A game review (sample of a game that fosters proper reading skills)
There is a game for XBOX 360 and PC right now by the name of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Now, mind you, there are roughly infinite playing hours inside this game, so I have not fully explored the world or really gotten very far at all (I’m level 6), but I have gotten a considerable idea of what the game is about. It is the basic search and quest RPG where you have a role to play in saving the planet, which is a given in 99% of RPG’s, but the cool part is that the entire game is pretty much interactive (no background interactions, but destructible terrain is a pain to code). The world is a living, breathing one where characters go to work, eat, sleep, and do everything else that normal people do. This includes, dun dun dun, write books. That is right! There is an entire library full of short stories (not to mention shelves of manuals and guides) within the game. The texts are flavorful, but not extremely difficult, so the people playing the game can get enjoyment out of the short stories themselves. Now, I’ve actually been looking around for the short stories, so I can’t promise that they automatically are gained. There is, however, a massive amount of textual background to the game anyway. If a student were to demonstrate to me, through screen shots for instance, that they were published in the world of Morrowind writing guild (yes there is a writing guild) OR that they successfully gathered and read the entire works of a writer within Oblivion (there are ways of showing how much of the text has been read) I would grant them credit for the reading (or extra credit if I couldnt’ get a lot of support for gaming inside the classroom). This game, honestly, takes at least a 10th grade reading skill to comprehend, not to mention everything that must be memorized and categorized. Anyone who is against gaming within the classroom just needs to sit down and play this for a while, then see how their brain feels after absorbing roughly 500 pages worth of text. A professional review for the game is as follows:
IGN
I have playe Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and many other games like it. Like Oblivion there is a ton of reading required throughout the game. With any free roaming, questing rpg, your memory and reading skills are constantly tested. Not only do you have to remember what quests you need to do, you also have to remember town locations, recall the layout of towns to find shops and such, remember names for quests, and even deal with numbers with buying and selling. Often certain shops will have better prices and you have to remember good prices for certain items to know when shops have good deals. There is a huge amount of memory and thought required for these games yet these characteristics often go unnoticed. If RPGs that are not designed for educational purposes can help this much, imagine what one with some educational goals could do.