Shoot 'Em Up, Bang Bang: Video Games and the Crisis of Literacy

Kendra Clark

BACKGROUND

            When I was about seven years old, my father bought our family its first computer. It was a hulking machine with a monitor that was downright gigantic compared to today's, and it came with a printer that was about as big as me and weighed twice as much. The sound from it all was terrifying. Looking at that system, if you had told anybody that it was on the rise and was going to take over the lives of our society, they probably would have laughed and gone back to filing.

            My first inclination toward technology was when I used to watch my mom type on a DOS screen: black background and lime green print. Her fingers moved across the keyboard at the lightning-fast pace of 74 words per minute. Of course, this is fascinating to a child and soon I wanted to participate in the use of a keyboard and mouse. My love for the computer developed rapidly; soon I could use code that mystified most adults. The “addiction” only grew with the advent of the online world, and I was designing websites in HTML when I was twelve, a business where even small-time web developers were making one hundred eighty dollars an hour. Back then, the industry of video games and computers fairly exploded onto the scene. Soon access to the internet was growing across the world and brands like Nintendo and Sony Playstation were in households everywhere.

            Today my brother, two years my junior, eclipses me. He attends a technology college, and his room is a plethora of machinery. He has a 37” TV hooked up to his computer so he can dual monitor, numerous gaming consoles and a phone that accesses the internet, holds appointments, texts and is just a plain phone. He wired his apartment himself for all his gadgetry. The future is in his bedroom.

            Nowadays, we have all heard of the controversy over video games and technology, how they are affecting future generations in a very negative manner, a complete conflict with how I grew up in association with the very same things. Psychologists, journalists, and parents are writing about the negative effects of the things my brother covets the most. They are claiming that the items he, and to a somewhat lesser extent myself, grew up on have rotted our brains, destroyed our creativity, made us mindless, violent, illiterate people.

            My question is: how is today's technology, namely video games, affecting the future generations?  Even more specifically, how is it affecting our education and literacy levels? Do these claims we see on our TVs and in our newspapers today really hold true for our youth? What does the future of video games hold for our children's education?

CURRENT PROJECT

            I want this project to depict video games in a good light, and show that they are overall helping our children develop, but want and reality are two different things. I currently don't know where my research will carry me or what the outcome of it will be. Through this project I'm hoping to reach a level of knowledge on how kids are affected, be it good or bad, by today's technology. Do video games affect a child's literacy? Can they, and how so?

PLAN FOR THE NEXT TWO MONTHS

            I will be reading specific books that contemplate solely on the effect of video games on children and young adults over the next two months. I also want to read books that deal with just the issues of literacy in children to gain further knowledge of the extensive problem of illiteracy itself.

IDEAS ABOUT HOW TO PRESENT THIS WORK

            My goal for this project is to be able to clearly state whether video games help or hinder and the ramifications of letting a child play such games. I think that today's society is struggling greatly over such an issue and I'd like to be able to say with certainty whether someone should agree or disagree.

TENTATIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abanes, Richard. What Every Parent Needs to Know About Video Games: A Gamer Explores the

            Good, Bad, and Ugly of the Virtual World. Harvest House Publishers, 2006.

Cleckler, Bob C. Let's End Our Literacy Crisis: The Desperately Needed Idea Whose Time Has Come.    American University & Colleges Press, 2005.

Gee, James Paul. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Palgrave    Macmillan, 2003.

Hirsch, E. D. The Knowledge Deficit: Closing the Shocking Education Gap for American Children.         Houghton Mifflin, 2007.

Manzo, Anthony V. “Literary Crisis or Cambrian Period? Theory, Practice and Public Policy         Implications.” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, Vol. 46, 2003.

Robinson, Ken. Do Schools Kill Creativity? Technology, Entertainment, Design Conference. Monterey,   California. Feb 2006.

Robinson, Ken. Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative. Capstone, 2001.

Shaffer, David Williamson. How Computer Games Help Children Learn. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.