May 13, 2025
·ï»Ë²ÊƱƽ̨ Game Design and Development Professor Scott Nicholson isn’t just an expert on family-friendly library programming — he literally wrote the book on the subject.
Published in 2010, Nicholson’s Everyone Plays at the Library would become the definitive guide to developing library-based gaming programs for all ages. Its impact continues to be felt in libraries across North America — but perhaps nowhere more directly than in Brantford, Ontario.
In the summer of 2024, Nicholson took a page from his own playbook, approaching staff at the Brantford Public Library to gauge their interest in programming hosted by his students in Game Design and Development.
“I’d been looking for ways to demonstrate to the community what we do in the Game Design program at ·ï»Ë²ÊƱƽ̨,” says Nicholson. “When I came up with the idea of family game design workshops at the library, I knew it was a good match.”
Emma Flintoft, the ’s coordinator of children and youth programs, agreed, noting it was an easy ‘yes, please!’
“We’ve been ramping up intergenerational programs that are fun for the whole family and it also supported our commitment to lifelong learning,” says Flintoft. “It was just what we’re looking for.”
Having established a fit, Nicholson pitched the workshop concept to his fourth-year Game Design students as an extracurricular activity.
Micah Visser was among the students who jumped at the opportunity. As a high school student in Kingston, Ontario, he’d volunteered to run weekly Dungeons and Dragons meets through the local Boys and Girls Club, witnessing firsthand how organized gaming can spark creativity that outlasts a program’s runtime.
“We’d get kids who weren’t necessarily experienced with the game coming back the next week with characters they’d created on their own at home,” says Visser.
With his sights set on a career developing educational games for children, Visser also recognized the opportunity to gain valuable teaching experience — another one of Nicholson’s goals for the project.
“This would be something they could add to their CVs,” Nicholson says. “Not only would they design a lesson themselves, but they’d teach it and then assess how it went. It was important to me that when they’re in the job market, they could talk about the content they’ve created.”
Visser, along with classmates Lily Boughton, Gobina Mathyaparana and Catherine Armour, split up into pairs to develop two two-hour, family-focused library programs. While Visser and Boughton would pursue a board game design workshop, Mathyaparana and Armour opted for a video game design workshop based on Twine, a free browser-based application that enables users to create Choose Your Own Adventure-style stories.
Although the students took the lead, Nicholson met with the pairs throughout the development process, serving as an adviser and liaising with library staff.
In their board game design workshop, Visser and Boughton would challenge families to come up with a plot, story or setting, then prompt them to think about the mechanics —rolling dice, drawing cards or spinning a wheel — that would support a player’s ability to explore that story through an adventure or journey.
“Everyone has great ideas,” says Boughton. “We saw ourselves as guides to refine these ideas into something playable.”
Similarly, the video game design participants would spend the first hour of the workshop fleshing out an original story, before learning how to map out the branching narratives in Twine.
Despite the difference in focus, both teams shared similar goals in developing their workshops: get every family member involved in the game design process; give them the tools and training to continue designing the game afterwards; and, most importantly, have fun.
“We needed to communicate the fundamentals of game design while giving families the room to have fun and work together to make something that they’re proud of,” says Boughton.
Scheduled over two Saturdays in January and February 2025, registration for both workshops reached capacity within days of posting on the Brantford Public Library website. The enthusiastic response to both workshops suggests the pre-event hype was well warranted.
“The workshops were very successful in terms of the attendance and feedback that we received,” says Flintoft. “Our staff programmer was very impressed with the students and their ability to lead a workshop — something that she’s very well in tune with, doing them herself — and everybody seemed to be having a really good time.”
Likewise, the students were impressed with the creativity families displayed in their game designs.
“We had a Sonic the Hedgehog-Mario mashup and an amazing escape room-type adventure game as well,” Mathyaparana says of her group’s Twine-based designs.
Visser’s participants devised board games based on concepts from dragons hoarding fabulous treasures to a mother and son taking road trips with their pets.
“What made that so special is that they were playing as themselves,” he says.
Although the two-hour timeframe was always going to be tight given the workshops’ ambitious goals, Flintoft was pleased participants were given all the tools they needed to ensure playtime would continue long after they left the library.
“The families felt confident they’d be able to keep working on their games at home,” she says. “And with Twine being free and user-friendly, it’s something that’s easy for families to replicate later on.”
In addition to player pieces for board game prototypes created by participants, the novice video game designers were given USBs to save what they started.
“There’s such a wealth of talent at ·ï»Ë²ÊƱƽ̨ and it just seems like a natural fit for us to have students come in and run programs based on their areas of expertise,” says Flintoft. “I’d be very happy to do it again.”
And true to the title of Nicholson’s book, everyone played at the library, with family members of all ages bringing their unique skills to the table in a truly collaborative effort.
“The youngest kids, who might not have been as involved in the game design aspects, would doodle on cards and then the older family members took those cards and incorporated them into the game,” says Visser. “Everyone was engaged and everybody left smiling.”
Some, in fact, may be inspired to become future Game Design and Development students themselves.
“You can actually see the public library from the ·ï»Ë²ÊƱƽ̨ Game Lab,” Nicholson says. “This was a great chance for the students to show these families, ‘This is what I learned in four years at that building across the street.’”
The Inspired Community, Real Impact report celebrates the 25th anniversary of ·ï»Ë²ÊƱƽ̨'s Brantford campus by showcasing exceptional alumni, groundbreaking research and investments in infrastructure that have fostered a thriving environment for local residents, businesses and organizations.
