Another day, and more press about the videogames and learning research going on in Madison. Today’s New York Times features an article by Motoko Rich entitled “The Future of Reading – Using Video Games as Bait to Hook Readers” (it’s a follow-up to her earlier “The Future of Reading Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?“). Today’s article speaks favorably about the work Constance’s group has done in the past year, building an afterschool group around World of Warcraft for fostering literacies of various kinds. Ms. Rich visited here last spring, and sat in on a day of the afterschool program, watching us work with the kids to both improve their gameplay as well as set the foundations for them designing their own guild website (with graphics, text, videos, and other media).

I was a privately a critic of Ms. Rich’s “R U Really Reading?” article. Beyond the unfortunately snarky tone of the title, she clearly comes at this topic from a decidedly traditional perspective. A telling quote from the earlier article:

“Learning is not to be found on a printout,” David McCullough, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, said in a commencement address at Boston College in May. “It’s not on call at the touch of the finger. Learning is acquired mainly from books, and most readily from great books.”

Not to disparage Mr. McCullough, but, really? While certainly accomplished, McCullough’s not an education researcher, and has no experience in studying learning in any context that I know of. Also, isn’t it ironic to read this kind of thing off of a computer screen? (I can’t recall the last time I picked up a paper version of the Times).

Rich’s beat is clearly books, books, and stuff related to books. This isn’t really a criticism, just a statement that her background and focus have been on print media and all this digital stuff seems to be, at best, problematic for her. Rich reports widely on publishing industry developments — including the kinds of (valuable!) learning that can come from immersion in books. I’m certainly not criticizing that emphasis, but acknowledging that her standpoint was, at least initially, one in which “new media” (online culture, games, etc.) were viewed as threats to an established medium (not to mention business).

Thus, it was quite refreshing to see games positioned in today’s article as something which could potentially encourage reading. Here’s a nice snippet featuring one of the kids from the Madison afterschool group:

For the past year, Ms. Steinkuehler has been testing this hypothesis with a group of teenage boys who play World of Warcraft.

Noah Tropp, 14, who participated in Ms. Steinkuehler’s program for several months this year, regularly reads sites like gamewinners.com and supercheat.com. While looking for hints online, he read about “Death Note,” a novel based on a Japanese video game. Over the summer, he read it.

Noah also wrote about the games and other pastimes on a group Internet forum. “I was so surprised because he does not like writing,” said William Tropp, Noah’s father. “I said, ‘Why aren’t you like this in school?’ ”

In one posting, Noah recommended “xxxHOLIC,” a graphic novel based on Japanese manga cartoons.

“You should check it out if you get the chance,” Noah concluded, “and it is a good book!”

Here, we used the forums to give the kids a place to both discuss World of Warcraft and, simply, to talk to one another about anything else that they wanted to. In this case, Noah got a fire lit under him and started talking quite a bit about Japanese manga (Death Note, xxxHOLIC). This is exactly the kind of thing we know as gamers, and which we’re trying to encourage in our programs — using the game to foster social connections between people and to open doors to academic content (reading, writing, math, science, art, etc.) that may not be obvious, even to players of the game.

However, the emphasis (for Rich) is ultimately still on books. In the first article, online culture and online text seem to be impediments to getting people to reading books, while, in the second, she seems to have tempered this a little. Still, books are the happy outcome of playing those darn games, and games are useful for “hooking” kids into reading. For Rich, it seems that games are useful insofar as they drive us to learn using stuff written on dead pieces of paper. Again, I don’t question that books are an important and valuable tool for learning, but what about the unique affordances of interactive, dynamic media themselves? Books are fantastic, but can’t games give us something unique that books cannot?

I always enjoy hearing Jim Gee’s thoughts on how we should be looking at games as games — not simply as a delivery device to encourage some other kind of medium. His quote in today’s article was right on the money:

“Games are teaching critical thinking skills and a sense of yourself as an agent having to make choices and live with those choices,” said James Paul Gee, the author of the book “What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy.” “You can’t screw up a Dostoevsky book, but you can screw up a game.”

In my personal work, I want to see people “screw up” in environments in which they can learn from their mistakes. Learning from errors and iterating strategies until a successful one is determined are valuable learning experiences that games have at their core (unlike books)… not to mention how they encourage the building of complex mental models of the game systems in order to even play them! In a world which seems to be falling deeper and deeper into a state of economic crisis, we need more people who can think in terms of dynamic systems, as well as design robust ones for the future.

Despite my misgivings, both articles are definitely worth a read. I’d love to hear what other people think!