"You can't play video games if you can't read. But it's more than just text," Neiburger said. "It's about decoding meaning from symbols and the ability to understand complex systems of abstraction."
Heather learned some of that by shooting virtual pool in the community room of her small library. She fumbled with a wireless controller the size of a large candy bar as eight other children helped her figure out how to best position the cue ball on the 6-foot projector screen.
"Oh, I see," she said, swiftly executing a poking motion with the controller and neatly pocketing a green ball.
"Nice!" one child said.
Game events are not always so polite, particularly among teenage boys.
"There will be some trash talking," Neiburger said. "You just have to be prepared to let boys be boys."
The music thumping in the background and cheering from the audience aren't quiet, either. But neither are story time and other activities offered by libraries, Roy said.
"People ask me, 'Isn't it supposed to be quiet in a library?' " she said. "Libraries are creating social commons for people to interact with each other."
Some librarians have wondered whether their peers were resorting to stunts to attract young patrons. They have debated whether video games belong in libraries.
"Why do we have to lure kids into the library with candy?" Steven M. Cohen wrote in January on his blog, LibraryStuff.net. "Shouldn't good literature be good enough?"
Cohen, a senior librarian at Law Library Management Inc., declined to be interviewed for this story.
Others believe games are a legitimate media no different from DVDs or the classic board games that many libraries have offered for decades.
"Libraries are about content, whether it's in a book or in a DVD or on the Internet," said Jenny Levine, an Internet specialist at the American Library Assn. "We don't discriminate on the container or form that it's in. If chess is OK, then why not video games?"
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alex.pham@latimes.com
