The Core Knowledge Blog

Book publishers are increasingly using video games to “extend the fictional world” of novels for young readers.  By doing so, the New York Times reports, authors and publishers are hoping to lure gamers who might not otherwise pick up a book.  And that’s just a start.

Spurred by arguments that video games also may teach a kind of digital literacy that is becoming as important as proficiency in print, libraries are hosting gaming tournaments, while schools are exploring how to incorporate video games in the classroom. In New York, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is supporting efforts to create a proposed public school that will use principles of game design like instant feedback and graphic imagery to promote learning.

“But doubtful teachers and literacy experts question how effective it is to use an overwhelmingly visual medium to connect youngsters to the written word,” the Times notes. 

Mark Bauerlein, the Emory University professor and author of the recent best-seller The Dumbest Generation is not among those  quoted by the Times.  But it’s a safe bet he would cast a skeptical eye on the piece.  In a recent essay he wondered whether digital literacy is reading at all. ”Yes, it’s a kind of literacy,”he cautioned, ”but it breaks down in the face of a dense argument, a Modernist poem, a long political tract, and other texts that require steady focus and linear attention.”

For publishers, the lure of appealing to gamers is obvious: enhanced sales and — as they say in marketing-speak — multiplatform merchandising.  For educators?  Proceed with caution.