Caracal.docx



afternoon, everyone, welcome back. Hope you had a great lunch and happy Friday afternoon. We?re here for Animal Crossing in the library. Just to note, the session is 75 minutes. So it will take us right through the planned break this afternoon, right up into the final session of the day. So just be prepared for that. Take a break when you need it. As I'm sure you've been able to practice with the ask a question function already earlier this morning. So please remember to put your questions there. And there's already some great conversation happening in the chat. So just keep on with that. And I will now turn things over to our presenters.Ok, you want to go first, Debbie?Sure, yeah. Hi, everyone, my name is Abbey Stevens. I am the tween librarian at the Public Library of Brookline in Massachusetts. And for those of you who don't know, that's just like right outside of Boston.And I am Robin Brenner. I'm the teen librarian at the Public Library of Brooklyn. And we obviously work together with very overlapping age ranges. So mine is. An audio issue.Everyone hear us? OK. So clearly it's working for most people.But anyway, yes, so we like I do grades nine to 12.You do 8th grade also.Oh, do I.Yeah.Oh, that's right. We do. Sorry, we made that distinction. We had a lot of debating about the distinction. I guess so.And then I have seventh, fifth, sixth and seventh grade. Yeah.Right.So yeah we just thought we'd start off with saying hello and letting you see our faces a little bit. But otherwise I'm going to go ahead and start our presentation. Hold on just a moment.Oh, yeah, the person sound is working now. That's great.Oh, good. Let me help you. Slightly less together here. OK, can everybody see the slides?Yeah. Looks good. Like we're good.Ok, so I am going to start us off by actually showing you all a trailer that we need to introduce our animal crossing island to our patrons and to, to kind of the world in general. We figured it would be nice to start off with a way for you guys to see a little bit of what the game actually looks like in action. This normally has sound. We don't have a way to play sound at the moment. So we're just don't worry about the fact that there is no sound. It's basically, just imagine like Pirates of the Caribbean music going on. So here you go.All right, so hopefully that'll work for you, but as you can see, it's a, we had a lot of fun putting that together and we can send it out to everyone if you want to hear it with the appropriate pirate music.It's so fun with the music. It's like really dramatic and but it's great.So, again, do you want to start off just with a little bit of the history of the game?Yeah, yeah. So for those of you who aren't super familiar with animal crossing or gaming in general, we just have a little summary here. So what is Animal Crossing? It's a game that was released on the switch just this past year, March of twenty, twenty, kind of right at the beginning of all of this, you know, pandemic. And so it kind of came right at a good time for people to have a sort of escape from what was happening in the real world. And it's a really kind of passive game. You are brought to an island where you're told like this is your island. You can make it whatever you want. So you build your own house, you decorate the island however you want. You bring other villagers to the island, little animals that live on your island with you. And there aren't really many goals in the game. You kind of fish, you catch bugs, you make outfits for your character. You decorate your, your house in your island any way you want. You can, like, give gifts to your islanders. It's really just kind of a make it what you will kind of game. And one of the main features in the feature that we kind of use a lot or the main purpose we got it is that you can visit other people's islands and they more importantly, can come visit yours. And that is how we bring people to our island. It's kind of an interactive game. Oh, and this is the fifth game in the Animal Crossing series. The first one, which was just called Animal Crossing, was released in 2002. And I played it as a small child. I think I was nine years old and I've been playing, I played every single game, animal crossing games since then, pretty religiously. And so I was already really excited about this game when it came out just for my own personal fun and was really, really excited when we thought of the idea of using it for our life, for a library programming as well.And just to chime in for folks who are wondering kind of what your skill level needs to be, I, on the other hand, have never played on an animal crossing before and actually was hearing about it from Abbey and my other coworkers. So I was like, maybe I'll finally get a Switch. We have Nintendos, which is in our both our teen and our tween room. So I've been watching the teams play various games for a long time. But I myself, the long-running joke is the last time I played a video game was Missed, which was in college, and that's a very long time ago in the landscape of games. So I got the myself a Switch and the game at the very beginning of the kind of quarantine period. I managed to be lucky enough to have done that early. And so in that sense, but I want to kind of make clear is that it's a very easy game to learn and to play. And of course, the Switch is actually a very easy console to figure out so that if you are new to the game or if you're thinking of getting the game and the console for this express purpose, it's not a steep learning curve. I found it to be extremely easy to figure out and had a good time just learning and figuring out how it was going to work.Yeah, I know a few people who like this was their very first video game and they had ever having a fantastic time with it.And I just we wanted to show you guys a little bit of what it actually looks like in the game. This is our island and you can see it gives you a little map of kind of what your island looks like. There are different aspects of the game that you can do. We'll show you a few more photos. But there's things like you can go shopping for clothes, as Abbey was saying, and all of the kind of digging up of fossils, catching animals, building all sorts of things that you can see on the map there. You can see all the roads that we've built into the island. So that's what the little brown spots are, including that hedge maze at the back, which you can see. But just so you know that, we wanted to give you an overview of what it looks like and the ideas that you have this whole island to use and to create things for events obviously is our main focus. But you can get really creative and you can also smash everything into the ground and rebuild again. So it's very easy to kind of rebuild and you kind of cool things as you go and change it completely by the time you're done. So just to give you these are some photos of what it's like to go shopping when you catch bugs. Going to the museum is in the center there and the bottom left is just hanging out with your little villager's. They look good, of course, mostly very adorable, and so it's a lot of fun of just getting to learn their personalities and hanging out. So we have a lot of fun with doing it. I do actually love going to the museum to relax because I love the giant shark tank.It's really relaxing. The music is nice. It gives you fun facts about fish.And I do think that that's actually one of the main reasons, of course, the game is taking off during this period. It is an extremely soothing game to play. There's not a lot of stress involved. It's a lot of just being like I'm going to hang out and build stuff and decorate things. And that's kind of fun. So we enjoyed that a lot.Yeah. So an idea. So this is kind of came about kind of near the beginning of when we were all working at home and kind of struggling to come up with ideas on like what sort of virtual programming we could do, especially for kids. MIT and Robin's age. You're a little bit older and aren't necessarily like we don't we can't do storytime. I guess we can't do storytimes for them. But, you know, like we're not going to be doing, like, storytimes for them or things like that. And so we were looking for something fun and engaging for kids that were a little older. And we actually saw an article on the Isle of Library's website where another librarian at another library had created her library on Animal Crossing and was inviting people to come to it. And we were both just like, oh my God, that is such a fantastic idea because I had already bought the game for myself. Robin had already bought the game for herself, and we had already been kind of playing it on our own and just realized that it would just be a really, really fun and easy and engaging way to interact with patrons. And it's such a weird time. We weren't in the library. Patrons couldn't come see us or interact with us in any way. And so we actually what I did was I like linked to that article to our supervisors.And I was like, look at this. Isn't this amazing? Robin and I would really love to do this. What do you guys think? And we got pretty much like an immediate response from our supervisor being like, yes, absolutely, go for it. Like, yes, this is a really fun idea. And so we were given the go-ahead. I ordered a Switch and it was delivered just to my house because at the time we weren't working in the library at all. We were all just at home. And so I had the switch over to my house and went about setting up the island and getting it ready for people to visit, which we'll get into in a minute. And then we kind of sent out feelers to our staff to set an email being like, hey, we're going to do this thing in Animal Crossing. And we know that it's a really popular game. And a lot of you guys are playing it, who have like to come help us? And got a really excited response from our coworkers. Like so many people are being like, yes, oh my God, I would love to help. And so it wasn't just me and Robin that did this. It was definitely a team of people that helped build this island, which was awesome.Yeah. And I'm just going to chime in with the part of the appeal for both Abbey and I was that, as Abbey was saying, like it was very immediate once everything kind of shut down, that we could do things like storytimes for the youngest kids. But our, our age ranges are kind of the hardest to connect with, as I think a lot of you would understand, because mostly what they do, at least in my room and I think also in Abby's room is hung out. I mean, they're not, they're not there with the express purpose of necessarily always doing library-related things. And therefore, we were looking for ways to connect specifically with the tweens and teens who we already knew were used to the idea of the game and also used to the idea that the fun of it was visiting other places. I, for example, my fandom club immediately gave us the thumbs up for the idea and started making suggestions immediately about what we could do and what kind of furniture we could have. And like hobbies like this. So I knew from that that was a small sort of focus group. So but it was I knew that at least that was catching their attention at the time and would be a way to kind of put them because it was so hard as I think was really to, to just try to figure out how to even bring the library to teens who usually just are there in the physical space. And that's how you get to talk to them. So then we went about building all sorts of things. Do you want me to talk about this part? And then you can take the next one, Abbey.Oh, I think is because I did this part getting doing that because that's true. Yeah. So since I was the one that had the Switch delivered to my house at first, so I was kind of the one who took charge and getting the island like past the beginning stages. And for those of you who aren't familiar with the game or haven't played it, there's like a lot of like little introductory things that you have to do just to be able to get to the point, people being able to come and visit your island. You know, you have to be like, build your house and earn a lot of money, or they call it bells and the games, you have to earn a lot of bells to build up your house to make it have lots of rooms. And you have to like to invite a certain number of villagers to come live on your island before you can move on to the next part of the game. And so it was a good week or so of just me sitting in my house like not interacting with patrons or anyone else, really, just like getting this island to the point where people could even possibly come visit it. And at this point.We had started a channel that for our co-workers to talk about where we, I was like telling people like these are the things that I'd like wood to build something or any stone, and people would send me what, it's done and I could build things that way. And so it was a good chunk of time of just getting it to the point where we could actually play it. And then we needed like other points of interest around our island other than just our little library. And so we came up with a swap area. There are a couple of different areas. One is a DIY area, which are like little recipes that you can use to build things and people can take things and leave things as they need. There's a fossil swap area. We made a lot of signs for all the different areas on the island. We spent a lot of time making these beautiful gardens, which we can see. Well, Robin, did the gardens. Thank you, Robin. At the top over there you can see one of our very lovely gardens and making like tons and tons of furniture and collecting furniture to make our little house look like it's a library was a lot of fun.Yeah. So you can see one of the things that we did a lot of work on was, Abbey actually did a ton of getting a lot of the furniture for the library setup and also deciding what it should really look like. And we collaborated a lot with our colleagues in terms of figuring out who had which thing, who had which design, of which thing. All of them are different colors and you can get all different kinds. And it's somewhat up to chance what you can get. So a lot of that time initially setting up was trying to figure out what do we want it to look like, our actual library? How much can we do? Is there anything into Brookline Village? I was like stupidly happy about the fact that they had diner furniture in Animal Crossing because that's what we have in our actual physical room in Brookline Village. So I got very excited that I could in many ways almost recreate the team room in the game. But we also wanted to do different kinds of spaces. And so we decided to actually have a kind of formal reading room, which you can see at the top, but also the idea of space, which is that middle photograph. So there's a lot of different ways to create the library. I know there have also been librarians who done it, who have actually created rooms outside and basically just built libraries outside of an actual building in the game. So there's a lot of different ways you can kind of feel that what you're doing. So I think when you're trying to decide what you want to do with it is do you want to actually somehow replicate your actual library in the game? How close do you want it to be with what it actually looks like? Or do you want to make more fantastical sort of building? That's obviously very easy to do in the game. And we did have a lot of spreadsheets. We did a lot of listing of who has which items, who can bring which items, who has money.As I think those are very important. When you're initially setting up, you need to do that. And also things like different goals, different floors, all of those things are parts of the game and how you decorate. And if some of us care about it more than others, in the sense that I got very like excited about having a lot of fun with making it look a little bit more like the library and so did Abbey. And then I also really enjoy all the landscaping aspects of creating all the gardens and all the paths, all that kind of stuff was something I really liked doing. And by that time we actually had traded off the switch. So Abbey gave it over to me. She dropped it off at my house. And therefore I have I still have the physical Switch in my house, and the mixer. And it kind of in that sense, my domain, because I have it there. And obviously, within the game, you can have people come visit you. So other staff members were constantly coming over to our virtual island and dropping off supplies and dropping off kind of all the things we needed to make the library and ready for lunch. But, but since I physically have it, I'm the one who has to turn it on and let everybody over and kind of open up the island in all these ways.But that turned out to work pretty well.And, and I did a fairly fun time kind of organizing all of this stuff. And this was still pretty early. As I said, we were all everyone was working from home during this time. So it was also a nice way to connect with our fellow staff members and have people from all different departments working together to do this one project. So in some ways, I think it also helped. But just to connect everyone and make us all feel a little less strange during the time, that is very strange. So it was nice to have a reason to talk to my colleagues and really build up something that was going to mean something to the public.Yeah, and just quickly, I see somebody mentioned time traveling and I did, I did do some time traveling and the initial parts of setting up the island, because, again, for those of you who aren't familiar with Animal Crossing is a real-time game. And so everything happens. It takes days for things to happen sometimes, like if it's three o'clock in real life, it's three o'clock in the game and, you know, sometimes it'll be like, OK, you can do this thing, but you have to wait until tomorrow. But if you are trying to hurry up that process, like you're trying to get ready for people to come visit, you can go into your Switch settings and then just manually change the date. And the game will then be tricked into thinking it's the next day. And so I think even still, our island is like a couple of like a week or two ahead of what the actual date is. But it doesn't, it doesn't cause any issues of any sort. Nobody's been like, why does it say it's this date and it's actually the date? Nobody cares. Yeah. If anything like, oh, sorry, go ahead.It just seems that we actually what we did do is go back and change it to the correct one. Once we were finished with everything we needed to get them because I wasn't sure at first. But it doesn't, it doesn't take anything away from you like. So if you've built a bunch of buildings or created a bunch of gardens and then you go back in time, it won't actually destroy any, any of the work you've done. I was worried about that at first because I didn't know the kind of rules of the game more time traveling. But thankfully, that what that does mean is that you could then get back in sync with the rest of the world, basically. And so if there are special events that are timed within the game, like holiday celebrations or kind of special activities that they often plan within the game to keep you interested, that we were still in sync with everybody.Yeah, and then if anyone's interested, the rooms that we have in our library, we have like a front desk area, right when you walk in and then we have a children's room, a teen room, our maker space kind of idea, space, area code idea space at the Brookline Library. And we have a big reading room. And then what? What's the other room? Our office as our room with little desks. Then like we all got to decorate a desk, which is really cute.And that was just we kind of had a long debate about which room seemed to make sense for the fun of looking around the library. And we have started to integrate in some ways when we have events, we'll do things like hide things in the library so it forces people to go into that building. You can't just ignore it or you can. But, but if there's a purpose to your visit, then we can kind of encourage people to go and visit the actual library building. So one of the things we did have to do pretty much immediately was think through all of the how we wanted to advise people to behave in the game. Once we start to actually kind of invite people, there are, there are some basic aspects of behavior that are controlled by the way the game works and the way that you invite people to come to your island. So, for example, it's fairly difficult for someone, a stranger to come and visit and then suddenly be able to, like, tear down a building or do something really destructive like that. But at the same time, I think like all of us, we were a little worried about the fact that everyone can type and speak in the game and that we wanted to make sure that their rules were clear from the beginning, so that just like in the actual physical library, that the attendees to any virtual events would understand that we're expecting the same level of behavior that we would in the rooms that we have.But then you also have to think through the game itself and what the game allows, what it doesn't allow and what makes it fun and therefore doesn't spoil the fun for everybody else. So, for example, we have an area where we had a free for all where you can leave things for people to take if you don't want it, or you can take things if you need something. And it would be very easy for one player to show up and take every single thing that's been left out. And that's kind of not in the spirit of the game or of the way that we wanted to run it. So we have a kind of discussion of what the rules should be and how they should look. And we there is one place in the game where you can actually write a message and post it for people to read. And that is a bulletin board that's in the kind of center of the town square. So as you can see on the right there, those are all the rules that we came up with. And they are a lot of them are kind of similar to our actual rules in the library, but some of them are very specific to the game. So the idea that you take one thing and you leave something else, that you swap something fairly or don't run through the flowers, because if you run through the flowers, you actually kill the flowers. And that's not fun. So there's little things like that. There are also some considerations for when we have events and we knew that a lot of people would be going back and forth, either arriving at the island or leaving the island. There are things that will disrupt the game. So we had to think through how many things do we want them to be able to do, how many things do we need to not let them do because it'll actually crash the game and cause a problem for everybody who's there.So, for example, we decided not to have one of the stores open because that causes a lot of traffic going back and forth and makes it much harder for people to enter and leave the island. The other thing we did talk about was how to communicate in the game. There is a way to do that. You can basically type in messages and it'll look as if your character's speaking. That can take a long time, especially if you don't have a way to use a keyboard. There is a way to connect the game to a mobile app that lets you use a keyboard and actually type. But for example, a lot of the players may not use that, so they may not be able to type as quickly as you are. And there is voice chat in the game. We haven't used that, that much, mainly because people seem to be used to using the actual typing chat more. But we'd be open to that if people were really curious about that. And the other part was just to keep in mind the fact that when you're doing an event or you're inviting patrons, you have no idea how old that person is or how adept they are typing or even if they speak English, which is the kind of default language of the game. So you have to think about that when you're talking to people as a staff person, you have to make sure you're not getting frustrated with how quickly or not quickly they're responding and then adapt the way that you're speaking to fit the limits of the game.So that's something we all kind of learn to think through when we were doing that kind of work.So anything else you wanted to add?No, I think you kind of covered everything there.So one other thing we did do is one of the fun parts of the game is you can create custom things so you can create your own signs and create your own clothing. And so we decided to go ahead and create a few public library of reclaimed T-shirts.That little high message is based on a big wall art at the Coolidge corner location of the physical building. They have a big high on the wall. So we decided that was a nice way to make a fun T-shirt that still looked like it was related to the library. We did a little print edition there on the bottom. So it was June when we were running a lot of our program. So that made sense. And we also made all sorts of little signs that would be directional signs to point people around to find the library or which areas for which to identify them. So people knew what was happening just by looking in the game. That is the one where you can post some sort of messages to create a piece of art and then post it within the game.Yeah, and we also have hats with our little PLB on them. And then for our ideas, space and the real world, we have kind of a little robot. Yeah, yeah. We have a robot mascot for our idea space. And one of our very talented co-workers managed to kind of draw him in Animal Crossing for us. And so we were able to put him in our ideal space in the game as well, which was a lot of fun.All right.And then we did a lot of social media to try to these are a couple of different examples of the things that we posted for people. We initially did a launch day where we just said everyone should come visit. And we'll talk more about how that works in just a minute. But we also decided to do open hours during the month of June so people could come for a number of hours and it would just be a drop-in sort of program. One of the other things the game has now, which is very nice, is they have what's called the dream address, which means that whether or not you as a player are in your game playing, anybody can still come and visit the island that you've created. It's a little less interactive, but it's really nice so that no one has to wait for you to be open or playing.They can still come and see what you've created and what your island looks like. And then one of our final events most recently was a big fairy tale sort of celebration for the end of our summer reading program. So we've done a range of different things and we do a lot of social media to try to drum up sort of who is going to join us.And then we wanted to show you a few more photos of the different aspects. This is our librarian.I mean, do you want to talk about just designing our brand or so our librarian's name is Page. And I wanted Page to look as gender-neutral as possible because it's a shared character and it was created by co-workers of all genders. And so Page uses they/them pronouns and, and so they are kind of our little, you know, mascot for our island. And so they are who the patrons see when they come to the island. And we did vote on the name Page. I set up a little poll and I asked co-workers to just say, like, what do you think we should name our librarian? And Page was the one that got the most votes. We had some good some other good ones, too. I can't remember any of them. I think somebody suggested, Dewey, like doing it? Although there are some cute pun names. But we've had Page was just kind of fitting in cute and booky and our island's name is, I pronounce it in my head is Broklib, B-R-O-K-L-I-B. And that's just a shortened form of Brookline Library that we use in a lot of things and like advertising and our website. And so that's something that I feel all of the time anyway. And so we have Bookclub Island and yeah. So that and Page likes to dress in very snappy outfits and they have a lot of professional clothing and but also some fun clothes as well. So a lot of costumes.Right. So our first event we just posted to social media and one of the things we figured out is that the easiest way to tell everyone to join us was to share what's called a dodo code. And the dodo code is Dodo Airlines.They are the in-game airline that takes you between the islands. And so the dodo code is basically a five. Is it five digit code or five letter like that?Yeah, that lets people plug that in on their device and then they can come and visit your island without you having to know who that person is. So it allows a stranger basically to come and visit. And so we decided to just do open hours and basically see what happened. We set up a bunch of activities we had set up of areas on the island. We decided to see how it would go.So you want to chime in about how it went.Yeah, we, we had a, it was a booming success which led to some issue. So one of the, the things in the game is that you can only have so many people visiting your island at a time. And so if there is one like your own islander for us, it's Page that counts as one person. And then along with that, you can have nine other people visiting at a time. So the island has a cap of 10 people total at any point. And it just so happens that we didn't really know the extent to what popularity this would have to our patrons and led to issues of way too many people trying to come to our island at the same time when the island was already full, which led to it disconnecting from the Internet basically. So it would be too many people trying to come at the same time. And then as people are trying to come, other people are trying to leave, and that just put some stress on the system. And it basically just kicked everyone off, which was not ideal and led to some very panicked text messages between us being like, what do we do? Oh, my God, everyone's gone.How do we get?And whenever everyone got kicked off and we just connected that code that we had put out on social media, our digital code that people could use to come visit our island, we had to create a new dodo code. And so we had to very quickly find a way to get out this new code to people because the old one no longer worked. And so Robin was in the game trying to get everything set back up. And then I was all our all of our stuff. I had, like, every social media account open at the same time, like frantically editing post, being like, don't look at that code, look at this new code. And yeah, and it happened, I think one more time. We just connected two times total during that first event and which I don't know, I think kind of just shows the popular we were so popular that it couldn't handle us. And we had people coming from all over like it wasn't just local folks, it was people from kind of around the world, actually, and it was a three-hour event.So it's not as horrible as it sounds. If that would have opened in one hour that would have been more distressing. But the other thing we learned is that we had, we had plans for staff to swap off and be like there'd be two staff people in the game at any one time, but that couldn't work because they couldn't get to the island because so many people were trying to go, that we ended up just kind of having to give up on having all of the staff be there because it just functionally wouldn't work. We'd set it up. So on that, it was definitely a success. I think we counted it was over thirty people over the basically the island was full the entire time, which is as good as one can get on on the game.So, yes, we definitely learned the idea that you have to it's better to kind of encourage a time slot sort of thinking when we do events at this point, we often will remind people that we'd like them to hang out for a certain amount of time and then encourage them to leave when they're done so that other people can also join the island and do a similar visit.We do a lot of periodic announcements throughout the game to tell people what's happening or when, when something might be happening and after that first kind of debacle of having the island and the dodo codes and poor Abbey Hemington, just like spam, all of our social media accounts, we decided to use Remind, which is our text reminder software that I've used for a number of years now with our teens. And so we set it up. So there was a specific animal crossing texting group that you would just sign up to get updates and reminders from that text group. And then now that is how we contact everybody during the game. Is that both ahead of and during we send out reminders and send out updates about the game. So if the game crashes, I can immediately tell everybody, OK, the game just crashed. Here's the new code. You can come back now or I can say the island is full or I can say we have room now. Would people like to come visit? The island is still open, so it's much, much easier and also obviously less troublesome than reports can back.So we no longer put out our data on social media at all. We will put out things every now and then being like one to visit our animal crossing island, sign up to remind but that we don't advertise the code on social media for those reasons that we talked about. So it only everyone who wants the code has to go through the remind system.A reminder for us at least, is familiar to most of our parents and kids because the Brookline, Brookline public schools also use it. So that was helpful that they kind of were used to the system. And at this point we have, I believe, over 50 people on that list. So they will get reminders any time we do any animal crossing program. So in that sense, it's also really nice because you can contact people who have come to their events before really easily.And then, yes, so we ultimately decided it's easier to just have one person run an event per hour or per the event rather than trying to add multiple staff people into the game. And oftentimes lately that's been me because I have the physical Switch. So it's easy for me to start up an event and start it myself. But there's also been an awareness of like wanting to make sure other stuff and can still participate and help. The other big thing that I've also learned is that having things like the prize will or a way to win prizes or a scavenger hunt is a nice way to get things started, but also to think through who's coming to that particular timing. If you have an event in the afternoon, you're more likely to get kids, tweens, and teens. So you want to kind of think of what they would enjoy doing rather than making a complicated quest or something that has to happen throughout the game. That being said, you're also trying to work on being more innovative with what you're doing and think, think of new and interesting things.So we're going to go through a little bit just some of the basic things you can do while you're in the game that helped make it fun for the attendees. So as we saw, we had things like fossil areas where you can you can collect for the game and also recipes that help you build things. We have prize wheels, which are little spinning wheels that you can win things with, basically. And that's a lot of fun for if you want to do a very basic giveaway in the game, kind of like you would almost like a raffle prize and a program, an in-person program. So we did a lot of kind of if you spin the wheel and you get a prize, then you get something that's valuable in the game. So either get money or the fellows that you have or you get an object that's rare in the game that can be very appealing, especially to tweens and teens who really like and kind of doing that aspect of the game. The other thing we've done is we had done a scavenger hunt. So things like we have there's a little object. You can build that as a tiny library. So that's what you see in the real world. And you can build that. And we had, I think it was eight of them around the island. And then when asked people to go around the island and find all of the tiny libraries and tell us how many there were, and then if they got it right, then they got a prize.So there's that kind of thing that you can do pretty easily in the game. One of the major things to remember, if you do want to do that kind of activity, is make sure that you have all the prizes ready to go at the beginning of your event so that you're not scrambling to go get more bells or get more objects and makes a person wait. For you to find the price that they're supposed to get, make sure you have lots of room in your pockets. This is a thing basically it's a storage in the game. You just need to make sure that you have enough room to hand out things. If you need to close off any part of the island, do that before it starts. So, for example, we usually close the store. And what that means is we physically block it off so that nobody can get to that building. And then the other thing I've also learned just from running events at this point is I always have to open up the game and get everything started at least 30 minutes in advance to make sure that everything's all set within the game, but also so that you can get a digital code. That process of getting the code takes longer than basically. So you want to be ready and be able to send it out as soon as the event starts and not make people kind of go through the process of getting there.And then there's been some more complicated programming as we've gone on and learned and been inspired by what other people are doing in the game. So, for example, you can see at the top this is a what's called a price grid. And it's something that people have developed in the game is that all of these things are buried in these little squares. And you spin the little number at the back and that gives you which number of kind of grid you're supposed to be on. And then you can there's another wheel that shows you all these other little items that you can win. So basically, you spin two different wheels and you get coordinates and then you get a prize out of it. So it's elaborate to set up. It takes a good while. I think it's probably about four or five days in the game of just collecting interesting things and putting things and burying them in the ground and getting all the wheels. And so you kind of make sure you get that all set. But the kids, especially in the tweens and teens, really love it because they love being able to win a surprise thing in the middle of the game.We also had an obstacle course that was pretty elaborate that I was inspired by a video that I saw that I will link to later. So you can see the kind of insanities that people get up to when they have a full island plus an entire obstacle course for your characters. And that was a lot of fun and kids really enjoyed coming to play that as well.Slightly more elaborate to you would be the idea of doing a costume contest. A lot of the fun parts of the animal dressing is that you can buy an enormous amount of clothing for me. I know that definitely feeds my desire to dress up, which I do in person in the library a lot as people who know me know. But I also really like the fact that it's really easy to get in the game. But you can also design your own costumes. So if you look at the bottom right, that's being cosplay.Peggy Carter from the Marvel Universe because you can make your own thing. So I made my own version of one of her dresses and you can change your hair color and change your eye color and have a lot of fun with dressing in character, basically.So that's another way of doing an event where everyone is invited to come in costume or to design the costume and show it off during the event. The other thing we haven't quite done yet, which I'm hoping to do for our upcoming Halloween program, is to also costume at the same time so people can actually just talk to each other when they're playing. We don't have the ability to do a more elaborate setup than that. So we've decided that combining Zoom with playing is probably the easiest way to let the kids talk to each other or talk to us. So that's something we're working on as well.And then we did do one more elaborate event, which is this one, which was we set up the entire island to have all sorts of fairy tale themes. And we had a castle. Basically, we created new characters. You can add more characters to an island and they therefore get their own house. So we used that to be able to build both a fairy tale castle in a fairy tale cottage. And we decided to redecorate the entire island and get rid of the obstacle course, created a giant hedge maze. We did all kinds of things. The other thing we decided to do is create scenes all over the island that show different references to different fairy tales and then encourage everybody to do a word scramble while they were playing. So this is one of the more elaborate ones that we decided to try and see if it would work. We just weren't sure if people would enjoy it or if it was too elaborate and would be frustrating. But we did it for two different events that were fairly long, one during an afternoon on a Friday and one during an evening session discovering that we had a lot of people that like to visit after school or after work.So if we were able to do it at night, you get more teens and more adults that were players as well that wanted to come and visit. So we had a lot of fun doing that. As you can see, those little images on the right, we're actually what I sent out to people through the room service. So it was kind of like once you're prepping for the game, you could be like, this is the game we're going to play and these are the references you need for it. It's kind of more fun for that reason. You can see these are some of the examples of what we created. So the little like fairy tale cottage is in the bottom left. The dungeon in the castle is the top left.And we had one of our little scenes there at the top is Cinderella. You can't actually see their shoes there as well. And then down in the bottom right is our throne room, which we decided to decorate as a, as a fun place to take photos. A lot of the fun of the game is also the ability to take photos of your character in different locations. So we figured we'd make a really fancy room for people to go and have fun. So I learned from that one that that was a lot of fun to do. And we did have a lot of people that really enjoyed the word scramble. And then there were a lot of people that just enjoyed running around and looking at everything. So you can make it as strict as you want. But I think the more elaborate it is, the more explaining you're going to have to do so. That's a, a program that would have, I think, benefited had I been able to think it through in advance to do more of a Zoom interaction so that people could ask questions. And I could explain things more rapidly than asking people to read notes or read signs or to text them. So I think in the long run, that's what I learned from running that one. But people still really enjoyed the event itself. And this is what our island looks like right now, is we're still in fairy tale mode for the moment.Soon to be Halloween mode for.Yes, that's what we're working on. Yes.And I did want to give a shout out one of the things we aren't able to do, but which the Boston public folks have been doing is streaming playing, animal crossing live through which this is something we investigated doing. And mainly it was the technology restrictions that didn't allow us to do it. I'm still mainly doing this from home, so I don't have a good enough computer with the most powerful setup that you need to do a lot of that. And I'm sure there are probably people chiming in, in the, in the chat at this point, because I know a bunch of the folks from Boston are here.I saw Chris from Boston is in our little audience. So shout out to you, Chris, for, you know, doing this. We maybe will be able to someday is just not something we're able to do right now to stream. But we really love watching y'all stream.So, so those links there are to lead to them. And they, I emailed everyone over there and just said, is it all right if we give you one, give you a shot at and to tell people to email you about how you're running that? And they've I know they've already talked to you, I think at least a dozen librarians from across the country. So they're probably getting pretty practiced at how to explain what they're doing. And I just think that's really exciting. If we had that capability, I think we would be doing it, but we just don't. And I think it's good to know that there's different levels that you don't have if you don't have that technology and still have programs. But if you do, you can take advantage of that.Chris says if you ever need help advice on streaming, let me know. Thanks, Chris. We might hit you up sometime soon.Yes, definitely. So one of the other things to think through is, of course, we knew from the very beginning of doing this as a program that we would be kind of insisting that the people that were enjoying the game or were participating in our programs would have to have a Switch and have to have the game. And that's a lot to ask of the public. It requires certainly an amount of money to be able to get both of those things, and because, of course, the library is unable to offer the game in the library itself right now, restricted it, and we knew that was kind of an issue, especially dealing with the popularity of the game. We wanted to think through ways that people could do it and kind of capitalize on the, on the fun of the game without actually requiring people to be in the game all the time. So as you can see, there's a couple of different things. There's definitely escape rooms out there. I know there's trying to find the escape room that I had with White Oak Library 10 Department. They did a really fun escape room. That's a digital escape room, as we see many of those. One of the things we've talked about doing as well is getting people to send us art that we can then display in the game like an art gallery that's from, from other players.So in that sense, we can display it, but it doesn't require them to attend and play in the game. And then there's also, as I said, a costume contest where people can make custom designs. So these are all asynchronous. They don't have to happen while you're playing or while you're all playing together. The other obvious thing would be animal crossing displays. Both Abbey and I have seen some really delightful displays through the Internet of kind of people relating aspects of the game. So things like gardening and decoration and costume design are all these different ways you can kind of link to what the game allows you to do. And then the bottom photo there is just the really simple shrink film of using that to create some of the iconic things that are in the game. This is something that I think my teams particularly love all shrink them all the time. So it's very easy for me to just break out some color pencils. I think this would also be if you're doing things like making kits, this would be a really simple one to include for people to do and give them a printout of some basic plans for how to do it. And this one I actually did see through teen services underground, and it was LeAnna Kiggins who is in the Safety Harbor Library in Florida who posted about that idea.And I thought that was really great. So I want to give her credit for that. But yes, it was a lot of fun ideas and we're always kind of thinking about whenever we are open to the public again, we're still not like there are ways we could do more programming that would be in-person but not require people to be in the game.Yeah, right. If you want to cover this.Yeah. So just like if you guys are interested in getting the setup, you getting to know that there are some monetary and time costs that go into this. So I looked back at the receipts that I had and the total cost of getting the game, the Switch itself, and then the online subscription, which allows people to come visit your island. The total cost of that was two hundred and seventy-four dollars and nine cents. That is including my Target, five percent red card discount. So if you're not buying it from Target, you don't have a red card, it will be five percent more expensive than that. And then with the game, I did buy just the, the virtual version of the game instead of the game card. It was the same price. And that way it just kind of travels with the Switch. You don't have to worry about having, like, dealing with a game card and it getting lost somehow or kid taking it from the Switch if we have it at the library. And then in terms of time cost, it is a bit of a time, I think, especially with getting it set up for people to come visit it just at first, because you do have to go through a lot of setup things before you can even have people come visit. And so getting it set up took us about three weeks total. And that was like with consistent everyday gameplay, even like on weekends, like on not on work time, which like I mean, that was great.It was fun to play, but it, it was, it was a lot of time and but then just keeping the island maintained and if you're trying to keep it nice for the visitors, you'll need to get on and like pull all the weeds around the island or make some minor adjustments to like fence placing or whatever. If you notice that something isn't working when people are there visiting or if you want to or if you like, find better signs, you're like, oh, I want to put these signs in the game instead. So just like basic maintenance is about an hour a day roughly, you know, averaged. And then to get ready for a program, it takes about a week or so depending on what if you need to gather new materials, build new furniture. We're lucky that we have a lot of staff that are lot love helping. And so we can just kind of send feelers out through our channel being like, does anybody have red shoes and something like that or like a fairy tale hood? And then like, somebody'll be like, I have that. And then they can send it to our library island. And so but even with the help, it's taken us about a week or so before each program to get everything ready on the island.Yeah, and one thing I did want to include is that we had a lot of really lovely little notes. This is one of the ways that people in the game can leave a note for you on the bulletin board as well. So one of my teams actually drew that top gun. I was super impressed because it's really hard to draw within the game.And I was like, that is an astonishing piece of art given the limits. But I also really loved just chatting with people in the game. I have some definite reactions of people who are really excited. Some folks I knew, I was like, oh, these are my teens. Like, I could figure out who they were. And that was exciting to me. But they're also a lot of new people. And I loved hearing both from the younger players that we're just excited about the idea that we had kind of met them in this place, but also some adults that were just like I used to go to the library all the time. And it's really strange not to be able to. So this is really lovely that you did this. So there's a lot of really positive reactions from everybody. And it was really great to hear that it was working and that it was worthwhile for people as a way to connect back with us. Alright. I think one thing we did want to mention, we I certainly did.And I think a bunch of us joined with the various discords that are out there that are about library work in Animal Crossing and that top one, the library, animal crossing, Ko-koda. I'm not sure how they supposed to say is more that it is about actively doing programming and building the second discord. There is more just librarians who are playing animal crossing so that there's a lot of different ways to interact around the game. And I know I've done a lot of poking around to find custom designed so that Sputnik's Island is one of the bigger databases of custom designs where you can see what kinds of things other players have created that might be useful for your island. I occasionally definitely look at pictures of what other people have been doing on their island to figure out a new thing or a new trend that I might be able to adapt to our island to do that. Bottom one is the first one of the first obstacle courses out there that inspired me to build an obstacle course on our island and try to see how they were doing it, but shows you a video of gameplay and how it actually works. So there's a lot you can just kind of Google honestly and look for animal crossing stuff and you'll find an enormous amount. And at this point now all my social media feeds tell me all about animal crossing all the time because of all the research that I've done. So I feel like I'm often being told perhaps more than I want to know about what people are doing on Animal Crossing. But it is really helpful to kind of look around and see what could you do what could you not do in the game.And then one final thing we did want to invite everyone to and this was with the blessing of the team summit coordination team, is that one we do have what's called a dream address. So if any of you are out there who are playing animal crossing and want to just see what we've set up our island as that dream address there, the code you can enter in the game and you'll be able to see our island any time. It is right now set up for fairy tale fun. And it's, I believe, in evening one. So it looks especially pretty with all the lights.And then today, just after the teen summit is over, we wanted to invite everyone to come and visit our island, open it up later this afternoon. And in order to for all of you to join us, we thought we'd just do what we do for the public, which is that you can just sign up to get the dodo code in the same way that the public does. So if you text at Teen Office two eight one zero one zero, I will send the dodo code out that way and that will let everyone come visit. I possibly can see if I can also just post the digital dodo code in the chat at the end of the team. So I don't want to assume that I can do that. But that might be an easy way to prove any of you out there would like to join us.And this PDF is also in the tote bag, so if you don't have an immediate screenshot of this, you will be able to get it in the tote bag packets in it's in our presentation there. So, yeah, we have time for questions and or let people go have a break. But this was really fun and glad we were able to talk about this today. Abbey, is there anything else you wanted to add?No. And thanks for letting us talk about Animal Crossing for an hour. One of my dreams. We do have some questions that people put in a little Q&A so we can read some of those. So then I'll just read them and we can. So how do you monitor the billboard? Could someone potentially visit your island when there are no librarians monitoring slash playing the game and leave the inappropriate info on the billboard?So no. Well, kind of know. So people aren't able to visit when no librarian is there. So like, if Robin isn't in the game, people wouldn't be able to come at all and leave anything on the billboard. They can come in the dream address. But in the dream version of the island, you can't write on the billboard or that at all.So in that way, there is not really any sort of issue, but there is a way to delete messages from the billboard. So if somebody does leave something inappropriate, we would be able to delete it pretty quickly, hopefully. I really love the idea of doing this. My main worry is that a console and the game are both quite expensive and that many teens families may not able that may not be able to afford it, causing them to feel left out by the library. Have you had any issues with this? It was a big concern that we had that this was very much targeted to people who had the ability to buy a switch and, and an online subscription, which is a big monetary. It requires people to have the ability to do that. And that's kind of why we're hoping maybe sometime soon that we might be able to start screaming like the Boston Public Library does to include people who don't have those things into our animal crossing world. But at this moment, we don't have a way to do that. I don't know if anybody has, has come forward and had a complaint about that yet to us.But I have I haven't heard any feedback that way.I mean, but of course, it's the kind of thing someone probably wouldn't bring up with us in the sense that I don't know that they would feel comfortable saying that.But, but I yeah, obviously that was a concern we've had all along. And I think, again, if we were in the library physically again, we would have the Switches in the building. So that would help a lot to let people at least, you know, they could come to our island during, during regular library hours and use our Switch in our games. But, but, yeah, it's been, it's been a concern all along. So I think that is something to consider.Yeah, yeah, you may have answered this, but how long does do some of the more elaborate activities take to set up? Yeah, like we said, about a week or so, depending on what it is.Yeah, I think the fairy tale island took a dive. One probably took a couple of weeks because I had to build the buildings. So that's one of the things is building buildings requires time and money in the game. So that that took a little longer just to get the actual different houses set up.Somebody wants to know, do we have any favourite animal? Islander's staff, favorite animal.Islander's my favorite on our, our library island. Do we have a sheep named Younus. And I love her because her house is a laundromat. And I just think that each islander has their own little house and you go into her house and it's just like full of washers and dryers and it's set up like a laundromat. And I just think that is so funny. Like, she's not especially like an interesting looking character herself, but her house is a laundromat. And I think that is just hilarious.Yeah, I think my favorite island in the library is Poppy, who's, is he a horse? Yeah. He's a horse, but he's just kind of goofy and fun and is very chill and, and dilators have slightly different personalities. So he's one of these characters, I believe. But I just find him very entertaining. And he's very I don't even know is a he. I don't think that's clear. But anyway, Poppy, definitely really cute.On my own personal island, I have a deer named Dussel, who's a black and white deer, and his house is set up like a New York, New York high rise apartment, which I just think is really funny. He's a socialite and. OK, here we go. How would I market this to teens specifically? I know it's cute art style and relaxing gameplay would appeal to players plus and also to younger kids. I am less familiar with devising teen-oriented marketing.And I mean, I think for me with, with our teens, one of the bonuses was that they were already playing it. It was it was just abundantly clear when I talk to any teens, they were as obsessed with it as everyone else was kind of in May and June. And they get very competitive in ways that are different, I think, from younger players in that they like to build strange things.They like to use the game in ways that are, of course, maybe not as intended in the sense of building strange, like, you know, little shrines to gold and toilets and things like that, that they find entertaining. But on the other hand, the other thing, they were they were competitive about doing things that you accomplish in the game. So they are collecting every single fossil. Making the museum complete is a goal that you have over a long period of time in the game. And they got very competitive in terms of actually marketing them. As I said, that's one of the hardest things for us to do right now. I think we all struggle with that. So part of it was just contacting the teams. I already knew from before kind of the shutdown. And again, using our mind and using social media is more likely to get people to notice that, whether it's parents or adults who can tell those teams that that's happening and say, OK, you play Animal Crossing, you know, you might like this event the library's doing. But also I had the direct connection with my fandom club so I could let them know we were doing it. And word of mouth, of course, is always the strongest. So I was able to get them to remember that it was happening and invite their friends and that kind of thing. Otherwise, I honestly, I don't have a kind of perfect solution for that in that it is really hard right now to, to even connect with the teens, the teens that I would see every day in the building. I'm fairly sure I'm are the hardest because they are not following our social media.I can, I am fairly sure if anyone has an Instagram or, or Tik-Tok account for the library, that would probably work extremely well as well. We have Instagram, we don't have Tik-Tok. So I think it all depends on where your teens are. And if there's a way for you to advertise directly to them there, that is the best way you can do it. We do use the reminder service to send out just general information as well. And that's what I've started to do more is use that more during this time than I had in the past.Yeah, and with the younger teams like the twins that I work with, like they're not on Facebook or Twitter and they're mostly on Tik-Tok, which unfortunately we don't have at our library. But honestly, a lot of them get it. They hear about it from their parents seeing it on social media or from our newsletter. We have a lot of very involved tween parents who religiously get our newsletter and will tell that their fifth and sixth graders about events that are happening in a lot of the cities, don't have phones and don't have a mind, but their parents do. And so it's a weird time for me right now, advertising programs, because I'm like, how will parents hear about this? Whereas like when I'm in the library with my kids coming every day after school, I like very much try to market it to them. Thirstier Kitty. Hi. She's visiting inside.Um, yeah. So it's just kind of an odd time for everyone trying to get older kids engaged when a lot of them are on social media that we are familiar with or that we use for advertising.Yeah, I think I've had a good bonus of them, the one nice thing I will recommend about reminders, it tells you who is the parent and who is the child, because children can sign up with their parent, has to get permission or they have to get permission from their parents and both of them get messages. So that's really helpful just, just in the sense of knowing who it is you are talking to. So, yeah, my cat waited to the end, so she's a good, she's a good one.Yes, I don't think there's any more questions.No, those are all the questions. If anybody has any more questions, you can put them in.Now, I think we have a few more minutes, but otherwise we can end a little early.It was really fun getting to present this to you guys.We both love animals and then we'll, we'll kind of we're happy to update as because they said we're working on a Halloween event, which will involve, you know, inviting a costume contest. And that is when I wondered if there are ways to actually do that more without with people who don't have the game in the sense that you could have people submit costume designs and photographs and then have people vote on it through social media or through our post on the website or something like that. So in that sense, you're not you're not requiring people to play. They can just vote on which costumes they think are the best. So that's, I think, a good way to do both, if that makes sense. Yeah.All right. I think we can end there if nobody else does any questions. Lots of thank you. Thank you. Thank you guys for coming. People from the BPL. Hopefully, we'll talk to you guys soon about doing think maybe collab like Chris said or somebody said, which would be awesome. Yeah, that would be great. We'd love to do that.Great. Thank you so much and thank you so much Abbey. Great. Everyone was just about to start our last session of the day and so please enjoy and then we will see you back for the raffle and special guest appearance. So after this final session, be sure to meet us back on the main stage. All right. Thanks, everyone. Thank you.

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