Parini for the lulz

An absurd article suggesting that playing video games improves the literacy of the player, or perhaps of people near the player (really). Some of the people quoted in the article think playing video games is better than reading books:

“Games are teaching critical thinking skills and a sense of yourself as an agent having to make choices and live with those choices,” said James Paul Gee, the author of the book “What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy.” “You can’t screw up a Dostoevsky book, but you can screw up a game.”

“I think we have to ask ourselves, ‘What exactly is reading?’ ” said Jack Martin, assistant director for young adult programs at the New York Public Library. “Reading is no longer just in the traditional sense of reading words in English or another language on a paper.”

Is an assistant director for young adult programs at a library a librarian renamed, or is he in professionalized management with librarians reporting to him? In any case, it is almost admirable how willing he is to be illiterate in support of illiteracy. Usually advocates of bad spelling, grammar, reading, etc use standard English themselves and show some evidence of letters, an ironic fact often thrown back at them by conservatives. Jack is a proper revolutionary, a vanguard illiterate: "Reading is no longer just in the traditional sense" shows how firmly he has rejected English syntax and idiom.

Gee employs some remarkable English with "You can't screw up a Dostoevsky book," but all I have to say to him is that he really should play a video game. He will be astonished to find that games let the player save his place and retry levels, so that choices are almost costless. The 1-Up mushroom will blow his mind like peyote.

The best part of the article, of course, is the appearance of my favorite moronic English prof:

“I wouldn’t be surprised if, in 10 or 20 years, video games are creating fictional universes which are every bit as complex as the world of fiction of Dickens or Dostoevsky,” said Jay Parini, a writer who teaches English at Middlebury College.

The tendentious might want to ask him what he means by "complex," and whether that word can apply in the same sense to intricate software and well-developed fiction, but look at the implication in his statement: Dickens and Dostoevsky created fictional universes, as though they were mere precursors to Tolkien and his hobby world. I had naively supposed that the "universes," or settings, of their books existed to support each story, which was the intended creation. Maybe Parini is just confused, thinking Dickens and Dostoevsky are the D&D of the Forgotten Realms.

And yes, I have read a shameful number of Forgotten Realms books, and played all the Bioware/Black Isle games. I suppose the one advantage to such a waste of life is that I can say with complete confidence that my literacy suffered for every hour reading the really appalling pulp and playing the entertaining but vacuous games.