Educational Playtime

Posted by Sara Slack in Featured Articles on Jul 20th, 2010 | one response

You know that game where the floor is lava and you have to get from one side of a room from another with the use of stepping stones? Well, that’s what I found my two young cousins doing not long ago. Reliving such a staple of childhood playtime I almost joined in, until I saw that the ‘stepping stones’ were actually books. “What are you doing with those books!?” I cried, quickly scanning them for any rips or tears. “Playing with them” was the innocent answer.

Now dear reader, this is where I hesitated for a second. My cousins, after all, hadn’t done any harm to the books, and they were showing that their stories were able to be used as something other than intended. Now, this anecdote serves as a rather literal indication of ‘books as games’, but it doesn’t take a lot of searching to find other, more subtle, instances. With the emergence of eReaders such as the Amazon Kindle, the general populace could finally read books without staring at a computer screen or carting around a heavy tome.

And of course, this was the point where the video-game industry decided to poke their noses in. Don’t get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoy gaming as much as the next person, and I also believe that companies such as Nintendo are actually helping kids’ literacy to an extent. Just picture it, dear reader. You’re in your favourite gaming shop, perusing the newest releases for your Nintendo DS, and all of a sudden you see ‘101 Classics’. For a moment you stand confused, but a little intrigued. Well, if Nintendo think it’s cool, then it must be interesting, right? Picking it up and going home, you slot it into your (insert eye-melting colour here) DS and begin to play…er…read.

Okay, so not a lot of young teenagers would bother with this, but at least it’s a step in the right direction. Perhaps next time, Nintendo could create an interactive reading game. Oh wait, they’ve been around for years…they’re called RPG’s. (Although to be perfectly truthful, who ever reads all of the dialogue or cut scenes?…now be honest…). The fact remains that there are getting to be increasingly sneakier ways of producing book-based games. I don’t mean things like ‘Harry Potter’, which has already been turned into films…but other titles such as ‘The Women’s Murder Club’ series by James Patterson. How far are we able to say that offering an increased awareness of the existence of different books is a good thing…when on the other side of the coin, it may be argued that after playing the game, individuals may feel as though there is no point in reading the story itself?

It’s very easy to say that big corporations like Nintendo (I don’t mean to pick on them, honest…it’s just that it’s easier to stick with one example), are just trying to use any means available to them to ‘cash in’. It can’t be that difficult to download 101 books, throw them into a cartridge and call it a game, after all. I would like to think however (along with a world of sunshine minus global warming, fuel minus spills that go on for months –coughs-, and unicorns without being mentally unstable) that maybe…just maybe…someone at game HQ decided to put aside the age-old contention between reading and videogames and create something which might appeal to both.

As far as the entertainment versatility of books never ceases to amaze me…it doesn’t mean I don’t cringe when I see a particularly poor ‘game’ version of the novel however. Although, as the saying goes, you can lead an individual to knowledge, but you can’t make ‘em read. (Or something along those lines, anyway).