Video Games and Literacy: More Than Meets the Eye

I've been doing a lot of thinking about video games and literacy, and I just want to put a couple of ideas and questions out to the group to both extend my own thinking, and maybe to frame the conversation a bit, moving it outside of the "video games are not as good as books" argument that I hear a lot.

First, I think that it's really important to define terms in a discussion like this one. One central term is literacy. Are we thinking of literacy as being able to decode symbols to create meaning (functional literacy) or are talking about literacy as the ability to understand, critique, and question text, media, or other things interacted with (critical literacy)? Or are we saying the ability to read and comprehend books (print literacy)? Another central term is video game. Is the discussion around "mini" games such as Tetris, MarioKart, BrainAge, or around "complex" games, games that require players to take on a new identity, play for more than 10-100 hours to complete the game, problem solve and face consequences for their decisions, such as Final Fantasy, Spore, Sims, DragonQuest, etc? (BTW, I borrowed these terms from Marc Prensky, who talks about them in his book Don't Bother Me Mom, I'm Learning.)

From the reading and studying that I have done, I think that complex games can probably improve critical and perhaps even functional literacy. James Paul Gee makes a case for this in What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, in which he argues that educators can study games to observe extremely effective teaching techniques. (Whatever you think of the content of games, they are very good at both motivating people to keep playing them, and teaching them an internalized implicit set of rules so that they can understand and play the game.) One example of Gee's arguments about how games can support even print literacy (there are many, and I really encourage you to check out his book if you are interested!) is that games teach players "to learn about and come to appreciate interrelations within and across multiple sign systems (images, words, actions, symbols, artifacts, etc.) as a complex system, [which is] core to the learning experience." To paraphrase, learning to read at its most basic is really a process of learning how to decode and understand a symbol set. While games may be teaching players to understand a different kind of symbol set (not the English language), they are honing the same underlying skill.

In addition games provide a unique chance for players to immerse themselves within narrative structures, becoming part of the story creation itself. Some games have better stories than others, true, but they also do something that books can't (even Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books!): they give the "reader" / player agency and power over shaping the story line.

Finally, I'm borrowing from Steven Johnson's book Everything Bad Is Good for You to make this little chart about the differences between books and video games. While books do many things very well, and we have invested them in Western culture for hundreds if not thousands of years because of the things they do well, video games do other things very well, and I don't know that it has to be an either/or dichotomy. Maybe print literacy is not the main benefit of video games, and maybe it shouldn't be. But perhaps there are other, just as valuable, skill sets that video games have to offer. Take a look and see what you think.

Media Literacy and Criminals

I know that this course is about youth and media literacy, but I've been quite amused recently about the articles that I have been coming across concerning criminals and their use of new media and games.

• Gangs use of Twitter, Facebook on the rise
• Criminal Colin Gunn Used Facebook To Threaten Enemies From Jail
• Dungeons and Dragons Prison Ban Upheld
• Fugitive Christopher Crego Posts Facebook Info That Helps Police Arrest Him
• Prisoners Lose Facebook Pages After Victim Taunts

Interestingly, police and prison officials have had to increasingly deal with criminals and their use of social media in ways that were perhaps quite unexpected. For example, gangs are now recruiting new members and bragging about their exploits on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook or lone criminals are taunting others via posts on Facebook. Some of these poor choices on the behalf of criminals have led to their capture or the revoking of privileges in the cases of criminals that are already incarcerated. What seems apparent though is that criminals are now using new media in order to carry out some of their work. In some cases, the police are using this to their advantage, for they can now see and document when threats are made and sometimes even when the acts are carried out when the criminals post pictures of their crimes. In one of the articles that I have provided, one cop is even quoted talking about the need to not publicize all that police are doing with new media to catch criminals so as to keep criminals in the dark about police tactics. Nevertheless, there does seem to be a need to make uniform policies - or simply make a policy at all since there are few official policies in place - concerning new media and games.

Gaming, for instance, seems to be greatly misunderstood. The article about Dungeons and Dragons that I have posted above is a bit problematic for me. I suppose if one is in prison, then they are being punished for some reason and shouldn't be able to do everything. On the other hand, I don't know that I agree that Dungeons and Dragons "promotes fantasy role playing, competitive hostility, violence, addictive escape behaviors, and possible gambling." Statements like that lead me to believe that there is an air of ignorance towards gaming that needs to be addressed in our criminal justice system.

With all of this being said, I have found these articles quite interesting. Our focus on youth in this course is not wholly separate for these topics. Informing young people about new media and gaming is important, but it's also important to teach them about being responsible with new media and making them aware that the choices that they make about what to share and post online are choices that need to be taken seriously. A new site has been created called Please Rob Me that simply searches for public Twitter posts in which people freely mention that they have left home. This information can be combined with other location-based social networking tools to determine the location of homes that have been left unoccupied. I'm sure most of us don't think about that when we post status messages about our locations, but it's perhaps something that we should be thinking about and it's a great example of a seemingly simple action that has rather unintended consequences.

On the Imperiousness of Literacy

While Ong’s questioning of the effects that the centrality of writing has on our minds and our culture is at first provocative, I think he is raising an important point that should be considered. Why are reading and writing privileged in our society, and what effect does this have? As librarians, we see great value in reading in particular, and spend much of our energy promoting its merits. I’m not suggesting that this should or will change; but I do think it is important to take a step back and understand why this exists and what it may mean. In Ong’s assertion that “Literacy is imperious,” I don’t see imperiousness as a characteristic of the term or something that is inherent in the skill of reading, but rather a reflection of the cultural privileging of this way of learning, working, and living that has become so imbedded that it may obscure our vision to other ways of thinking.

Applying Ong’s argument to Aviv’s New York Times piece “Listening to Braille” for me brings out some of the assumptions that are underlying people’s perspectives on the “illiterate” blind. I found it interesting that in Doug and Diana Brent’s study of blind people’s prose, they asked them to “write” by composing on a keyboard, a skill unfamiliar to them. They invoke Ong, but I feel, miss the idea of writing as a “technology.” To me they prove that people that haven’t had much experience writing will have difficulty writing—and perhaps even that their minds work differently that literate people. I wonder, however, how the results may have been different if they had their subjects compose their stories orally and dictate them. If the subjects then created organized, complex thoughts, would this be less valuable just because of the medium by which it was accomplished? To me the study assumes a specific set of values, and disproportionately privileges the “tool” or means of production, therefore backgrounding content or meaning. The Brents’ conclusion explicitly identifies the set of assumptions they are working from (using the term “value”) –“It just doesn’t seem to reflect the qualities of organized sequence and complex thought we value in a literate society.” The examples of Laura Sloate, successful director of a Wall Street firm, and New York governor David A. Paterson may counter the idea that lack of literacy equals an inability for complex thought.

In The Children’s Machine, Seymour Papert (developer of the LOGO programming language and contributor on LEGO Mindstorms) argues that computers may offer some very meaningful ways for pre-literate (illiterate?) children to learn, create, problem solve, and interact. He questions the idea privileged in the U.S. educational system that reading is the first and most important skill to be learned, and points out just how much time teaching to read takes up of the first few years in school. He is not suggesting that reading is not important, but that it might better serve students to learn in other ways in complement to reading. This is just one example of an alternate viewpoint that may not be considered because of the privileging of literacy.

Of course, reading and writing is so embedded in most of our lives that how can we ever really distance ourselves from it enough to analyze its role? Like Plato, who records Socrates’ arguments against the written word in writing (the only way we would even know about it today), we are fully immersed in the written way of doing things. While the beginning of Ong’s article raises the questions I mention in the first paragraph, it becomes clear that he sees it as central, concluding that “Writing is a consciousness-raising and humanizing technology.” While we may come to the same conclusions, I think the process of thinking it through raises some interesting ideas.