Report: Games may help steer interest in reading

by Jason Dobson { Oct 7th 2008 at 5:00PM }

Games, according to some, are a gateway drug to books, drawing players away from the screen to engage in some old-school page turning. According to The Times, everyone from teachers to authors are embracing the idea of using video games to help encourage children to read, while nonprofit John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is even offering grants in hopes that game design principles can be used to help build literacy and other skills in school-agers.

Interesting as this is, it's not exactly new information, is it? As far back as the early '70s young'ns were getting a leg up in schools learning about the dysentery-filled life of 19th century pioneers in The Oregon Trail, while other edutainment and even mainstream titles like Civilization have helped spark interest in the word outside of games as well. Still, it's encouraging to see efforts that try to bridge education with our hobby of choice. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to finish up these last few pages of Animal Farm before getting back to Viva Piñata.

Tags: edutainment, reading, video-games

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

WorMzy @ Oct 7th 2008 5:03PM

Interesting.. I do read a lot of books, but I don't think that's because of video games..

Red Leader @ Oct 8th 2008 1:00AM

I think playing games with a lot of text eventually gave me the confidence to read books I would have otherwise passed on.

Vegnagun bwf @ Oct 7th 2008 5:07PM

Animal Farm is a good book. Agreed.

Blank-Mage @ Oct 7th 2008 11:31PM

Snowball is such an innocent name.

umm....hello??? @ Oct 7th 2008 5:12PM

really??? there's a reason why the acronym RTFM came to be...;)...

samfish @ Oct 7th 2008 5:12PM

I know that when I'M not playing Halo, I'm expanding my mind by reading Halo novels. Heavy lifting for the brain, those are.

Shagittarius @ Oct 7th 2008 5:38PM

Being a Wii Fanboy you probably prefer short stories.

;-P

Negativecool @ Oct 7th 2008 5:55PM

Paper Mario on paperback.

Titanium_Orchid @ Oct 7th 2008 5:13PM

I told my parents that an NES would help my reading, and that convinced them to buy me one.

Thank you text boxes

nofriendo @ Oct 7th 2008 5:17PM

when are they gonna make "everybody poops" the videogame

Haggard (Mr.ESC resurrected on a... thursday?!) @ Oct 7th 2008 5:46PM

That's some QTE sequences I really don't want to see.

Chris Are @ Oct 7th 2008 5:25PM

That's kind of dumb.

Kamizar @ Oct 7th 2008 5:27PM

For all the games I've ever bought, I always read the game manual...

Ahmedz @ Oct 7th 2008 5:35PM

lol @ ppl playing SSBM in the picture XD

Courtney @ Oct 7th 2008 5:35PM

From purely anecdotal experience, I think gaming has encouraged my daughter to read. She's dyslexic and has had a strong aversion to reading due to how difficult she finds it. Besides the traditional education help we have gotten for her, I've also tried finding "fun" ways to get her to read that are less intimidating that a full novel, including games that are heavy on text, gaming magazines and mangas/comic books.

In the last year, she's reached the point where she sits down to read books on her own without us prompting her. While I think the educational help was of greater value than gaming, I don't discount the effect it had on her. With dyslexia, comprehension of text is always an issue. Particularly on adventure games and RPGs, she had to find ways to comprehend the text if she wanted to advance, including using some reading strategies that we had had problems getting her to use with traditional reading material. She wanted to understand the game text, but was more ambivalent about trying to understand some story we were making her read.

Denis @ Oct 7th 2008 5:41PM

My brother has a reading problem that hindered him greatly in school. At first, we thought it was something like dyslexia, but after several consultaions it turned out to be a short term/long term memory issue. He won't remember his spellings from yesterday, but in a years time, he'll know them all perfectly. Because of his difficulty with reading, he didn't like reading books. In fact I don't remember him ever reading books for leisure.

When I went to college, I didn't see him as often, but remember coming home one Christmas and sitting in the living room while he played Legend of Zelda. He played along, and I was watching. He's fantastic at games, far better than me. And then he got to a "talky bit". Zelda, as most of you know, favours text over voice acting, so I assumed he'd skip over these bits to get back to the game.

Instead, I heard him slowly read through the full piece. There were a few words here and there that he struggled with and had to skip over, but he got the gist, and continued on.

I remember this, because my mum cried when I pointed it out to her. I guess partly she hadn't noticed the slow, gradual improvement, and partly because, well, she was mum, and didn't bother us while we were playing our games. Since then, my brother has read comics, books, magazines, you name it. Mostly about computer game characters or super heroes, admittedly, but still.

So do games steer interest in reading? Yes. Definately. And long may they continue to do so.

gaymerxbox360 @ Oct 7th 2008 5:41PM

Well if reading the Halo novels, warcraft novels, Star Ways novels or any other nerdy/geek book... Then count me in !!!

LeMuRfArT @ Oct 7th 2008 9:56PM

i can say i dont read for fun

but i did pick up the mass effect book so that o would have the back story before the game.

got me to read and i plan on picking up the next one before the new game comes out.

edgore @ Oct 7th 2008 5:43PM

"I need to finish up these last few pages of Animal Farm before getting back to Viva Piñata."

All animals are filled with delicious candy, but some animals are filled with more delicious candy than others.

ToRo @ Oct 8th 2008 9:51AM

ha that made me chuckle! Good book though. One of the few good books I read during high school.

edgore @ Oct 7th 2008 5:46PM

It will be released at the same time as the film, and will, of course, be a derivitive platformer.

edgore @ Oct 7th 2008 6:40PM

Stupid comment system (or stupid me) this was supposed to be a response to the Everybody Poops post above.

DVD Defects @ Oct 7th 2008 6:00PM

Some games have encouraged me to read. For instance, I remember buying the game "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" for the Commodore 64. I was terribly bummed when it didn't have any graphics (was only a text adventure game), but it was funny enough that I was hooked and it made me seek out the book it was based on. Also, the game Nueromancer on the C64 made me always want to read it, which I'm finally doing 15 years later.

Dirty @ Oct 7th 2008 6:33PM

What are these book things... they sound fun.

&rew @ Oct 7th 2008 6:34PM

Does Phoenix Wright count as a book?
If so, then gaming is a gateway drug to the nefarious world of books.

Sean Newton @ Oct 7th 2008 6:36PM

At 5-6, I was playing "Adventure" on the VIC-20. It was the closest thing to an action game I had.

And I had to play it in the snow. Uphill.

Mr Khan @ Oct 7th 2008 6:42PM

Nah, Calvin & Hobbes and the Berenstein Bears, those'll get you reading (in my case, at least)

Though i remember Pokemon Red and Blue being helpful to some of my peers in grade school.

Blank-Mage @ Oct 7th 2008 11:34PM

I think Calvin and Hobbes accounts for a good 35% of my personality. Life's just more fun when you're Tracer Bullet.

kftgr @ Oct 7th 2008 7:38PM

They had these page turner games decades ago...

Enter word 7 of the 3rd paragraph on page 52 to continue.

jinn35 @ Oct 7th 2008 7:50PM

I actually find myself reading less than before I was a gamer. Games are just too much fun!

A person @ Oct 7th 2008 8:03PM

I love to read. Ted Dekker books mainly. I think playing video games really helped my reading skill. I was always among the top readers in my class.

phrequency @ Oct 7th 2008 8:25PM

i played mud games so i ended up reading a lot and learning how to type properly and well. cuz when i'm in pvp, i'd be damned if i died because i couldn't get initiative from not typing "unsheath sabre", "unsheath sabre", "doubleslash " fast enough (and accurately). this was from playing in a telnet client without echos or backspacing before i realized the great world of mud clients and aliases.

i thought the article was literally going to be about that photo (boyfriend plays games, must read book). it'd be a second-hand smoke effect in a sense.

SpikeDelight @ Oct 7th 2008 8:32PM

I literally got interested in reading when I picked up Halo: The Fall of Reach. That book is so amazing and now I'm really into the Halo books. I never knew the Halo universe was so deep! Must-read!

Trulz @ Oct 7th 2008 8:54PM

I wont say games gave me my love of reading, but all those hours reading text box after text box in FF7 had to do SOMETHING.

Arienette @ Oct 7th 2008 9:00PM

I started reading Atlas Shrugged after playing Bioshock, so it does happen. It's an awesome book, but it's a lot harder to get through than the game.

Blank-Mage @ Oct 7th 2008 11:44PM

The RIGHT games make you read. I can't see Gears of War or Ninja Gaiden helping you much academically. But a good Final Fantasy or Legend of Zelda really fires up your imaginative and generally cooler side. I mean, I can't imagine how different I'd be without the RPGs that shaped my personality. (Odin Sphere for the tearful win.)

So anyway, who here has read Brisingr? Ooh, and Beetle the Bard comes out on December 4th...

TheOverlord#2 @ Oct 7th 2008 10:14PM

Reading? How when I have all these games to play?

BigD145 @ Oct 7th 2008 10:27PM

All those load times make me want to pick up a book and stop wasting my time.

James @ Oct 7th 2008 11:02PM

My 5 year old son has expressed a strong urge to further his reading skills after playing Super Mario Galaxy on the Wii.

The fact the story is outlined both visually and in text boxes has really given him the desire to improve.

I think that so much of children's play centers around interaction with toys and imagination that they don't see the value of reading as a skill.

Now that he knows he'll get more out of the game the incentive is there.

Saria the Cat @ Oct 8th 2008 1:12AM

I think the potential for gaming to encourage reading is great. It just depends on what games you play. I always loved to read from a very young age and came to like games like Final Fantasy more because they seemed to cater to a reading audience.

And video games would most definitely encourage children to read more than TV would. You don't read anything on TV unless you're watching a foreign movie. And even then, you don't exactly need to know the script. But most games, even non-story-oriented ones, require some reading in order to figure out what is going on, even if it is something simple like "Pick up the stick."

The real question is, when voice-acting becomes the norm for the RPG genre, which consists of the story-heavy games that would normally require a lot of reading, will text in games become obsolete?

xtremeholymuffin @ Oct 8th 2008 4:49AM

Bioshock inspired me to read Atlas Shrugged, no joke. My decided to read The Fountainhead. Now we hate Communism!

Also, I'm sure everyone knows this already, but I just noticed that Andrew Ryan is an anagram for Ayn Rand, minus the -rew from andrew.

Gamehiker @ Oct 8th 2008 9:48AM

My niece and nephew used to love watching me game and when I would play games like Zelda, they'd always insist I read the text. Sometimes I'd do it, but that's a lot of text to read. They've since become avid gamers and the desire to know what the characters are saying, I think, really encouraged them to want to read so they could play the games on their own.