Video games lure teens into the city’s libraries
Here’s yet another article that talks about how video games promote literacy by providing a different type of reading. The games mentioned in the article are DDR and Rock Band. Nothing else.
Clearly there is something amiss here. Here’s hoping that there is more to this than the fluff that ALA and the MSM is providing to us.
It seems to me that the games they listed don’t require any reading whatsoever. Games like Zelda: The Twilight Princess and any game from the Final Fantasy franchise are full of sections where the gamer must get through loads of text in order to proceed to the next section of the game. Rock Band and DDR, albeit are extremely popular, don’t require any reading besides navigating through the menus to get to the games themselves.
Maybe having these popular games to entice young people to visit the library is the goal in and of itself. Once the young people are in the library, maybe they’ll be tempted to stay and pick up a book.