In an email exchange, Jane McGonigal pointed me to Hot Books, an open spaces game created by Nick Reid and played at New York Public Library last September as part of the Come Out & Play Festival. Ignore the first sentence, as we all know it's not true, and wrap your mind around the concept.

"Libraries are dying spaces. Hot Books is a game designed to bring life back into libraries by forcing players to explore, discover and share the deserted and unexplored spaces that make up a library.

Hot Books is a game where players 'attach' books to each other. The game play of Hot Books takes place over the internet. Each player starts by creating a profile for himself. Other players then attach book titles to that profile and gain a point. If a player wants to detach a book from his profile, he has to go to the library and find a specific word in that book, which allows him to detach the book. Once the player detaches the book, he can attach it to any other player.

The game augments the library into a social space –where books are re-imagined into social markers that creates a new experience of exploring a library.

Hot Books bridges a physical library with an internet social network, and the result is a game that brings a library to life while at the same time is non-disruptive, and in fact invisible, to the already fragile library environment."