Harper’s Tackles Literacy and Gaming (Not In That Order Necessarily)
Harper's Magazine, where all the learned kids go for their gaming news, just published a piece on literacy in the video game age. It's a roundtable discussion with Jane Avrich, Steven Johnson , Raph Koster and Thomas de Zengotita. All smarty pants, no doubt. What did they talk about? Oh, Typing of the Dead and other stuff. They discuss game plot, which moves from "Can games teach narrative?" to "game plots are so crappy" and climaxes with "games don't even have good characters." Johnson adds:
We see [games] as being driven by their narratives. In fact...the narratives tend to be a vestigial part of games that has been carried over from earlier forms. When people play games, they aren't playing them for the story. They aren't playing them for a narrative arc of any kind.
So, we're just playing them to shoot shit up? Anyway, the article is interesting and worth a read. And as Kotakuite Flink points out: If you buy the issue, you get a bit of chat-log transcript from one of the Columbine killers! Value added!
More Here [Harpers Magazine] Thanks, Flink!
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