 Good morning and welcome to Encompass Live. My name is Michael Sowers. I'll be your host today while Krista is stuck in a bunch of meetings. And actually I'm feeling under the weather myself, so it's been a little bit of a reorganization this morning here at the Library Commission. Encompass Live is your weekly free online webinar dealing with topics of interest to Nebraska librarians and librarians from all over the world. They are always free to attend. They are held every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. And today's topic is Are You Game? Game night at Perkins Library. We have with us today Susan Franklin from the Perkins Library. Let me turn on Susan's microphone. Susan, are you there? I am. Well, good morning. Okay, what we're going to do here is we're going to dive right in. So I'm going to go ahead and give Susan presentation rights here. And let you just take it away and we do see your slides. Excellent. Okay, good morning everyone. This presentation is sort of of the how we done it good variety. So I don't go into a lot of research. Of course, there's a lot of research out there. A lot of studies and statistics that show that gaming is linked to intellect or coordination or socialization. I'm not going to worry about any of that. I will, however, talk about why we decided to experiment with game night. What equipment, supplies, publicity, and partners we needed to make it fly the first time. How we went about planning it. How the event grew. The benefits to holding your own game nights, some of the challenges or obstacles, and what we have planned for the future. So motivation, a.k.a. everybody else is doing it. And yes, I would totally jump off the bridge if it meant a new service for the library. But motivation included the North Rock Library Commission is interested in gaming. Has held gaming events at conventions. American Library Association has held gaming events at conventions. And also it has a national gaming day, which this year happens to be November 13. So you have a little less than three weeks. That's your homework from today's session to plan your own game night. Omaha Public Library did a board silly event. But theirs was an after hours in the library, a built only pay for and cash par event. Which of course, those elements would not work in my or many other environments. And then other libraries and colleagues from across the nation have experimented with gaming. And then of course, the research on millennials, they're doing it, they're gaming. But it's not just for millennials. So all of these things added up to a desire for us to try gaming. What do you have to lose if it doesn't try, basically. So we started with, well, we have two gaming systems in the very first game night we had. I borrowed one gaming system from a Republican Valley library system. And it on that state end, I think all of the regional library systems have gaming systems alone. Don't quote me on that. And the second gaming system was mine personally that I brought from home. So in the beginning, we had Wii games, we had classic games, the golf, the bowling, the baseball, those things that come with the system. We had Dance Dance Revolution 3, which was mine personally. And Cabela's Big Game Hunter, which was mine personally. And then when we advertised, we let it be known that students could BYOD or bring your own game. And guess what, they did. We also started with board games like Shoots and Ladders, Monopoly, Candyland. Card games like Slammich, Rook, Playing Cards, which I left to play pitch. It weren't for that pesky thing called needing to get your bachelor's degree. I probably would have just not gone to classes and played pitch 24 hours a day. We also had other games. So we had Factor Crap, Apples to Apples, In the Pickle, Jenga, Connect 4x4, and Vanagrams. All right. For supplies, we had one TV, the bigger the better per Wii. You can also use LCD projectors and screens if TVs aren't feasible or a projector and a wall. We needed to have long extension cords and surge suppressors. We needed buckets of batteries double A. The remotes for the Wii controllers go through them, go through batteries quite rapidly. We needed space for spectators. Of course, we already had tables throughout the library and comfy couch areas where people wanted to play traditional or card games. And then we needed food, of course. More on that later, but we all know that food is going to bring the people. If you serve food, they will come. As far as publicity, we totally saturated the campus. So we did flyers in every building and dorm. We prominently placed flyers in the library. We included our game night announcement and HC announcements, which is a daily email that goes to faculty, staff, and students. Not sure how many people read it, but hopefully they at least stem it. We notified all of Hastings College's media entities. So it's TV, newspaper, radio, and website components, all we're aware of. And hopefully it's a publicized event for us. Word of mouth. We had a Facebook ad that listed on our Facebook library group page and created a Facebook invitation. And, of course, we got student assistance buy-in. So, of course, they spread it through word of mouth to their friends and roommates. And then finally, best year coercion. I'm the faculty sponsor of a fraternity on campus, and I sort of suggested that if they knew what was good for them, they should attend. And also, my son, his roommate, and her girlfriend. It was a non-negotiable attendance for them as well, but they did have fun. So this is our first fire. And we did it right before finals week, end of the semester, couple before finals week, end of the semester. And so this is our first one, and our draw was that Dr. Dudley, our esteemed president, who will retire at the end of this school year, agreed quite gamely, no pun intended, to come and was very, very, very gracious about trying out games and sticking around to play with the students. I hope everyone is still with me. I hope I'm not going too quickly. Two ingredients to our success. Snacks, as I mentioned before. The first time we had trail mix, which we purchased, and homemade caramel bugles. That's right, homemade. You can buy caramel bugles in a bag, but they're like $3 for five ounces or something ridiculous like that. You can make your own, and they are a perfect combination of sweet and salty. It was like sherry crack for the students. They kept coming back to caramel bugles, and then they'd go game. And then secondly, as I said, President Dudley is buying. People wanted to see what he would play and challenge him. So those were the two cards the first time. And as you can see, I cut his face off. But this is President Dudley playing Dance Dance Revolution 3 with a student. And of course, he had no idea what he was doing. I don't have enough coordination to play that game, but he absolutely was gracious and stuck it out, even though he felt uncomfortable with it too. So the final scores for observations for our first game night were that freestyle gaming was successful. And by that, I mean what we did. If I remember the two Wii consoles set up at two different TVs, two different places. We just had, we had the snacks on one table area, and then we just put all of our other games and played them on the other table. And so there was no sort of organization or sign up for games or whatever. We just let students, faculty, and staff who attended groups themselves grab a game and go. And it actually turned out really, really well. Homemade snacks, of course. Trump store bought ones. And this is where I will offer to solve my caramel bugle recipe to the highest bidder. So we can talk about that at the end during the question portion. And we had approximately 50 students, faculty, and staff for that first night. They played a range of games. Some were surprising. Some were new, like nerds. I'd never heard of nerds before. But it's a multiplayer game. Each person needs a deck of cards, and it's sort of like a solitaire except you're playing solitaire yourself and also against other people. So it's kind of interesting, fast-paced game. And I'll talk a little bit more about that later. Game nights started out slow, but 30 to 60 participants how come each event. And we've had, I think, four now. And we have what we've found, which isn't surprising. We have our core group of library groupies, as I call them, and student assistants. And then you have people who are in the library sometimes. But then you have this great group of people that you've never seen before who are now in the library because a roommate or a friend or maybe they've just seen the sign and decided that game night sounds like something they would like to try out. So it really is a way to burrow into some untapped users in your community. And then volunteers and staff, by volunteers I mean the captive student assistants who are on duty, need to mingle even though they are sought after opponents. So someone has to sort of mingle, take pictures, keep the snacks flowing, make sure that people are having a good time, make sure that there aren't any technical difficulties. That sort of thing. All right, so the first game night was so successful that word of mouth buzzed from two students who attended it back to the Dean of Students the next day because they happened to serve on a committee with the Dean of Students. So that's the first part. They buzzed about it and said, oh, that was great. You know, what a great idea, how much fun. They were recapping some of the things that happened like presently playing bandstand for evolution. And so then our Dean of Students came to me and said, hey, by the way, good job. I heard you had a game night. I was told how much fun it was. And I said, yes, it absolutely was. I said that the library was planning to make it a semesterly event, but ruminated out loud, not really the intention of soliciting a donation, but just said, ideally, though, we need to figure out how to purchase our own gaming systems because, you know, just more convenient than borrowing from the library system, bringing my own personal one, asking students to bring their own personal consoles. And I was elated at the fact that he said, well, hey, we have an Armstrong McDonald, McDonald's Armstrong. I can't remember which one it goes now. Grant for Enhancement for Student Life. And I have some extra money. We're to the end of the grant. And if you give me an idea of how much two consoles plus overalls you need would cost, I can see if I can pay for it. So the money tree was right there. And through this grant, Dean of Students generously purchased two gaming systems, two equipment bags, because our systems circulate when we're not having game night. Four additional Wii remotes, because as you may or may not know, there are lots of games that you can have multiple players, four, six, whatever. And then three Wii games. He bought Mario Party, which is a hit with students regardless of age. Just Dance, which is actually the number one game in our library, and DJ Hero. So here are some pictures of the first game night. And you can see over here, President Dudley playing apples to apples with students. You can see the manograms. These four people, one clenching his head, I think he's studying. So if he were over here and no pair, he'd be having a better time, right? Okay, connect four by four, premium. I'm going to wave through these sort of quickly. Fact or Prop, Jenga, Giant Shas, which we have in our library all the time. A traditional puzzle, which we usually have a puzzle going in the coffee area, and it's popular. People grab a cup of coffee in between classes, fit a few pieces in. But it really did surprise me that students came to game night and worked on a puzzle together. That was kind of neat. Our second game night, we held in January during what we call J-term. It's our three-week term in the middle of fall and spring semesters. So we tried it out during J-term since it's sometimes a lighter load. And again, it went over really well. This is Wee Mario Party, and you can see you can have multiple players. This happens to be, I hope my pointer is going, the young man in the J-hawk basketball shirt is her son, and apparently he likes to play Wee Mario Party with his eyes closed. Now that's just where I caught him. That's the camera. Just Dance, as I said, is our most popular game by far, and it has 30 fracks for those of you not familiar with it, and very few people are. My son actually gave it to me as a Christmas present last year for several reasons. He basically was mocking me because I like all sorts of music, including disco, and he had seen an advertisement for this corny game. So it was kind of like the joke was on me, like him giving it to me, except the joke is really on him. So what it is, is it has three songs, and a little animated person, or in one case a mascot dog, moves, dances, does choreography to the songs, and then however many players, I think four to six can play at a time, you follow, you hold the remote in your hand and you follow the moves, and so you get points for following exactly and whatnot. But students who don't like to dance in public don't like to be fools out of themselves. It's just amazing that this game is the most popular. And the second version came out October 12, so I'm working on getting my hands on that. Now the second game night, I put a sign up saying to prevent a certain person from having her self-humiliating just dance moves preserved for infinity. Please no cameras or video cameras. Thank you for your compliance. Noncompliance will be strictly punished. Of course by her that meant me. Of course I'm exempted from that. I can photograph people making fools of themselves, but I don't want me in there. However, as you can see right there in the middle, they don't listen. So this is a group of just dancers including me, and you can see the rapture, you can see how fun people are having, and by the way, it will make you sweat. You will exercise simultaneously while laughing and having fun. More just dance, and it cracks me up every time. It's always the men who get into it, and they're absolutely into it. So this is what a screen looks like. This is one of Spice Girls songs, and you can sort of see each bar here, and each icon represents one player, and so while you're playing the game, you can gauge how well you're hitting the marks in comparison to your dance mates. Next, we have students who like this game so much that they come prepared. I'm not sure what his cat or mask are about, but he showed up ready to game. He's got his gloves on so he does not hold, doesn't drop the remote, and he's absolutely ready for the game. In this picture, our second most avid dance player showed up. Remember, this is in January, and he had jeans on, and yes, those are his jeans on this carpet, and he said, all right, I'm ready to play, and he unzipped and unhooked his pants, and I'm like, whoa, Kirk, what are you doing? And he's like, hey, if I'm going to bring my game, I'm going to bring my game, and bring it he did, he had gym shorts underneath. This is DJ Hero. You can kind of see, you have a turntable and little levers that go up and down, so you are acting like DJ. And then our next game night was on President's Day, so we had a nice little patriotic theme. And again, this is Nerds. You can see three people, and they each have a deck of cards. I think they're playing cranium in the background. Ooh, this is really, really dark, but it's not that way on my slide, but this is a Nerds scorecard, and you can see that I kept it because I annotated that Susan was the winner, and that the others were not winners. So, you know, there's nothing like being a good sport as well. Jenga, again, please excuse the sound of my phone ringing in the background. I tried to turn it down, it won't be silent. And then our fourth game night, the first one held this semester, was Monday, December 20th, and it was right after, it was the week, third full week of school, and it, we wanted to start off pretty quickly so that freshmen could get oriented to library game, and it was a success as well. You can see Monopoly. It also coincided with the first celebration of international talk, like a pirate day, so we had various pirate stuff. This picture didn't come out very well. I should have included one with people in it, but we had a nice swashbuckling pirate laugh and pirate, and they could put their faces in the holes, become the pirates, and take pictures. And this time I made caramel corn puffs, which were also decadent, and you can see we had first stickers, some pirate coins, pirate eye patches. This bowl over to the side had pirate bouncy balls. So we kind of threw in a double, it was a two for one celebration of pirate, talk like a pirate day, and then also game night. So, my how we've grown. From the first to the fourth, we've grown in number of participants, and of course, depending on the night of the week itself, we've heard Monday, Wednesday, Thursday. We're closed on Fridays, Tuesdays. It also depends on the time of semester and other activities that are going on. But we've found that 7 to 10 is the right amount of time, and that you really can't go wrong with those hours, at least in our setting. We've acquired more Wii games, including Like the Star Wars, Mario Party 8, and Seat It. We have outside games now, so we have Botchy Ball, we have OK. We've added more board games, like Craneon. We have two that are unique to Hastings College days, which is about, it's like Trivial Pursuit, except it's based on the Hastings College campus, and then Hometown USA Hastings, and then lots of more other games. So, Spoons, Pasa, Quidditch, Card Game, and it's amazing how delighted students get when they realize Spoons. You haven't played Spoons for a long time, or Slamwitch, or Old Maid. It's amazing that they will revert back to the Shoots and Ladders stage sometimes before trying out a new, quote, adult game. Potential problems, OK. Noise, which our first floor were not big noise teachers. Our first floor is basically normal level conversation. People who really want to get intimate with their books and studies generally go upstairs anyway, which is the quieter floor. But, of course, on game nights, you can't tamp down the desire to, you know, oh, yeah, or, yeah, take that, I got it. So, it is going to be noisy. There's a fear of monopolization. When I first started, I was worried that, you know, one group of kids monopolize the Wii or, you know, monopoly or whatever all night. And it just didn't happen. We found students playing games with students, other students, that they didn't already know just because they wanted to play the same game. And they were pretty good about taking turns, you know, the bowl, and then they'd look around and say, do other people in place of the slot, let it out. A concern, of course, is theft or misuse of the games and equipment, which we are blessed in our environment. We simply do not have that problem at all. And we circulate all of our games. So, any of our games can be checked out or Wii consoles checked out. Everything is circulating except when the library is using it for game night. There's the consideration of a mess from snacks. But we are big on the food. We love the food at Perkins Library. And so, that's just something that we take as a given. Whenever we have an event, we have snacks. We're going to have crumbs on the floor. You're going to have to clean up. You're going to have sticky remarks, but that's just what it is. And then, you prepare to answer why from outside. So parents or administrators or whoever the case may be. Expect reactions, questions, and comments from your user community. And then, that's when you rely on research and statistics and studies on how gaming promotes learning, creativity, intellectual pursuit, et cetera. And then, you go challenge someone to a game of paper scissors rock because that could be more creative or intellectual than that, right? Challenges and considerations include batteries. So, are you going to do rechargeable or regular? We do regular. As I said, the day of week, time span, you're always going to have conflicts. You run into the problem of having it be too short, too long. And of course, these are things you adjust. They're self-adjusting. You could do surveys, which we did. The second game night, we did a small survey. And so, I didn't include it here, but we asked things like, how did you hear about game night? Did you come alone? What games did you play? What games didn't we have that you would have liked to have played? What day of the week would you prefer it to be on? What time period would you prefer it to be on? And so, we gathered some feedback and took it for what it was worth. Games, are you going to borrow them by them or BYOG? We, of course, as I said, borrowed it first, then we bought. And now students know to bring their own games. And that works out wonderfully as well. So, last time we had someone bring, I can't remember what it was called now. But it was a freshman. So, this freshman was paying attention to the flyers when it said bring your own game. Consider whether freestyle or refereed is going to work for your particular environment and user population. For us, freestyle works perfectly where people can just organize themselves into groups and find their own place in the library where it has adequate seating and space for that particular game. But I know situations where refereed actually works better, maybe with smaller kids, but with us freestyle is just fine. And then, other, you can talk about if anyone has any experience or can think of any other concerns when we get to the question part. Benefits, lots and lots of benefits. Relaxation and recreation for all. Positive energy in and for the library. They see the library as a fun place. And I like to think that our library is a little bit higher ranking on the funometer than lots of libraries that are academic. But it's good to see all of the positive energy, and it's good to see other people who just come in to study seeing that people are having fun in the library. It's validation. As a library, it's more than just books or as the need for multiple types of literacy. It's great. You can read. It's great. But you also need to be social. You also need to have hand-eye coordination. And then also, as part of this, work-play balance, which is something everyone as an adult is going to struggle with. So it helps them moderate that balance. Of course, the connections between students and library staff and students and other students, as I said, it gives them a chance to see us in a light that is exactly that lighter. So they get to interact with us on a really fun level. And they also get to meet students that they may not have met before. Increased traffic, of course, pulling patrons in. Gabe Knight has brought us, like the Kirk, the young man who shed his jeans in order to have gym shorts and more freedom while kicking my butt at Just Dance. I had never seen him, and he was a sophomore. I had never seen him on campus or in the library before. And he came out for game night. And now he will not miss a game night. So that's great. Increased traffic, pulling patrons in. The sheer fun of it. Why not do it? It's a feel-good thing. It's a good time. And it doesn't require bucket loads of money or time to pull off successfully. I read some other presentations or kind of how we done it goods, too. And there are a ton of libraries who spend lots and lots of money on game night, and we don't. Aside from the initial outlay of buying the games, which you spend this time of year or before Christmas, you can get some really good deals. Aside from that and the snacks, it's really cheap, at least the way we do it. More benefits. We have experimented with strategically using Gabe Knight for a way to pull freshmen in as back-to-school thing as a stress reliever before finals week. So figure out a way to make it useful and worthwhile to your students. It gives us insight into millennial life, and it gives them, in some sense, as I said, into our personalities. It brands the library as a real-life social networking place, as a relevant place to students, just as relevant as interacting on Facebook. This is a real-life social networking place where you can poke people in person if they're beating you. Now, you might think with all my jokes that I'm really, really competitive, but I'm really hot. It's an inevitable introduction to the library's spaces, resources, et cetera, because they have to find a space to play their game. And, of course, it's not a surprise that students who are running for Gabe Knight tend to use our other services and resources while they're there. So they'll come before Gabe Knight, or they'll take a break from gaming and look up an article or do whatever it is they need to do. But in the end, Goodwill is generated for the library. All right, future of gaming at Perkins Library. We are continuing to add games to our collection, as our budget allows. We take requests from students. Of course, that's a no-brainer, because if students are playing games, then they'll want to play them here. We plan to continue to hold game nights at least twice per semester, one toward the beginning of the semester, one toward the end. We will continue to seek partners such as our peer ed groups on campus or the Student Association. So if we can have a partner in staging a Guitar Hero attorney or whatever the case may be, all the better. We listen to our students. I kind of wrap that in with adding games. And we want to try hosting tournaments, like a bowling tournament where students self-organize into teams and then go at it until the death. But most importantly, we want to keep on having fun. My personal future goals with gaming are to get someone to challenge me to Twitter. And I'm serious about this. We have Twitter. I've been stretching for like two years. No one will play Twitter with me. And my goal number two is to get this guy to take a 10-minute study break to join in the fun. This happens to be one of our international students. He's from Germany, and he's always in the library. I cannot get him to take even a 5-minute, 10-minute break. He has too much homework to do. So I think this is a senior year. I will get him to gain him before it's the end of the year. I'm just determined to do it. Ideas for Contemplation. So try hosting an event on 2010 National Gaming Day, which is coming up on November 13th. And if you go to nationalgamingdayala.org website, there are some ideas and different resources, examples of publicity. So I would encourage you to try that, even if it's something small. If you do just a soft rollout, get into the spirit on National Gaming Day. Try an intergenerational game night. When we have faculty, staff, and students, it's kind of fun because we all come from different gaming backgrounds, and it's just kind of neat to see someone in his 60s sit down with an 18-year-old and play a game of cranium. Start with a survey, formal or informal, to see if your users would be interested in the game night. You can incorporate library instruction into a gaming event. For all creative, you can easily do that. Especially if you're doing younger kids, you can also incorporate quizzes or crossword puzzles about the library or scavenger hunts that can be going on simultaneously while people are gaming. And basically, I would encourage you to start small and grow from there. And if it doesn't work, then it doesn't work. You either adapt it or you ditch it, but at least you tried it. Remember what William Shakespeare said? All the world's a game, and all the men and women are merely players. If this be true, let's play on. Are you game? Questions? All right, thank you. Move my mic. Thank you, Susan. That was great. I want to remind everybody if you've got a question, we will happily take those now. If you have a microphone, you're welcome to give a hand raise in the GoToWebinar software, and I'll turn your mic on for you. Everybody is currently muted. Or you may go into the questions area in the GoToWebinar interface and type in your question that way, and I will happily read those back out to Susan. We got one question already, and it's a really good one. I'm just going to throw in that we just did our gaming night at the NLA conference, and we found that actually the board games ended up being slightly more popular than the video games. We had card games going. We had Scrabble going. Roomful librarians. You think Scrabble's going to be popular? In fact, there were some very interesting, shall we say, variations on your traditional Scrabble rules once some alcohol appeared. We'll just get to that. I'm not sure there's any photographic evidence of that, at least none that's being posted on the internet. Anyway, it was fun. Let's go ahead and I'll read some of these questions out that have come through. The first one is actually here from some staff at the commission, and you mentioned about dealing with comments that are coming in, and basically the question was, did you get any negative comments? What were they? How did you handle them? Were there any maybe generational issues involved with library staff actually thinking whether this sort of event was appropriate? Actually, no. I live in a wonderful bubble here at Hastings College Perkins Library because as long as I can make a case that it's something that is beneficial to our students and to the library and it doesn't cost lots of money, I generally get to do it. About the only comments, I mean, some people did say why, not staff-wise. In fact, that one picture showed two of our other staff members playing banana grams. Everyone came the first time and everyone can't come all the time. I'm here all the time because I'm the one hosting it, but I don't expect the rest of the staff to be here all the time. The only really negative feedback we get even from other people in the library is that they wish they could join in. Again, I'm trying to work on some people getting them here in the first place and then getting the ones who are intently studying to break for 10 minutes. You know they're breaking for 10 minutes anyway. Why can't they come play a per game? Michael is absolutely right. The board games, the card games, out of the blue games like Nerds are way more popular. Not to say that the weeds aren't in continual and always used, but they rotate, so board games much more popular than we. I hope that answered your question. Sure, and I suppose if that's the complaint you're going to get, that's the one you want. Yes. We also had a pretty fun game that I like to play, a card game called Flux. Always fun and I will teach anybody to play at any time. Next question from Steve. Do you work with the local middle or high schools at all as that's his demographic? I do not. Hastings College had all of the middle schoolers in 8th grade on campus earlier this semester and I did a session for them in the library on library science which you can imagine how that went. I would not have enough energy to put on a game night for middle schoolers but I imagine you would want to do some refereeing and you would want to make sure that students aren't left out, that sort of thing. It sort of takes care of itself on the college level. But I do know from perusing the web and such that there are resources for holding teen gaming nights. Good luck. I know Lincoln City Libraries does it and generally opens it to public and I've seen they do have some younger individuals show up. You do kind of have that older demographic which does lead to a couple of interesting questions that have come in here. What if people bring inappropriate games and there is a younger audience and tied to that, what about shooter games? If somebody was to bring Call of Duty or something like that. You're dealing with a college audience obviously but are you kind of watching for the content or has it just not been an issue? It's not been an issue in our environment. No one has brought Call of Duty and probably, I don't know, I'm not sure what I would do. I've never played Call of Duty. I'm assuming that it's a fairly or could be a fairly long game and we try to keep the types of games we want on the Wii are concrete, beginning and ending, ten friends bowling, just dance, three dances in a set. Mario Party is a little bit different than Mario games are but usually 10, 15 minutes per game. I'm not sure I would say anything or disallow it if people were playing because it's just not an issue with my age group. Okay, yeah, completely understandable. Susan Lee has a comment here. We have a team gaming twice a month and elementary student gaming once a month at a public library and they call their program Play It Up. So that sounds pretty cool. Any other questions from the group? That's kind of the list. I'll comment. It never hurts to mention that you need money from the sounds of it because you never know where it'll come from. So that's a very good point. So let me see here if there's anything else. We've got some more time. If people have questions, just give everybody a chance to type for that. Was there anything else, Susan, you wanted to throw in or mention before we wrap up if any other questions don't come in? Back on inappropriate content or whatever. I'm sorry, I still wanted to attend your gaming session at NLA but being so close to home, I had to go home and be real and not partake in the fun. There's always next year. Good, excellent. I will be there. Game on. College students tend to have different varieties of games, like their own versions. And I did learn that there is an alternate version of Jenga. Did anyone know that? I was unaware of that. It is where college students write with Sharpies. It's like a truth and dare type of thing. So they write with Sharpies on each piece, something embarrassing for something that has to be done. And I can't remember how it logically would be. If you successfully put the piece in and you get to ask someone to do it, do that task. So the first time I brought Jenga out, one of the students yelled, dirty Jenga? No, not Jenga. They have their alternate versions, but again, we keep it fairly tame in the library. Well, like I said, that kind of happened to us at conference. And I will say, don't make any generalizations about or don't make any assumptions about the generations involved in that version of the Scrabble game they were playing. Exactly. You never know. It was wide ranging, yes. Yes. Gaming will bring out the best or the worst in people, and then when you add alcohol and plus librarians. I mean, you got a lot to them anyway. Yeah, exactly. We did get a couple more questions in. What time of day was most successful for your gaming events asks Kate? Oh, I'm sorry. I should have said that. 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. Our library is open on Sunday through Thursday, actually, evenings until midnight. At 7 to 10, it seems to be, and like I said, it starts out a little bit slow. So athletes are just being done with practice and showering and eating at 7 p.m. If I weren't so old, I would go. And if I didn't live half an hour away, I would go 8 to 11 because they think more people would stay. And also the, I have, though, in the past two times, instead of just gathering everything up when it ends, if people are still playing, I just leave them playing and ask them to turn off the Wii or put their games back on the table and deal with it in the morning. Great. Next question. Susan asks, do you circulate your board games and are they barcoded? How does that work? We absolutely do circulate all of our games. They are barcoded. And we haven't had, I haven't been keeping track. We just got that in place primarily because I just got organized over the summer and so we just had one game night and then I haven't been keeping track. But I do know that I've come in and seen people playing Slamwich or is everyone familiar with Slamwich? I can say I'm not. Okay, it's a card game. It's a children's game and it's kind of like that hand-slapping game Jax or whatever it is. But there's, like, if I remember correctly, a grandma and a grandpa and then each card looks like a piece of bread or a piece of lettuce or a piece of bologna or a pickle or something. And so you're building a sandwich and you play your cards and you get to the game stoppers, you get to slap your hand down and then you get to keep all of those cards. So it's the equivalent of Old Maid or something totally, totally childish and I have come into the library before and seen kids, students who have just picked it up off the shelf and checked it out but they're taking a break playing it. So that's good too. We have in-library use and also checkout use. Great. And the only other question we have outstanding is, will your slides be available? And our general rule with Encompass Live is that we do make all the material available. We'll work with Susan to do that assuming Susan, you're okay. Now that I'm putting you on the spot. Absolutely. Okay, yep. This has been recorded. Audio and video will post up as our podcast. We'll post the video up on the Encompass Live archive and we will make a link available to the slides for everybody to look at and print later. So that seems to be the end of our questions. So Susan, I want to thank you very much for doing this and working between conference and everything else. We kind of put this together for the last minute this morning but everything worked out lovely, I will say. So that is great. So I'm just going to go ahead and wrap this up and point out that next week's Encompass Live, I will be in Monterey, California and attending the Internet Librarian Conference. And if everything goes well, I will be talking live with some people about what's been going on in the Internet Librarian this next week. And then the week after that, we will have some folks from NLA coming and doing a kind of NLA NEMA 2010 wrap-up, kind of give you some of the highlights and what went in the conference for those of you who weren't able to make it. And I do know on the NLA SlideShare site that a lot of the presentations are being put up, so those will be available for anybody else who didn't get to attend or is looking for slides. And with that, I will thank Susan once again and thank you all for attending today's edition of Encompass Live. And we will see you next week. Thanks a lot. Bye-bye.