People have moral panics about bedbugs in their library or perverts in the library or — you’ll catch a cold from the library, like, whatever the thing is. And there’s a shred of truth to that, but realistically people are afraid of their own public, I think, in a lot of ways. And so being kind of matter-of-fact about the fact that, “Well, these really are who your neighbors are. Like, you can choose just to ignore that that’s how the world works, but you know, these are all your neighbors, and you see them all at the public library. You’re welcome.
Your library may also be underfunded. This is an issue for a lot of libraries.
One way to deal with this situation is to disallow entertainment on certain computers. That way there are always computers available. Still, in the era of everybody having an internet-capable mobile phone, the original premise seems suspect. In fact, the people using library computers to play games seem more likely to be the ones who need it most. Many kids don't have a home PC capable of running the games, whereas pretty much everybody has the internet.
You think that someone who wants to play WoW in a library is of the same importance as someone finishing a highschool assignment in the library because their parents can't afford a computer at home?
Get real.
How about going back to library of alexander and letting the commoners play dice games in it.
> Entertainment is one of the basic human needs.
Ok, if you believe that, then fine. But where is it writ-large that entertainment == playing video games on a free, public library computer? There's lots of entertaining books in the library too. Grab one and sit quietly on a chair if free entertainment is so important to you.
Dota / LoL / CSgo matches last an hour and have severe penalties for leaving, and they are very popular at internet cafes so I wouldn't be surprised if that was what's being played.
Let's be honest: that highschooler will almost certainly spend as much or more time on Facebook than on their assignment. The poorer the person, the more likely this becomes.
Meanwhile you get to use that extremely-uncommon corner case to penalize everybody else just because you dislike video games.
Those people reserved their computer time like everybody else. You don't get a say in how they use it as long as they're following the rules. It's doubly important to protect a shared public resource: we live in an era where anyone can attack X as immoral, especially when X is harmless.
> Dota / LoL / CSgo matches last an hour and have severe penalties for leaving, and they are very popular at internet cafes so I wouldn't be surprised if that was what's being played.
Perhaps not the most fair comparison, as soon as you get into even casual raiding/mythic+ dungeons.
Who are you to dictate which fun is Proper and Allowed?
Years ago, I sent my mother-in-law our old computer when we upgraded, and I made sure to include kid-friendly software on it so my very poor nieces and nephews would have reason to get on their grandmother's computer when they were at her house. I saw this as a very important element in trying to make sure they didn't wind up on the wrong side of the digital divide. At the time, computers were not nearly as central to modern life as they are currently.
http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13506283
You'd have to curate the experience to do something that forces them to learn necessary skills. I've seen those skills dressed up as games or something on occasion. Most fun apps don't do that, though.
The parents seem to have some vague concept that spending hours each evening on Facebook and YouTube will impart, by some sort of cybernetic osmosis, a knowledge of PHP, HTML, JavaScript and Haskell.
And you posit that their computer literacy will go up if we start throwing them off the public computers so they can't even use Facebook and Youtube?
Your argument that they aren't so hot currently in no way rebuts my assertion that if you start throwing poor kids off the internet at public libraries they will be left even further behind than they already are currently.