JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
People of all ages in Ann Arbor, Michigan, are obsessing over a certain stuffed animal.
RUBY KESSLER: The flamingo. It's a little, soft toy flamingo.
SUMMERS: Six-year-old Ruby Kessler is with her grandmother at the public library. The toy flamingo she's holding is a prize, part of a game hosted by the library that has taken over Ann Arbor. NPR's Neda Ulaby has more.
NEDA ULABY, BYLINE: The popularity of the summer game cannot be overstated, says Ann Arbor librarian Allison Jones.
ALLISON JONES: Everyone plays, everyone in town.
ULABY: OK, maybe not everyone, but a lot, says the public library's director, Eli Neiburger.
ELI NEIBURGER: This summer, we have 16,000 active players.
ULABY: Out of a population of about 120,000. Players read books for points and hunt for codes posted all over town - in people's front yards, at museums, parks and, of course, the library.
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: Found one.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: You found one, too?
ULABY: The game started as a way to incentivize kids to read books during the summer, but it did not really work, says Neiburger. Persuading kids to make lists of books was tedious for everyone, and librarians decided that tracking how many pages they read did not matter.
NEIBURGER: We don't really care, you know? We want people to use a library, whatever that means to them.
ULABY: Using the library might mean not reading at all. It might mean using its website to solve a puzzle for points. Seven-year-old Ian Hautamaki has already won a prize.
IAN HAUTAMAKI: A flamingo.
ULABY: Does it have a name?
IAN: No.
ULABY: How many points do you have so far?
IAN: I have no idea.
ULABY: But Ian knows exactly what he's going to get with them.
IAN: Lots and lots of flamingos.
ULABY: The summer game was designed with kids in mind, but shortly after it started 15 years ago, something unexpected happened. Grown-ups, says Neiburger, started playing too.
NEIBURGER: I was certainly not expecting how intensely popular it would be with adults.
ULABY: More than half the players this year are grown-ups. Women in their 50s and 60s are overrepresented. One young couple got married while playing the game. Ning Wang got into it because of his 6-year-old, but now he's super into it, too.
NING WANG: I enjoy to find the code (laughter).
NEIBURGER: Humans love to hunt and gather.
ULABY: Eli Neiburger says getting 13% of the residents of Ann Arbor to play the public library's summer game comes down to human nature, which finds joy in community as well as finding codes.
NEIBURGER: Libraries are magical. It's something that wouldn't be allowed to be created today if it didn't already exist. And for most communities, the library is one of the most beloved government institutions. And for government to turn outward and find completely new audiences they didn't know they were reaching, and for those audiences to discover public services that they didn't know about, that's magic, too.
ULABY: The game has not been picked up by some other public libraries because Neiburger says it's not enough about reading. But this game is about developing a library habit for anyone.
NEIBURGER: If they're a person who loves to read, great. If they're a person who hates to read, also great. We want them to use the library. We got all kinds of stuff.
ULABY: Including stuffed toy flamingos for 10,000 points in the summer game.
Neda Ulaby, NPR News.
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