Chapter Four: Making Meaning Through the Feedback Loop

The library videogame programming that we observed were created by librarians primarily interested in inspiring, supporting, and maintaining youth involvement. To that end, the library videogame environments encouraged independent and collaborative game play and, either explicitly or implicitly, focused on youth ownership of and meaningful engagement in the library videogame space.

Learning through the feedback loop often involves the movement across spaces and texts and interaction with other people (e.g., players, spectators), and this makes the feedback loop an ideal framework for identifying and supporting the ways youth make meaning with and across a variety of texts, be they games, books, or even each other (i.e., nonverbal communication). Take, for example, the game play Abrams observed when one teen, Ethan, was playing Faster Than Light on the Northeast Public Library’s computers. Ethan explained the type of decision making the game involved: