After a quick drive down I-90, dropping my bags off in my room at the nearby Howard Johnsons, and several misdirected steps that included entering the wrong Marriott O’Hare Hotel (Only the corporate wizards of Marriott know why they put two major hotels less than a mile from each other), I arrived at the right Marriott fraught with apprehension. Would I learn anything that would help me to write my current mystery? Was video gaming an appropriate setting for either for libraries or for my novel? Would my rusty gaming skills translate to the games now being played?

The first day’s format followed standard conference procedure: a keynote speaker succeeded by several others whose combined mission is to reassure those waffling attendees that the topic has relevance and gravitas and your being there is not some elaborate excuse to goof off. Keynoter Henry Jenkins’ speech concerned things of which I knew next to nothing: fan fiction, youth culture, and the digital divide. He seemed most concerned that the information presented on the Web and in video games might be accepted at face value. Though I had no idea why, he seemed most heartened by the notion that video games made it OK to fail. Then he went on to list a dozen reasons why gaming is OK, even better than OK for children and young adults with examples of growth and rebirth that ranged from inner-city kids reworking Moby Dick into a street-gang version entitled Great Big White to the Urban Games Academy where these same kinds of kids learn to facilitate learning by learning to design games.

While I mulled over Jenkins’ observations, Syracuse professor, Scott Nicholson, elaborated upon the theme by discussing the benefits of gaming for libraries. He offered the first of many acronyms I was to encounter during the course of this symposium: LARP or Live Action Role Playing. Study of such events even has a name: ludology. Research in the field reveals the surprising fact that the greatest number of people playing these games are women over 40. Their teachers are children and young adults. And the prizes awarded at the library events they participate in are books. Colleges, too, have climbed aboard the gaming bandwagon. Everyone in attendance received a free copy of Prof. Nicholson’s new board game, Wits and Wagers.

The excitement level ramped up a notch with Eli Neiberger’s testimonial about conducting the gaming events at Ann Arbor Public Library. Part anecdote and part side-show spiel, Neiberger’s ESPN-style presentation showed how gaming provides social benefits by attracting children and teens, prompting them to interact with adults and other authority figures, even stimulating them to read. Just as important, gaming events result in economic and institutional fallout that benefit librarians trying to bolster declining attendance and falling usage statistics. Most important, games are fun as Eli offered to demonstrate by inviting everyone to participate in that evening’s entertainment, concurrent video and board games running in Ballrooms 1-6.

I, for one, declined. My head spinning from a welter of facts, the blare of slide-show soundtracks, my three-hour drive through the by-ways that surround O’Hare airport, and a dangerous lack of nourishment, I retreated to my Howard Johnson’s Express, downed a McDinner, and passed out between the laundered sheets of my tiny motel room a little past 6 p.m.