Baited into Books

How are we to feel, then, today, about the ways in which video games are now being used to 'bait' young readers? Is gaming our new reading? Is it our new gate to reading? Is it the essential path in a digital world? Some words from today's NYT story:

... doubtful teachers and literacy experts question how effective it is to use an overwhelmingly visual medium to connect youngsters to the written word. They suggest that while a handful of players might be motivated to pick up a book, many more will skip the text and go straight to the game. Others suggest that video games detract from the experience of being wholly immersed in a book.

Some researchers, though, say that even when children don’t read much text, they are picking up skills that can help them thrive in a visually oriented digital world. And some educational experts suggest that video games still stimulate reading in blogs and strategy guides for players.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/06/books/06games.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=books

Certainly gamers are required to attend to plot and to latch onto words, to follow the thread, to notion in. But is it also possible that knowing and feeling are two different things—and that books prepare us like nothing else can for the heartbreak, confusion, mystery, joy—the outright complexity—that constitutes living day to day? Books without gadgets, books without gimmicks, books in which characters can't be surmised at a glance and stories take time to unfold? We aren't in control when we read another's book; the author is. We are forced to go under, deep, to submit, and when we emerge we aren't precisely who we were; something ineluctable has changed. We have in our head new ideas not just about the ways in which stories get made, but about how lives—for better, for worse—get lived.

Good books square us up against complexities and consequences; they force the issues. And I suspect that in the days to come, we'll need leaders who can manage both, leaders who read. Games have their place; of course they do. But in our zeal to please, let us not sweep aside our book-bound stories.