Gaming As the New Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Book

Video games. Over the years, we've heard them labeled as mindless activities. We've heard them labeled as a mind-rotting leisure. We've heard them labeled as toys for children. Lately, researchers have found that video games can have less of a negative effective on players than naysayers might think; video games can indeed be claimed to be a good way to develop literacy for young students as well.

In Immaculee Harushimana's August 2008 article in the Journal of Literacy and Technology, Literacy through Gaming: The Influence of Videogames on the Writings of High School Freshman Males (found here on the internet: http://www.literacyandtechnology.org/volume10/harushimana.pdf ), Harushimana discusses how several games go to great lengths to include a story that works as well as any book does, writing that "video games which involve intense reading activity [are] serious games, such as history-based and classical literature-based games" (41). He continues to discuss how games such as these do not just involve looking at a character and moving around, but also writes that the text and story in the game are also necessary bits of information to understand how to play these games. On page 50 of his article, Harushimana discusses how many video game characters are based off of classical heroes, which helps to explain to me why on page 44 male students were able to write stories based off of these characters and settings.

Many games-- not all games-- can manage to draft up a game with well-developed characters and a believable story. I think that one of the games that drove the idea of mixing video game elements and into a game that would have made a good novel would be Jane Jensen's Gabriel Knight, an adventure game from 1993 that that was lauded for its focus on creating believable and real characters in a fantastical Gothic world in which players freely traverse in. If a video game can maintain believable characters and a story that has a natural and well-paced arc, how is the game any better or worse than a novel or film? Since video game characters have the option of moving or interacting with their environments as the player pleases, do you not feel as if games are a sort of "choose your own adventure" version of a novel or film?

In discussing how I feel that games work well as "choose your own adventure" media, I want to discuss this gaming article I ran across the other day which can be found online at http://elder-geek.com/2012/02/non-violent-skyrim-playthrough-results/ . Essentially, this article is about a gamer who chose to play a game that highly focuses largely on fighting monsters to advance the storyline. This player instead chose to take the exact same game and attempt to win it as a "pacifist," taking the time and effort to try not attack anything at all and still managed to beat the game which has a large emphasis on combating monsters and people in the game. I argue that this player's game narrative and experience can be viewed as a novel in itself. Is the story about this character who refused to get involved in combat when the game "tells" the character he must live a life of combat not as interesting and unique as the story of a character who plays the game with the intent to engage in combat?


I think that gamers are also creative and able to weave stories in a medium in which a story need not necessarily be told. A unique and creative story can be built from a strategy game such as Civilization V, a game about choosing a world leader and creating a civilization that will stand the test of time against adversity of other civilizations on a randomly-generated map. In this forum thread, http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=397739 , a player writes a story that is written as a diary to show how Ramesses II began his own adventure. The diary is written on the forum as he plays the game and he shows screenshots of his progress so that readers can follow along with his choices in the game while reading his narrative.

I believe that we as teachers and writers would do a disservice to students to not consider video games as a form of weaving stories and learning literacy, grammar, characterization, and storytelling. In a world in which the Internet has helped to provide a plethora of sources for any sort of person to develop literacy through any means of media—be it books, films, video games, or anything else—we teachers need to at least consider jumping into the stories and narratives that students present to their teachers before dismissing certain mediums such as video games.