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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 4911661" data-attributes="member: 22779">See, I don't buy it.  Let's step away from the US for a second.  I worked in Korea in the schools there for about seven years.  Now, if there is a population on the planet that is as full of hardcore gamers as the Koreans, I don't know what is.  Yet, literacy rates in Korea are just shy of 100% and have not changed in decades.  Reading rates in Korea have also remained pretty much the same throughout.Cool idea.  I listen to the Fear the Boot podcast (can I say that here? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />)  One of the episodes a while back talked about a teacher who would use the old Traveler world generation rules in class.  He would then turn around and use what they created in his games.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />  Everyone wins.But really cool idea.I figure my ESL classes might just get a huge kick out of Dread.  We're about to play Catan again next week.  I love getting paid to play Settlers of Catan.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Mercurius though, I think you are really, really underestimating the creative power of video games.  Long gone are the days when you pretty much did nothing but button mash your way through hordes of side scrolling baddies.  Everything is optional now.  Heck, even look at WOW, the much dreaded WOW.  Look at the amount of time people spend making videos of their characters, dressing the part, planning all sorts of activities and whatnot within the game.  There are constant decisions to be made, many of which have very little to do with the basic grind of the game and everything to do with aesthetic choices.And that's ignoring the huge popularity of games like Civilization and whatnot.Something that gets lost in these discussions is the fact that reading for pleasure is a fairly new phenomenon.  Our parents generation certainly didn't do it.  My parents did, but then again, my mother is a librarian.  Think of your parent's friends.  How many of them would you characterize as regular readers?  Or, if you look at sales figures, the number one selling book in the mid-seventies sold 1/10th the number of copies as the #1 selling book in the mid oughts.  That's pretty telling right there.  Somebody's buying all these books and presumably lots of somebody's are reading them.</blockquote>

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