Games people play

Interesting piece in "Government Technology" (there's three pages of this article). I'm pretty agnostic about the virtues of gaming in libraries: if people choose to come in and play games on the public PCs and they aren't doing anybody any harm, that's fine. It keeps them off the streets, and in a few cases some of our staff have actively encouraged this precisely to stop kids and youths hanging round making a nuisance of themselves. So I can see the benefits from a social perspective. I just haven't seen much, if any, evidence of libraries using gaming to deliver on traditional library purposes. It's interesting to read how some libraries are using games for media literacy and reading literacy programmes.