Yesterday, GamePolitics pointed to an interesting blog-rant titled “Department of Bad Ideas: Teaching reading through video games,” written by one Miss Self-Important. (That’s her nom de blogge, by the way—no one is being snarky here.)
What follows is just one brick in the wall MSI posted yesterday:
So this brings us to video games as a means of encouraging reading. There is no logical connection between these two activities—in my experience, the only activity that video game playing encourages is more video game playing. This is not inherently evil (just mostly), but neither is it going to achieve the stated end. But! also! “some educational experts suggest that video games still stimulate reading in blogs and strategy guides for players.” And nothings instills lifelong literary habits like video game strategy guides. ... Again, I have to wonder—how excited should we about every line of text a child reads? Is it an achievement that a child can establish basic communication with his peers, which is essentially what a message board allows, and which is completely different from understanding literature? Are food labels the next big literary thing?
So I read this, and instinctively, I think this woman is kidding. After all, she wears glasses. Also, she identifies as a Chicagoan who now lives in a new city. Her punctuation is so Lewis Carroll. She is obviously very likable. She also belies, in her blogroll sidebar, an interest in casual gaming—how can I not assume that we are cut from the same cloth?
Moreover, she notes elsewhere that, just this September, she was reading Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History. Why, this summer, I was reading a different history of children’s literature, Minders of Make-Believe (thanks, Seth)! So while I would ordinarily pay this blog entry no further thought, I am, instead, helplessly furious.
I underscore MSI’s interest in children’s lit because, in her rant, she hints at having a broader suspicion of edutainment on the whole: she isn’t just skeptical of software targeted at youth, but also at mainstream children’s books and, I can only assume, various other media. And this is so frustrating, because we share a real interest—how best to cultivate children’s literacy and enthusiasm for learning—but, clearly, we approach this from completely opposing vantages.
Rather than deconstructing this blogger’s argument (which I assume she wrote for her own writerly satisfaction, and not to engage the entire GamePolitics readership), I will simply confront it with:
My Favorite Software and Edutainment Titles That Promote Literacy
Storybook Weaver (MECC, 1992)
It’s a computer game in which you seldom read, only write.
Maybe this is a strange place to begin a list about literacy, but alas, Storybook Weaver is the first game I played on our very first family computer. To be fair, this ‘game’ was nothing more than blank pages to type into, along with an enormous catalogue of clip art. But the clip art was populated with archetypes from folk- and fairy- tales, ready to be graphically remixed, mashed up, and ultimately, written about. Storybook Weaver was like magnetic poetry for elementary school kids. This was perhaps, in my quest to write the Great American Novel, my most prodigious era.
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