speakers will be Brian Mayer and Christopher Harris authors of Libraries got game : aligned learning through modern board games

Reyn√¢rdine: thanks for presenting :D

Franticread (Ellen Forsyth): thank you so much Eli - it sounds great - plus you might want to try reading mogworld - it is set in a mmog

Ulotrickus (Eli Neiburger): thanks Ellen, this was fun! Cheers guys!