International Games Day Ideas

Start thinking about International Games Day with a range of exciting opportunities and case studies from libraries and their friends around the world. First, entertain and inspire yourself by revisiting some work from our Creative-in-Residence Matt Finch: a choose-your-own-adventure exercise set in a real-life library, and published in the literary journal The Lifted Brow. You can play A Tear In Flatland here.

Roll the dice and take a chance on gaming in your library.

“Choose your own adventure games don’t need to be technically complex,” Matt told the Regional Partnerships team. “A program like Twine lets you stitch together the chapters of your story in much the same way as you’d draw a flowchart.”

The British Library has hosted an interactive writer-in-residence, and Toronto Public Library devised an event where users had to join the Literary Resistance against a book-destroying totalitarian regime.

These events involved hiring creative writers with digital skills to support the library, but just across the ditch in Auckland, librarian Danielle Carter stepped up to create their zombie-themed teen text adventure City of Souls.

If you’re more comfortable with pen and paper, Matt also worked in New South Wales with the team at Parkes Library to create the Tabletop Superheroes game which is available for download.

Watch the Parkes Library Playtest at the Railway Hotel.

That game was based on an even simpler game by Cory Doctorow which, like the Parkes edition, is Creative Commons licensed and free to adapt.

Libraries around the world join in International Games Day @ Your Library in November each year. That might sound a long way away, but if you get started now, you could make something amazing for your community…or with your community!

Image by  John Baichtal CC BY-NC-SA 2.0