It's not far-stretched to connect literacy and learning with games. When we're young, we're often taught games that are great fun, but that are also teaching us important skills that will carry us through the rest of our lives.
As infants, we generally learn games that involve picking things up, moving things around and building things (all working on hand-eye coordination and fine motor skills). As young children, we start playing interactive games with others, perhaps pretending to be doctors, pilots or superheroes (all games teaching us social skills). Once old enough, we can start to learn games involving one of my favourite things - reading (think board games and of course, video games). Yay!
If you’re not sure about the connection between games and learning, why not take a look at this post by the Shifted Librarian.
How does this all relate to video games? I hear you ask. Excellent question.
Depending on the game, there are any number of skills the gamer is putting into practice at any one time. If you’re playing a racing game like Gran Turismo, you’re using hand-eye coordination, being involved in healthy competition and learning to deal with both success and failure, winning and losing (as opposed to the popular, but flawed, idea that everyone's a winner).
Playing my favourite game, Fallout (3 or New Vegas, let’s not be picky here!) involves prioritising (deciding which quests to do and when), making choices (how you'll communicate with characters, whether you want to be good or evil) and living with the consequences (i.e. the game has different outcomes depending on what you choose to do).
A game like Singstar promotes collaboration, socialising and perhaps even stepping out of your comfort zone by singing in front of a crowd.
I could go on forever - but don’t worry, I’ll stop now.
The point I am making is this - I think games in libraries are a good thing, whether it be board games or video games. It's another way of getting kids and young adults into the library, and who knows? Maybe they’ll borrow a book on their way out! (Read, kids, read!)
The Amherst Village Library (part of the City of Gosnells’ Library Service) has Wii consoles that have proved to be very popular. After a little web trawling, I discovered the Brimbank Library Service in Melbourne also has Wii and Playstation 3 consoles.
Does your library have video games? Let me know by commenting - I’d love to hear your opinion on how useful/fun/annoying/difficult you find them in libraries.
5 comments:
No, we don't (Cockburn)! Id like to try to introduce some but I already made a nusiance of myself with the comics (sorry, sorry, graphic novels) so I intend to lay low for a little bit. But its definitely on my mind.
I think half the battle for getting videogames into libraries isn't the libraries themselves, it would be convincing/training patrons.
I guess it comes down to having the library also become a social space - we even threw around the idea of trying to set up tabletop games after being offered a large colection of D&D books from a publisher(although I'm not volunteering to be DM. Noooo waaay).
what about the old atari game, space invaders? what does that teach us? kill those aliens!! hehe ;)
Yeah, I can see your point but it's no help for us uncoordinated-to-our-fingertips-stumblebutts! Still, I can see games benefitting libraries because it enhances our involvement and relevance to the community. Just as long as i don't get asked to play:-)
I can see games benefitting libraries because it enhances our involvement and relevance to the community. Just as long as i don't get asked to play:-)
Awww c'mon! Imagine how much fun that would be ... as opposed to shelf reading, for example :P
Post a Comment