The library experience is very much gamelike to begin with:

If we take a standard library: you have a unique environment (which is the library building itself, or a network of libraries if you’re looking further) , you have players of all ages (the patrons), non playing characters, helpers, games-masters or higher ranking players (the library staff). Then you have a variety of rules to abide by or not abide by, you have objects (the books and items for loan),  you even have an inventory (the library catalogue), there’s this notion of membership and exclusivity (reserving items, higher value items), then there are things like penalties and the intrinsic rewards themselves, like discovery, borrowing items for free in the mix too. You can even play for real money! 

There’s definitely ‘fun’, in that you learn new things, improve your skills, discover hidden treasures and form passions and even socialise with others when you’re using the space of the library itself!

So its not much of a stretch to connect it to gaming especially social gaming, where rewards are tied to your interaction with others, where competition can exist, where there are leader-boards and distinct achievements to be engaged with!

When I first started looking at this area, back in 2007, it was really sad, other than this post any reference to gaming in relation to libraries was all about housing games in libraries, and things like bringing some forms of gaming into libraries, there was never any mention of making the library experience itself into a game.

I kind of wish there had been or that I’d discovered it at the time. There wasn’t this massive awareness of the vernacular of social gaming, and pervasiveness of gaming on social platforms in peoples minds, if you spoke about gaming mechanics, it certainly wouldn’t have resonated with as many people as it does now. It’s taken a good few years for the superstars of the making life playable cast deliver their TED and SXSWi talks to rapturous applause, for Foursquare and Gowalla to go head to head, to get investors hot under the collar and generally for a lot of hype, noise and excitement to generate around ‘gamification’. 

So fast forward to 2011 and now its finally here. People are talking about games in libraries, whohoo.. 

but wait… 

it still begs the question why are we doing it in the first place? 
- are libraries really flagging so badly behind our other digital distractions.
- are people reading less?
- are libraries not as exciting as they could be.. or is it just because we’ve spotted an opportunity?  

In our case, its down to a few things, we’re designers and developers and we love libraries, we like imagining what something can be like, reimagined, how a simple series of interventions can have a profound effect in an area, we’ve seen it successfully affect other areas and we want to test our hypotheses to see if it applies to libraries, without faith in something, we probably wouldn’t be engaging in it, or would have give up a while ago, so we really do believe we can make a difference in this space, we believe in the transformative effect of libraries on society and on education,  more importantly we have our first partner and we have very specific criteria to adhere to, and we have loads of people we want to collaborate with.

So these things drive us!