Games, learning and literacy

New form of literacies such as video games, blogs, chat rooms, Instant Messages, film creations like machinima created a trend and encouraged writing outside school for students and suggested interaction with non-linear, intertextual and multi-layered text. Moreover, how can a little child master an online video game without much understanding and knowledge of complicated text – commands, instructions, goals within the video game context? The answer will be sound effect and image interpretation, these cues would definitely assist the way that they act and interact with.

Here, I would like to introduce a game or series named Diner Dash launched by PlayFirst. Your job in this game is to help Flo, the main character to run the restaurant, accumulate score to furnish your restaurant, the idea is to train working under pressure and good management of time.  

Although this game didn’t facilitate multiple players around the globe to interact in real time and work together, it connected with social networking sites, and eventually created some kind of new literacies, including blogs, online forums, and wikipedia page.

For example, it created a Page in Facebook, which enabled fans of this game to give comment and interact. I think the attractiveness of this game is: it enabled your design and layout of your own restaurant and the Avator (Flo, the waitress, main character in the game), fans would upload their masterpiece on the page and pull for comments or vote. Fans from this game can exchange their tips, raise questions throughout these sites.

Other than computer-based literacy, this game shooted for iPhone and iPad too, as a result, the APPs circulation enabled a great multimodal text, for example, other than the official video launched on Youtube, Fans from this game also recorded his/her own experience and posted on Youtube. Sometimes, the video game review would ge a great illustration on how to play/master the game successfully. At last, would teachers encourage students to do their book review on this basis too? An interesting way of storytelling. I suggested. =) 

Finally, I think that playing online games would be a good way to practise English too, since Fans should communicate with a common code to learn the tips or complete the goal of their favourite games. English would definitely the best choice although some games embedded the language choice, but if you want to gather walkthroughs about that particular game, you can't stay away from the utilization of English with others on the Net. They pick up new terms, sophisticated vocabularies throughout the process of text-based brainstorming with strategies in the game, communicate with Fans all over the globe!!!!!!!