Using Video Games as Bait to Hook Readers

“Mr. Bagley, now a senior, was so addicted that he some­times aban­doned friends in the din­ing hall to return to the game. But the story was never the attrac­tion. Both the nar­ra­tive and the char­ac­ters, he said, were too sim­plis­tic, and he gave up “World of War­craft” in his sopho­more year.

Video games, said Mr. Bagley, 21, ‘cer­tainly don’t have the same degree of emo­tional and intel­lec­tual com­plex­ity of a book.’

Some peo­ple argue that video games are an emerg­ing medium likely to undergo an evo­lu­tion. ‘I wouldn’t be sur­prised if, in 10 or 20 years, video games are cre­at­ing fic­tional uni­verses which are every bit as com­plex as the world of fic­tion of Dick­ens or Dos­to­evsky,’ said Jay Parini, a writer who teaches Eng­lish at Mid­dle­bury Col­lege.” [New York Times]

I’m dis­ap­pointed in this arti­cle, not because it isn’t a “rah rah, video games are great” piece, but because I don’t think it reflects what would have come from eight months of research, which is how long the author spent on it. Sev­eral librar­i­ans, includ­ing me, have talked with the reporter since Jan­u­ary, and I think we all expected some­thing a lit­tle deeper, regard­less of the view­points expressed. The excerpt above is indica­tive of the back-and-forth, “one said good, the other said bad” piece. I don’t think this arti­cle adds any­thing new to the debate, and I expected a series titled “The Future of Read­ing” from the New York Times to offer some­thing more in-depth.

In the end, I think this arti­cle is a rorschach test for how the reader feels about video games. If you’re against them, you prob­a­bly feel like this arti­cle val­i­dates your objec­tions. If you think video games are okay (or even ben­e­fi­cial), you can also find quotes to sup­port that per­spec­tive. Cer­tainly the com­ments get inter­est­ing and con­tinue the “good ver­sus bad” debate, but I keep won­der­ing when we’re going to get past extremes in this dis­cus­sion in order to fig­ure out how to inte­grate a for­mat that is clearly here to stay into our kids’ media diet (and into our libraries) in a bal­anced way.