British Library. Photo © Press Fire to Win CC BY-SA 2.0
Bournemouth Library. Photo © Bournemouth Borough Council
Buckie High School. Photo © Buckie Community High School
(run in partnership with the British Library and the Read, Watch, Play online reading group) resulted in 46 games and creative pieces of work being submitted by people from around the world. One of the aims that they have for these events is building community links with external organisations including local game developers and game groups and highlighting the common ground they share with libraries. During International Games Week 2017, they hosted a talk from a local games developer. “We hosted this session partly to high- light the game development community that exists in Surrey, but also to show children and their parents who attend our Code Clubs that moving on from coding in Scratch to eventually being paid to make games is not such an impossible dream,” explained Ash Green, Surrey Libraries Digital Lead, “[we are] developing the idea that libraries are about stories, but those stories don’t just need to exist within the pages of a book, and if you want to you can create your own stories via games your- self.”
British Library Outside their work with Surrey libraries 36 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
British Library. Photo © Press Fire to Win CC BY-SA 2.0
on game jams, the British Library has also taken part in International Games Week in their own right, hosting two major games festivals, Word Play and AdventureX. Both of these events celebrated writing and narra- tive in videogames, particularly those games with significant textual components. The most recent of these events, AdventureX, included both a showcase of the wide variety of narrative games and a series of talks on
diverse topics such as writing interactive dialogue and writing meaningful black characters. These events form part of a wider culture of embracing and encour- aging the creation of new digital content and the innovative reuse of the British Library’s digital assets through projects such as the British Library Labs and the Off the Map competition.
Schools Bournemouth Library. Photo courtesy of Bournemouth Borough Council
In the education sector, only a handful of school, FE and HE libraries have taken part in the initiative, though globally the proportion is higher than in the UK. Stephen Leitch, school librarian at Buck- ie Community High School and Keith Grammar School had not used games in the library before participating in Inter- national Games Week for the first time in 2017. “I decided to join up with IGW as I felt the idea of getting kids to try board games in the library was a great idea. I wanted to see if I could get them engaging in something else other than computers, phones and making noise in the library at lunchtimes. Linking into an international initiative also made the project feel more ‘real’ and not just something the librarian had made up –
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