Books and Video Games

As someone who enjoys playing video games and enjoys reading, I'm a bit conflicted after reading the New York times article "Using Video Games as Bait to Hook Readers" by Motoko Rich. I think that there are different things to be learned and enjoyed when either reading a book or some other print artifact and when playing a video game. Sometimes, interesting and useful information is acquired when playing video games. Those of us who were in elementary school in the 90s remember playing Number Munchers, and we all know about the perils of cholera and dysentery not from experience in real-life but from losing random family members and friends to those ills while traveling along the Oregon Trail. Using video games to try to encourage students to read books, however, is quite different indeed though from what those video games were trying to do.

The joy of reading books comes from not only the ability to escape to other worlds, see the world through the eyes of other people or creatures, and perform feats that we have never nor will ever perform but also in the ability to see those worlds and experience those things in any way that we'd like. Even though books describe the characters and settings, there is still the freedom to fill in the details in any way the reader would like. So, for example, even if we all read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, we all will imagine Narnia differently. That’s definitely part of the fun of reading; you can, to some extent, augment and change the story as you see fit. That changes, however, when you move to visual mediums like games and movies. A big complaint over the Harry Potter movies was that things were left out or were changed in some way. The mediums simply afford different things. Movies and games have to define how things look and how characters speak and move. A little less is left up to the imagination.

One thing that is cool about video games that is not a part of most books or print material is the ability to affect how the story progresses and ends. Books have one ending. Someone wrote the story, someone edited it, it was copied and printed several times over, and we bought one or more of those copies to consume the story. A similar story could be told about movies. With video games, however, though there are programmed movements and programmed endings, one usually determines how the story progresses and which one of the pre-programmed endings is accomplished. So, it feels as if one has a bit more control over the process. There are some books that allow that though. I used to love reading the choose-your-own-ending Goosebumps books when I was a kid. You remember those books where if you made one decision you went to page x but if you made another decision you’d go to page y, right? Those were awesome, especially the Goosebumps books because it was always a crazy decision like jumping off a cliff and landing in some bushes below or stabbing a monster in the eye and trying to run away before he retaliated. I'd always die rather quickly, which I guess means that I'm a poor decision-maker under stressful situations, but after dying, I'd always go back and switch up my decision to see what would have happened otherwise. It was a lot of fun and sort of game-like in nature, but it was still a book. I could visualize what the monsters looked like in my mind in any way desired, and I could interpret the book’s events in any way that fit the images that I had created in my head using the author’s words. I'm not so certain that that is always the case with video games.

In addition to everything mentioned above, I think a bit of my hesitation in using video games to get more kids reading lies in the fact that video game tie-ins rarely seem to work well. The games seem to be things thrown together after successful books and movies and not something on which much thought has been given. There are some exceptions to this, as the Avatar movie and video game were both developed simultaneously. So, perhaps more thoughtful and enjoyable tie-ins are to be seen in the future, but I'm not a believer right now. Besides, kids seem to be reading these days, and not just short books, but bible-sized books like the books in the Harry Potter series. I'm not convinced that kids don't like to read these days; it just seems like they need good stories to read. If the story is good, regardless of length, they seem to be reading. Even stories that aren’t that great, e.g., the Twilight books, are still widely and voraciously read. Okay, maybe the Twilight books aren’t that bad! But they prove that kids really are interested in reading; we just have to make the effort to write and deliver stories worth reading. We don't have to trick or cajole them with games.

Both books and games are great teaching tools in their own right and can teach kids many things in different ways. As opposed to using one to convince kids to use the other, we should exploit their affordances to teach kids about information in the most natural way possible with the chosen medium.