Thing 15: Online Games and Libraries

This thing was tough for me. I can see that many libraries are embracing games as a way to bring in young people, and that games can be educational. However, I don't work in a public library. Frankly, when young people visit us they're either with a school group, working on History Day projects, or doing other research for school. Our main clientele is older, quieter, and fairly serious. That doesn't mix well with games.

I took a brief look at Puzzle Pirates but declined to play. I really don't have the time or interest in navigating the pirate world. The puzzles I enjoy are crosswords, sudoku, trivia quizes, and so on.

My exploration of Second Life at first seemed to be more promising. I'm mostly struggling to live my first life and don't have a lot of time or interest in building a second one. I took the video tour, which was not thrilling for me. I registered and then started to download the software for Second Life and then had Second Thoughts. Do I really want this on my home computer? Will I use it? I stopped and deleted all files. When I tried to get on Second Life it recognized my username Medora Sorbet (very nice, don't you think?), but the password I thought I had used didn't work. I requested help and got an e-mail that was less than helpful. The second time I did that it directed me to call a phone number and mentioned Linden dollars. In the interests in preserving my shrinking but real American dollars and my sanity, I exited the site.

There may be a role for Second Life in libraries. I suppose if that's where a lot of people went, then we could have a presence to answer reference questions as some librarians already do. However, given the special nature of the materials in our library and limited time, I don't think this is the best use of our resources. We're thinking about making a lot of links in Wikipedia topics to our library collections. I think that will give us a bigger bang for our buck or effort.