{"id":1389,"date":"2008-10-20T11:34:54","date_gmt":"2008-10-20T17:34:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamingwithchildren.com\/?p=1389"},"modified":"2008-10-20T11:34:54","modified_gmt":"2008-10-20T17:34:54","slug":"nyt-gaming-leads-to-mass-reading","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/2008\/10\/20\/nyt-gaming-leads-to-mass-reading\/","title":{"rendered":"NYT: Gaming leads to mass reading?"},"content":{"rendered":"

According to a recent article in the New York Times<\/a> titled “The Future of Reading: Using Video Games as Bait to Hook Readers”, new efforts to bring video games into traditional literary areas are happening due to “that video games also may teach a kind of digital literacy that is becoming as important as proficiency in print”. One quote postulates “I wouldn\u2019t be surprised if, in 10 or 20 years, video games are creating fictional universes which are every bit as complex as the world of fiction of Dickens or Dostoevsky”. Also, they discuss how rich game worlds such as the one in Postal 2 have opened a dialogue around issues of race, religion and gender sensitivity.<\/p>\n

OK, the last one I made up … but it might as well be in there.\u00a0 Let me be clear – anything that fosters reading and learning is good in my opinion, but this over-valuation of alternative learning based on so much unsubstantiated conjecture just has to stop.\u00a0 It has been documented through the years that the reading level associated with TV shows is barely higher than a Dr. Suess book, and that video games are pretty much at that same level.\u00a0 I chose Dr. Suess specifically for the reason that it is not an end in the educational process but a means: a gateway for very young kids to get interested in reading and become more literate and develop a better sense of grammar, style and vocabulary by reading more and more advanced works.<\/p>\n

Sadly I look at the folks in that article as being self-serving and either dillusional or disingenuous: book sales are somewhere between ‘declining’ and ‘plummeting’ depending on who you ask, while sales of video games are soaring.\u00a0 They see that by adding cards to fiction as Riordan has done they can get a ‘Pokemon Effect’, a linkage that extends their world across multiple media.\u00a0 Again, that is not a bad thing – but please don’t patronize us by saying it is in the name of a better educational system.\u00a0 It is a money grab.<\/p>\n

I don’t mean to diminish the value of video games as fun entertainment with the possible ability to provide actual educational opportunities in rare instances; I just think that we need to be realistic here – the rise of this ‘new literacy’ has also seen more and more studies showing that the skills that employers need, the very skills that pundits claim that are delivered by the ‘better education’ of video games and blogs and Web 2.0 sites, have not been better served.<\/p>\n

Time is a zero sum game: there are twenty four hours in a day, and no new era of advanced multitasking kids can change that reality.\u00a0 If kids are spending ~4 hours a day between TV and video games which provide a first grade readin level, those are hours that are not spent reading at their own grade level, of learning other skills, of expanding their horizons in other ways.\u00a0 Video games are an extremely mainstreamed entertainment source, offering little that deviates from mainstream acceptable thought, and therefore never pushing the boundaries – the very boundaries of comfort and what is known that need to be pushed for true learning to occur.<\/p>\n

Again – I am a gamer, my kids are gamers, and pretty much everyone readin this is a gamer.\u00a0 Don’t get me wrong, I see video games as a wonderful part of a well balanced life.\u00a0 But when your teen wants to have a cathartic experience blowing stuff up in a war setting, do you reach for The Killer Angels<\/a> or Call of Duty 4<\/strong>? Exactly … each serves a purpose, and attempting to repurpose one as the other to make folks feel better about their kids spending more time a day playing video games than they do a month reading (according to studies) does a profound disservice to us as parents, to our kids, and to the world that could benefit from their underdeveloped talents.<\/p>\n

So I hope that there is a positive impact of gaming on reading – but I hope it is a means to an end and not a means to simply increase gaming at the cost of the reading it is supposed to be enhancing.<\/p>\n

And as for my Postal comment … that game could claim to introduce people to cultural, religious and other stereotypes with the purpose of bringing about discussion of those topics, but in reality the presentation is juvenile and trite and serves little purpose but an excuse to poke fun at stereotypes in a stereotypical way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

According to a recent article in the New York Times titled “The Future of Reading: Using Video Games as Bait to Hook Readers”, new efforts to bring video games into traditional literary areas are happening due to “that video games also may teach a kind of digital literacy that is becoming as important as proficiency […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1389"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1389\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}