This article was written by Andrew Tillman at Lee County Library in Leesburg, Georgia.

Game PLAY 2007 was held in the library's meeting room with a big screen television and kitchen. The PS2 portion was much more popular than Runescape; on average there were twelve PS2 players every meeting and five for the Runescape play.

Every player was required to fill out a permission slip with parental consent and signature. The youngest player was age 8 (and the only girl) and the oldest was 16.

After an initial meeting with participants it was decided we would meet every Friday from 1 to 5 pm for an eight-week period (June 8 - July 20). Every player received a participation prize left over from our vacation reading programs and the cash/gift card prizes were provided by The Friends of the Lee County Library.

I decided we would play up to four staple games every week for the PS2 which included Virtua Fighter 4 and Gran Turismo 3. Any remaining time would be used by games participants brought and would be played by a majority vote.

The only restriction I put on the games is they had to be for 2 or more players and could not be rated M (mature); this was done so that all the games would be rated T (teen) or below. Every game used the default settings and no memory cards were allowed which might allow the possibility of advanced characters/courses to be used.

The most popular games brought by participants included a Sonic racing game, Naruto fighting game, and a DragonBallZ Budokai fighting game.

The day would start out with the staple games and I would start with Virtua Fighter 4 and then Gran Turismo 3. After that I would try to rotate between fighting games and racing games.

For the first couple of weeks I paired up who would play against each other and based it on age and playing ability. In the end I decided that was not the fairest way to decide who competed against each other since I could easily start playing favorites without realizing it. So I began to use a pair of dice to create the matches. Each participant would role a number and they would fight the person who rolled the next highest number to theirs (ex: player who rolled 2 would fight player who rolled 3 and player who rolled 4 would fight player who rolled 5). After each game was over participants would roll again for new opponents.

The prizes for the PS2 portion of the program were a $20 gift card to Wal-Mart and two $10 gift cards.

The Runescape play was a bit more problematic than the PS2 play. The library has a mobile computer lab with five laptop computers. However the laptops are old and the batteries are no longer functional; coupled with a few missing power cords and adapters we were only able to use three of the computers at one time which limited the number of people able to play at one time.

There were only 2 regular participants that played only Runescape. The rest played Runescape while they were waiting for their round on the PS2. The two regular players were older teens about 14-17. One of them had a high level character and didn't want to start a new account for the tournament. The rest of the players had low level accounts (lower than level 20) and a few of them had never played before. Most participants didn't duel each other and just worked on leveling their skills in the game and ate food (something which we don't allow in the main part of the library). Since there was no real tournament play everyone who participated in the Runescape tournament received a postal money order that was enough to cover a one month subscription to the game.

Supplies cost about $15 a week for chips, drinks, cookies, plates, and cups. Friends of the Library also provided the supplies/snacks just as they did the cash prizes. We had to follow the county rules as best as we could and so the library obtained a health permit allowing refreshments for our summer reading club programs and the Game PLAY program. This was the first time we had been made aware that we needed a health permit to serve snacks/refreshments to the public.

The results of this program make it worth doing again another summer. Next time I would make a few changes making it easier to officiate and play:

• Use a newer game system (like Nintendo Wii, Sony PS3, or Microsoft Xbox 360).
• Have two game systems and TVs set up (one day we had about 20 participants for the PS2 portion and it made the rounds go very slow and people got too bored).
• Not have Runescape and a console system tournament at the same time (the PS2 tournament took up about 90% of my time during the tournament days which left very little time for the Runescape portion).
• Allow for a bigger budget for snacks. (I forgot how much a bunch of boys can eat when it comes to Doritos and cookies). Two family size bags of Doritos, 12 liters of soda, and two packages of cookies can disappear pretty quickly.
• If Runescape is used again as a tournament each player should start a new character for the tournament and only be allowed to use it during the tournament so that those with a high level character that have been playing a long time can't one hit kill the newer players. Or, and preferably, not use Runescape again but chose another free to play MMORPG that no one would have a huge advantage on (one that the participants have not played before or haven't played much).
• Put a plastic bag on the keyboards and game controllers for those sticky/cheesy fingers! And have a brand new extra controller on hand in case one breaks/stops working during game play.