"A whole family played Rock Band together."

~librarian

National Gaming Day 2008

University of Illinois @Urbana-Champaign Library, IL

This was the fourth gaming event for UIUC. Forty people participated in the National Gaming Day (NGD) event, mostly adults without children, and undergrad college students.

Running the Program

The Undergraduate Library offered console videogames, vintage games, and PC games. A local student game design group also demoed their new video game and had it available for students to play. Super Smash Bros. Brawl was offered as part of the national tournament hosted by Ann Arbor District Library via GT System. Mortal Kombat 3 (on Sega Genesis) and Rock Band were the most popular games.

Marketing

The Undergraduate Library used posters, emails on campus listservs, posts to campus Facebook gaming groups, posts on the library and gaming websites, and direct contact with student gaming clubs as the primary marketing tools for the event.

Impact

One outcome was the event was an opportunity to build partnerships with student gaming groups for future collection development and programming opportunities. Approximately 30 people attended, including reporters from the campus newspaper that published an article about the event, which include student interviews.

Users attended the event with friends and improved their social connections with those friends, the library got additional publicity, users improved their skills/knowledge, the reputation of the library improved with participants and the library developed community partnerships.

In terms of assessment and evaluation, a short survey was conducted at the first gaming night. This was mainly used as part of the event to gather feedback for building the collection past the initial purchase of top selling games for the (then-current) major consoles.

Literacy Connections

Rock Band requires a lot of reading - names of songs as well as lyrics. Rhythm games involve the ability to read text and recognize visual and auditory patterns.

Funding

The library already owns a number of consoles and games, so the event was no cost.

Resources

For more information, please contact David Ward at dh-ward@illinois.edu.

GT System. Ann Arbor District Library, 2008. gtsystem.org/. January 5, 2009.
Free online gaming tournament software from Ann Arbor District Library.

National Gaming Day Poster

Gaming Night Survey

UIUC Gaming Initiative

UIUC Game Collection

Kline, Greg. UI library stocking video games for research, fun. Gazette News. February 10, 2007.

Allgood, Eric. "Undergrad Library hosts gaming event - 'National Gaming Day' promotes video game catalogs." Daily Illni.com. November 16, 2008. http://media.www.dailyillini.com/media/storage/paper736/news/2008/11/14/
News/Undergrad.Library.Hosts.Gaming.Event-3545567.shtml . February 6, 2009.