I’ve written in the past on games attempting to encourage reading on one of my articles entitled “Creating a Generation of Winners” The article goes over a project from game developer Jesse Schell and its work called Lexica. The interesting thing about his game is that he isn’t trying to replace reading books with game play or reading in the game, or create some abstract interest in reading by playing his game, but the children playing it are required to read actual works of literature to advance the game.
The concept is a good one since it’s encouraging actual reading of the classics. One possible issue I can foresee with it however is that the students (which if I remember correctly will be underage students playing the game for a class) could simply post the answers of the game online or perhaps ti term searches on Google books and find the answers without reading the whole book, This may be a possibility but I haven’t looked into the success of the game, and even if that is the case it will introduce the students into the classics and possibly spark interest for reading the actual book that the literary characters are based on.
This being so, it’s still lacking in my opinion. Raph Koster has written in his blog on theories of why people like a particular game type of game, ex. Real Time Strategy vs First Person Shooter. His argument is that in order to like a game, you first need to develop neurological circuity for solving the type of problem that game gives you. One may be complex strategic thinking, the other fast passed reactions. This neurological circuity may be a slight advantage you are born with or develop later in life. If you don’t have a well established brain circuity for solving said type of problem you are not going to find the game enjoyable, but if you stick with it after a period of pain and your brain adapts, you may find that genre of game enjoyable.
Similar examples can be found outside the games. People who never workout will find working out painful, but if they stick at it they’ll get addicted to it. People who do workout may have certain exercises they hate (running, pull ups) but if they keep doing it they’ll start loving it. Same can be said with diets, working and studying. There are people who crave nutritious diets and hate junk food, get bored if they aren’t working their job and need to constantly be studying new quality constant and are intrinsically motivated doing so.
But why is this so? The mechanics described by Koster on why we like a particular game are most likely in play. You develop a skill or pattern you’re used to, and its pleasurable to exercise on this. This will have to do with the physical makeup of the brain circuity and body, not a personality or psychological element.
If this is the case, most of the methods to get students to become readers, and maintain themselves as such as adults are flawed. So far I see a lot of “motivation” to the students, and letting them know that the are great books they could be consuming. What the focus should have been instead is in the mechanics of reading. Ask someone who doesn’t read why they don’t read and they’ll say they get bored, they take too long to read, and they have a hard time understanding what they are reading. What does this tell you? The mechanics of reading aren’t set up properly. Most do not know how to speed read, they repeat the word they are reading silently in their mind instead of reading them as an image. This means their reading is going too slow and their mind is wondering, they’re half paying attention to what they are reading and start thinking of something else and end a sentence or paragraph just to realize they don’t know what it’s about.
The goal then should be focusing on the core mechanics. Most teachers probably don’t even know how to do this themselves, and it’s not even on the curriculum. Many people who don’t know about speed reading, or the proper technique may hear about a person reading a book on a three hour flight on the plane and think he’s some kind of genius, when the truth is they just learned the mechanics of reading. Something similar can be said about two men in the gym, one seeing gains with proper nutrition and training might be seen as superior by another who doesn’t know what he’s doing and no matter how hard he tries he is falling behind.
Software could be very useful on helping with learning the proper mechanics of reading and judging reading comprehension in the right context (we may gain different meaning from what we read, specially in areas such as humor, philosophy, literature, etc).
Over the past few years there has been many articles coming out blaming technology such as texting and social media for a decline on book reading, and how it’s damaging our brains. These articles NEVER address the fact that most of the people who they are talking about DO NOT know how to read properly. Neither the education system or culture at large seems to care about this. Tell an adult who complains about reading too slow and that’s why he doesn’t read books that he could learn to read faster and he’ll find several excuses as why he can’t learn to speed read.
Anyways, the constant talk about the “information age” and the skills needed to thrive in it never address how most of the population reads slower than they are truly capable and how this could have been easily address with a few weeks or months of training. Imagine how much better society at large would be if it could multiply the speed and comprehension of what it reads. These same individuals who look at other forms of frivolous entertainment could see their lives and society at large highly improved with the skill.
If you want to increase reading in the population stop telling them how entertaining or useful books are, they need to know how to read properly. So far most people are like the person who doesn’t exercise, if they are forced to walk a couple of miles they will do it but they are not going to enjoy it and won’t do it on their own.