The NYT has an interesting article that brushes the two sides of the “games can increase reading/literacy” idea that many authors like James Paul Gee advocate.
The article looks at examples such as Haarsma’s Rings of Orbis that requires players to use knowledge gleaned from the books to be able to advance in the game and other books that have virtual worlds “attached” to them based on message boards and/or MMORGP systems. While some of the reading here may be “incidental”, some of it might very well be directed by the student to garner more information. It is the reading encouraged by the games that the libraries are interested in, to the point that they are hosting game tournaments.
The reading that gamers do in instructional manuals, strategy guides or message boards, though often cryptic and more technical than narrative, might serve as a “gateway drug for literacy,” said Constance Steinkuehler, an assistant professor in the school of education also at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
For the past year, Ms. Steinkuehler has been testing this hypothesis with a group of teenage boys who play World of Warcraft.
For my two cents, I think the libraries are on the right track with holding game tournaments and using games as a gateway to other reading. But I think it does something else, it shows that reading can indeed be a “hip, social” activity, an idea that seems to be stomped out in K-12 quite effectively. In grade school, reading is something that you do on your own and as quietly as possible. Getting kids together in a library will likely help change that idea (and help increase the number of users at the same time) as they see that reading may in fact be a social activity.
So while the students might be playing a “simple” game like DDR, they likely don’t need to read much, but a keen librarian might have some workout books handy to help students “train” to play better. There are other variants of dance games that have classical dances as well, there again, a keen librarian might have resources regarding those other dances available.
Games like Civilivation might seem more straight forward in terms of finding resources, but they may not be – after all, just because you choose to play the Indians does not mean you’ll end up as Ghandi, you might end up as Churchill. Librarians might want to have guides to the game as well as biographies of the leaders in the game available. Together with teachers, they can create a lessons or unit around ideas that are explored in the game. This certainly is not something that is going to be easy as the complexity of the game increases, so does the range of resources that may need to be brought in. Games like Civ would be hard enough – just imagine Spore…
It seems to me that stories like this point to the fact that education has to change from the “stuffy” model that “produced” students cleanly and effectively to a model where things are louder, more engaged and certainly messier. And as a closing thought, maybe the old school method reflected a world where one person could have known everything – so that is what “we” tried to “machine” together, whereas the “new” model is actually a return to the days that acknowledged individual expertise and the engagement with knowledge and learning that preceeded the industrial revolution.
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