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Videogames are arguably the most popular form of entertainment in the 21st century. Far too often children hear “those games are rotting your brain” from parents who are worried about their child’s consumption of this modality. You could argue that many young people are ‘addicted’ to video games. Students are certainly spending more time in the 21st century playing video games than they are reading novels. This is why educators need to see the value in video games, as a way to educate and inform their students through play, and realize that video games, are not just a form of entertainment, (Jordan, 2011) bur an engaging educational tool.
Learning through games can lead to situated meanings, and specialist language (Gee, 2004). Videogames fit the description of what multiliteracies practice is all about; collaborative, social, multimodal learning. It could be argued that videogames best fit multiliteracies pedagogy, because users are not only ‘reading’ text, videos, sounds, and images; they are also concurrently problem solving, deducting, persuading, operating, and communicating. This tool of multiliteracies pedagogy is particularly interesting, because we can see games both as a literacy, and as an educational tool for teaching. Not only do teachers need to be teaching students through the use of videogames, but we also need to teach students how to comprehend, design, and create in this mode. While we see videos, images, and other modalities as texts, society still often struggles to see videogames as a type of digital text, which is ironic, as it fits all the criteria best. Jordan (2011) argues that “a key reason for adding video games to the textual framework of English studies is because they are texts, and as such are very much akin to the literature, argumentative writing, and films currently in use in the English fields. Because video games are texts, they can provide important insights into the nature of storytelling and the activity of readers, both in enacting and interpreting the text and the literate practices involved in doing so.” (Jordan, 2011, p. 17) Not only do educators need to be teaching students that videogames are a type of literacy, but teachers also need use them to help teach their students about a variety of topics. Videogames engage students to set goals, develop problem-solving strategies, and help cultivate their knowledge on different types of information. |