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Non-Traditional Learning: Video Games for Teaching Reading RACHEL WISNOM
NON-TRADITIONAL LEARNING: Video Games for
Teaching Reading
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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 the field 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), containing a 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 we do 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 achievable feat. 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 is unlikely. Students like this often have an
attitude towards not only reading but school in general, and they need more than a “because I said so” to see that value; which unfortunately leads to labelling such students as lost causes and poor readers.
Consequently, the idea that students become lost causes stems from a very traditional, and somewhat outdated, view of learning, especially in English Language Arts. One where the canon, or literature that is ‘proper’ literature, is heavily policed by the government, scholarship, and school administrations. Students who cannot or will not learn from the accepted works of canon literature are often left behind. It is unfortunate because these are students who could flourish in the ELAs if they were only given the opportunity to go at it on their own terms. In today’s world, the answer to that is video games.
I do not mean video games specifically designed for educational purposes, although those are indeed valuable assets to teachers. No, I mean narrative video games, popular culture video games, role-playing video games, etc. Games like The Legend of Zelda Series, the Elder Scrolls Series, The Witcher Series, the Dark Souls Trilogy, even Call of Duty. These games provide an aesthetic, yet interactive experience. They are designed like books are written, to provide a space for meaning-making and interpretation (Gee, 2011). Moreover, according to Barab, Gresalfi, and Ingram-Goble in their article “Transformational Play: Using Games to Position Person, Content, and Context,” narrative-based games “create a setting that learners can act upon in a personally valued and socially significant ways” difficult to achieve in “schools and in noninteractive media” (2010, p. 525). It is in the nature of video games to be personally interactive, so a player can be a part of the story and position themselves within the narrative, aided by visual and auditory cues, automatically. Something that non-traditional readers struggle with creating in their imagination while reading (Wilhelm, 2016).
It is important to note that just because video games provide some of the aspects of interpretation which books lack without the help of an engaged reader’s imagination, does not mean they require any less literacy skills to interpret. In fact, video games require visual literacy, a form of literacy that is becoming more and more important as things move online and into visual media. Researchers Ann Morgan Spalter and Andries van Dam see the rise of digital technology as a shift in communication (2008). As a consequence, visual literacy is often more natural to current high school students, who have grown up knowing and having digital technology at their fingertips.
Furthermore, if teachers utilize their students’ affinity for visual literacy, they can use that to work backward from the visual to the written. They would start with something their students already know and understand in order to train them to take it to the page. To write and analyze games the same way they would a novel. This is already being done at the college level. In some colleges, they are beginning to teach courses on game interpretation and the scholarship is out there, simply difficult to find largely due to a complicated classification.
This difficulty with classification comes with the words games theory, which is tied more to the study of games and economics than a game’s literary merit. Since this is the case, it might be necessary to change the search terms to literary games theory or aesthetic games theory, so that when searching for scholarship on feminist games theory the results are not a torrent on the blackspot that was #GamerGate. Instead, a game’s contribution to literary theory becomes first and foremost.
By changing the results around video game studies, perhaps we can better argue for its place as an acceptable alternative to reading. Instead of asking our students if they like to read, we will ask if they like to experience stories, thus we will not be condemning them for being bad at or not interested in reading. This way no student feels less than or dumb for not conforming to the narrow view of literature K-12 schools, and most colleges, often take.
Still, it is significant that there is some idea surrounding video games which, obviously, allow and encourage the player to be a character in the game as automatically disqualifying video games from a critical analysis. Earlier in this essay, I demonstrated the necessity of both active participation (Wilhelm, 2016) and situated learning (Gee, 2001, 2011) in the critical reading experience. Perhaps, it is simply the newness of video games, but I see no difference in being able to ‘virtually’ place yourself in the story-world through technology versus identifying and engaging with a textual story-world in one’s own mind. If we consider Wilhelm’s theories concerning drama (2016) and the evidence he takes from Rosenblatt’s transactional theory of reading (1978), it may be that some players more fully experience a story-world in a game than that of a book.
Moreover, any good book should invite the reader to be a part of the story-world, an essential part of Reader Response theory (Wilhelm, 2016; Rosenblatt, 1978), which video games do, if anything, by their nature. Or the other idea that games which include choice in any interaction leading to one player’s game experience to be different from another’s, also disqualifies it. This is discounting once again the nature of video games, which like books,
have a pre-scripted version of events that occur because a game is programmed in the same way a book is written. Even in games with different endings or experiences based on a player’s choices those variations are more than susceptible to literary analysis and criticism.
So, why then shouldn’t educators view video games as valid portals to literary learning? The answer to this question is only difficult because of how games are currently viewed by the larger scholarly community, an issue that James Coltrain and Stephen Ramsay discuss in their article “Can Video Games Be Humanities Scholarship?” (2019). They write “games naturally engage with subjects that lie within the conventional province of humanistic inquiry, including storytelling, architecture, music, and visual art” (2019, p. 36) and the fact that video games can fit into all of these categories, seems to be one reason for scholars’ inability to place it. Perhaps that is the beauty of video games. That they can be used to explore so many different areas of scholarship it becomes difficult to apply them to any. Coltrain and Ramsay talk about video games as “both a new genre and a new medium: one that will require its own...scholarly apparatus” (2019, p. 37), one which we do not currently have.
In the meantime, certain games contain elements ripe for literary, historical, and theoretical interpretation like that of a novel (2019). As an example, games can be a form of archeology, preserving authentic experiences of cultures and times that no longer exist or are far removed from our own experiences. Coltrain and Ramsay cite the games Never Alone, which teaches players about the heritage of the Inupiat people of Alaska, and 1979 Revolution, a retelling of the Iranian Revolution (2019). The culture of the Inupiat people and the impact of the Iranian Revolution are both instances of material that a majority of people might never know about or understand without playing the video games, specifically younger generations. Here, games become an important cultural artifact, part of a genre of historical studies we may call games archeology one day.
However, historical studies are not the only way video games can fit into the scholarship. Games like those previously mentioned utilize the same dramatic techniques and literary devices that any play, novel, or poem employs to convey meaning and intention. In the same way that Shakespeare makes us laugh alongside the Fool at the foolishness of King Lear, or invite our own sorrows to the stage in Hamlet’s famous “To be or not to be,” video games use dramatic “appeals to humor, sympathy, or disgust” (2019, p. 38) in their own writing. For example, the realization that the Bloody Baron in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt abused his wife and daughter, caused his unborn child to become a monster, and lead to his own death. All of which is encountered by the player through the main protagonist that, along with the player, expresses his sympathy and eventual disgust for the Baron. Just this one questline, in a game that contains hundreds, presents a story which evokes the consequences and tragedy of parental abuse and the trauma of losing a child, and could lead to an analysis along the lines of Feminist or Reader Response Theory at the very least. What’s more, by recording the responses of players’ reactions and decisions such a game could provide empirical research data regarding a multitude of humanities studies. Hard data being something that a good portion of literary scholarship is unable to present, such as “how many people surmised through their reading that Jay Gatsby might be gay because he wore a pink shirt that one time in The Great Gatsby.” This is research that, in my experience, is not done in English literary studies, but wouldn’t it be interesting to do so?
Without a doubt, defining the scholarship of video games is a challenge, and it is going to be even more of a challenge integrating them into the K-12 English Language Arts Curriculum as a viable alternative option to reading books and novels, but I believe it is worth it. I hope that books will never go away, that I will always be able to hold a book in my hands and read it. But, as technology moves on and kids grow up with a phone in their hands rather than a book, it only seems sensible to adapt. Furthermore, if we take all of the ways that video game theory can be molded and adapted to fit within other, more traditional, scholarship, why couldn’t video games teach our children all of the same things needed to become the critical thinkers that traditional scholarship teaches? The question remains, do we have to teach critical thinking skills from the pages of a book?
REFERENCES
Barab, S., Gresalfi, M., & Ingram-Goble, A. (2010). Transformational Play: Using Games to Position Person, Content, and Context.
Educational Researcher, 39(7), 525-536. Retrieved October 17, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40963353 Coltrain, J., & Ramsay, S. (2019). Can Video Games Be Humanities Scholarship? In Gold M. & Klein L. (Eds.),
Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019 (pp. 36-45). Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press. doi:10.5749/j.ctvg251hk.6 Gee, J. (2001). Reading as Situated Language: A Sociocognitive Perspective. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 44(8), 714-725. Retrieved October 17, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40018744 Gee, J. (2011). CHAPTER FIVE: Reading, Language Development, Video Games, and Learning in the Twenty-first Century.
Counterpoints, 387, 101-127. Retrieved October 17, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/42980948 Rosenblatt, L. (1978). The reader, the text, the poem: The transactional theory of the literary work. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Spalter, A., & Van Dam, A. (2008). Digital Visual Literacy. Theory Into Practice, 47(2), 93-101.Retrieved October 17, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40071529 Wilhelm, J. D. (2016). “You gotta BE the book”: Teaching engaged and reflective reading with adolescents. New York, NY: Teachers College Press, Teachers College, Columbia University.
