NON-TRADITIONAL LEARNING:
Video Games for
Teaching Reading BY RACHEL WISNOM
Ever since I was a child video games have been a large part of my life, whether that be watching my brother play Pokémon or The Legend of Zelda on his Nintendo 64, or playing those games and many others myself as I got older. Just as importantly as video games are to my life, so is reading. Being a voracious reader and consumer of stories is no doubt how I ended up in thefield of English and English Education; however, I would be remiss to exclude the impact video games have played on leading me to that same career path. I have played simple video games and complicated video games, and enjoy both, but for the purposes of this essay my experience with role-playing games is center-stage. Role-playing games are often heavy with complex plots and dynamic characters. Some, like The Elder Scrolls Series, include written story content and lore in the form of books within the game-world. Others, like the Dark Souls Series, rely on the player to discover lore naturally through exploration and extrapolation of the situations and contexts in the game-world. This situational learning (Gee, 2001, 2011) experience, by which players come to know the story-world through exploration and role-play, is similar to the experience good readers have while reading a story-book (Wilhelm, 2016). In both, the player or reader integrates themselves into the story-world, positioning themselves as a spectator and actor within it. Although, the difference between reading a novel and playing the game is rooted in experience; or the “ability to place a player in the role of a character” and “experience the consequences of those [characters] identities as they traverse the game” (Coltrain and Ramsay, 2019, p.41). In role-playing games such as The Witcher Series for example, the main character, Geralt, is often condemned for his mutation (or race) despite the necessary services he offers by hunting the monsters no one else is willing to. Then in the third game of the series, Wild Hunt, everyone is eventually required to have documentation proving they are not witches in order to enter the city of Novigrad, or risk being killed Salem Witch Trial style. Being Geralt lets players experience prejudice in a more personal manner. They end up “embody[ing] those actors’ [and characters’] roles and gain empathy for them through active participation” (2019, p. 41). Most importantly, it is this active participation or integration into the story-world that teacher-researchers like Jeffery D. Wilhelm find essential to the reading experience. Wilhelm’s You Gotta Be the Book (2016) describes engaged readers as being able to respond “simultaneously” to his 10 dimensions of response (pp. 87-888 and 92-128), containinga combination of evocative, connective, and reflective dimensions. He finds that they privilege “highly reflective dimension[s] without really discussing their response on an evocative one” (p. 144), whereas less proficient readers have difficulty making use of “extratextual information” or use strategies for creating meaning such as “building relationships with characters, taking their perspectives, and imagining and visualizing secondary worlds” (p. 147). Wilhelm makes use of drama as a strategy for meaning-making with less proficient readers, which he says encourages “active participation” (p. 148), in the same vein as Gee’s situational learning. Is that not what wedo as teachers, we ask that our students take on a role within the novel, within the story-world? To engage with it? Of course, there is the issue that some students are not readers. Not that they can’t read, but it is often difficult for them to stay focused or understand what they are reading; and so, reading becomes a struggle. If a teacher is lucky enough to have the class time and the age group to dedicate to fostering a love of reading, like Wilhelm demonstrates his book (2016), then encouraging non-traditional learners to read and understand what they read may be an achievablefeat. On the other hand, if these same non-traditional learners have made it to High School, especially 11th and 12th grade, what do you do then? At this point in their education having a High Schooler find the value in reading when they don’t and have never liked reading isunlikely. Students like this often have an
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