Lomira Quadgraphics Community Library

Portal 2 teaches spatial reasoning while being EPIC fun!

Come to the library to get all sorts of fun new console games for Wii, Xbox and Ps3.   Check out our Games page (found under the “multimedia” menu link) for updates when we add more games.

Some people wonder why an institution best known for books offers videogames. In fact, libraries are about all sorts of literacy. Information literacy is better supported by games than just about anything else in the world, including real life, for these and many other reasons:

• Our brain responds well to the reward system of learning new things and experiencing new worlds and shows it with bursts of happy-making dopamine when we level up, or accomplish tasks, or win.
• We are actively creating our own learning through games, which makes it stick.
• There are no real negative consequences for risks, which encourages innovative thinking.
• There are big learning rewards for small efforts, unlike in life, when you have to work very hard to see results. This allows us to learn things quickly.
• We get to try on other identities and discover what it feels like to be tough, or sneaky, or witty, or the things we perceive as outside ourselves. We learn empathy through living alternate lives, just as we do with fiction.
• We become aware our own skills and limitations, test them, build them, are appreciated for them.
• We learn multimodally, which suits people with different learning styles.
• We become fluent in different semiotic domains, or symbolic worlds, in which the culture of practice may be very different from our regular lives. This happens when we when we game as a soldier, as a detective, as an elf mage, or as someone who is a superhero. This fluency translates to quicker learning of “realworld” semiotic domains, as when we switch jobs.
• If reading is the most important thing to you, then you will love games. There is an incredible variety of reading needed to play most games, from the very complicated manuals, wikis and discussion boards to the various levels of formality with which ideas are textually represented in-game, depending on who is speaking.

There are a lot more reasons to game. Check out James Gee’s book What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, available at the library, for more information on why videogames and libraries are a perfect fit.