So Brent’s all angry at me now. When I first scheduled the gaming sessions, we talked about him coming with me for the day, but I hadn’t mentioned it since then, just in case. He’s referred to it a couple of times, asking when it was coming up, but I always just responded with a vague “soon.” This week I found out he had an English test that day, so I didn’t mention it at all. You can imagine how upset he was when he found out where I had been all day. It didn’t help that he watched me upload the pictures to Flickr, either.

He first noticed the case for AADL’s DVD sitting on the kitchen table, so I explained to him how they held the tournaments at their library every weekend during the “season.” His immediate response, of course, was, “Can I go?” Even when I noted it was six hours away (taking into account construction traffic), he still wanted to go. I told him how staff from their library came to my office to teach other librarians in Illinois how to do these tournaments themselves, and he thought that was very cool. He also rationalized the whole thing by saying that I probably didn’t take him because I was too scared I’d lose to him (no doubt he would have won every tournament!). He’s excited about the idea of going to the library to watch and play against his friends.

You know, normally I talk about shifting library services to where our users our, rather than forcing them to come to us. However, gaming is a great example of the reverse, and it definitely works for bringing in young boys.

Interestingly, during our conversation, my Treo was sitting on the table in front of us. When Brent realized it was there, he said, “Put on some music, dawg.” He very much thinks of my phone as an MP3 player. Of course the rest of the night, all I heard about was how big I owe him for not taking him to the gaming workshops….

If you are subscribed to the NEASIST blog with a podcast-capable aggregator, you already have the MP3s on your hard drive, but for everyone else, the files are now available at the following links:

Megan’s Talk (22.8 MB, 1:06:10 minutes)

My Talk (20.6 MB, 59:54 minutes)

Michael’s Talk (18.2 MB, 52.50 minutes)

Panel Discussion and Questions (12.1 MB, 35:08 minutes)

There’s also a repost that pulls together all of the Powerpoint presentations, so you can follow along if you’re at a computer. I haven’t listened to them yet, but I’m not sure my podcast will work very well without viewing the slides because I use so many screenshots to illustrate my points.

Thanks to the NEASIST crew for all of their hard work on this and to my co-presenters for making it such an interesting day!

I just finished posting on Flickr a set of pictures from today’s gaming in libraries workshops. If you weren’t able to attend, you really missed a great session!

BTW, I tagged them all “gaminginlibraries” in case anyone else wants to play along, too. Or maybe we should start a group?