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Gaming. And How! September 23, 2006

Posted by charris in : Community , 2 comments

Having presented a brief introduction to gaming, here are some suggestions for games that might work in a school library. The focus here is on free or inexpensive games that avoid some of the more troubling or controversial issues in gaming. In other words, no Dungeons & Dragons (though it is a great game and integrates nicely with libraries) and certainly nothing like Grand Theft Auto (ugh!).

Card Games (Dedicated Deck)
We are starting with dedicated deck card games because they offer ane asy point of entry into the world of gaming. There are no hardware requirements (though some may require dice or counters of some sort) and they tend to be relatively inexpensive (around $20).

Quiddler
One of my favorite games is Quiddler, from Set Games. The best way to describe this game is Gin Rummey meets Scrabble(tm). Play involves drawing and discarding cards to form groups, but the cards are all letters and the goal is to form words! This is an incredible language and vocabulary game. When you are sitting there staring at your hand of letters, you basically have to scroll your mind through a list of every word you know to find some that you could create. A full game, seven rounds of play that proceed from a hand size of three cards to a hand size of ten cards, takes about an hour, but a single round can take only minutes. Think about the possiblities. Have a deck available as an option for students in the library so when they are “hanging out” they can also be enriching their minds. Or, have a Quiddler letter set up as a daily puzzle…only where could you find a daily letter set? Well, the Quiddler website has a daily puzzle that you can use as well as a printout for a daily school worksheet.

Quiddler: $12.00 - Available online or find a local store by zip code.

Fluxx
If you want to teach students to be flexible, adaptable, information literate people, I can think of few games more suited to that task than Fluxx. Why? Well, Fluxx is a pretty simple game. There is only one rule, you see, you draw one card and then you play one card. That’s it. How do you win? I don’t know…nobody has played a card that allows someone to win. We will have to wait and see what develops. Understanding and applying rules to master a situation, really the heart of gaming, also happens to be a critical skill in information literacy. What is Internet searching but trying multiple paths and working through ever-shifting information tracks? Game play for Fluxx varies greatly depending on the cards, but an average game length is probably about 15 minutes. There is also a new science based version of Eco-Fluxx.
Fluxx: $8.95 - $12.95. Available online or find a local store.

Computer Games
This gets a bit tricker in libraries. Many computer games require powerful computers with dedicated graphics cards - something you don’t find much of in schools. Still, I thought long and hard to come up with two suggestions that I think have a great deal of promise for library use.