So I was reading with my girlfriends lil' brother the other day, and I had this idea: someone needs to write some book/video games, where kids actually need to read in order to discover new things about the game they are playing. And yeah, I know that some companies already do this, but I mean something different, like, you know, with games that don't suck.
And yes, my porpose, uh well my purpose, (and my porpose too if you must know) is educational. But the worst possible thing you can do with something like this is try to make it educational. when you do that you always end up with crap like:
discover amazing secrets of addition and subtraction!
Battle the polynomial persons!
Defend mathville from collapsing triangles by correctly figuring the missing angles!
Those educational things are always like that, kids see right through it. Then there are those games where they try to hide the geeky educational value, and when kids discover it they just feel betrayed.
Now when my mom wanted me to read, she left copies of Clockwork Orange and 1984 (or stuff by Tom Robbins, Kurt Vonnegut, Rita Mae Brown, Flannery O'Conner....) around the house, and then forbade me to read them.
Worked like a charm.
She basically got me into the habit of searching through banned books lists for my reading material-- and as everyone knows, most of the books worth reading are banned somewhere! Thanks to her, I was probably the best read college freshman around (don't quiz me, I'm a bit behind the curve these days-- it's all the damn music learning time)
So we really need to do the same thing with video-game/book combos. Make it like grand theft auto, and then have the characters drop hints about stuff in tertiary books like Wiseblood or Jitterbug Perfume, and you'll convert the ADD generation, who cant focus their eyes long enough to read a single sentence, into a great generation of literate citizens.
4 comments:
Reading does not guarantee the banishment of ADD... I could barely finish reading that post
;-)
yeah, and I guess Grand Theft Auto doesn't usually equate to citizenship....
This is a cool idea, actually.
Not a video game, but the television series Lost has a huge cult following who will dig into any minute clue to find how it might fit into the bigger picture. A lot of good books have appeared in the characters' hands, stuff like "The Third Policeman", "The Turn of the Screw", "A Wrinkle in Time", "Watership Down," etc. Because of it, a lot of Lost fans have read them looking for some sort of clue to the show's mysteries.
I could see some sort of online roleplaying game set in a modern or post-modern world doing the same thing. The problem is coming up with a game that gamers would care enough about to actually go hunting down stuff in the real world. The average game doesn't really compel a player to go much beyond looking up cheat codes on the internet
Oh, and Scott? One of the main characters is called John Locke.
I spend too much time trying to work out why. Maybe Lost is just an oblique way of propogating early enlightenment contract theory?
Or not.
Also? I really want another character to be secretly called Thomas Hobbes, so they can have a huge fight.
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