My exploration of the reader experience via video games has been heavily focused on direct connections between books, stories, and games {posts I, II, and III}. I think this established the benefits of this particular digital format for books. I’m going to wrap up this miniseries with a more personal reader experience: note taking and learning.
Whether with paper, a highlighter, and a pencil or on a digital tablet with a stylus, we’ve all marked up text to take notes and help learn from what we are reading. Or, maybe we’ve just pretended to do that while doodling in the margins {don’t worry, I won’t tell}. Note taking to remember information has a long history and was so integral to the human experience that Shakespeare included the practice in Hamlet. “Faced with the task of remembering, Hamlet himself holds a table-book” (Stallybrass, Charter, Mowery, and Wolfe, 2004, p. 414). Table-books, or more commonly, commonplace books, had a variety of uses but are frequently known as a tool, similar to a notebook, that readers would use to record passages and thoughts about what they were reading to keep important information organized and available for future reference. “Repetition is itself a memorial system, but the moment of copying from table to commonplace book also allows for organization through digestion and distribution…” (Stallybrass, Charter, Mowery, and Wolfe, 2004,p. 412). Reading is all well and good but readers need to digest and understand information, it is how knowledge is expanded. Yeo (2007) also refers to a commonplace book as a “thesaurus, a storehouse of quotations for later use” (p.56). We might call it a notebook, prior to the twentieth century it was called a commonplace, but regardless of the name, note taking while reading important for the storage and organization of the content a reader is encountering.
The stylus has enhanced digital note taking turning it into a process that mimics what would be done with pencil and paper. How do you digitally note take in a video game, with two hands on a controller? It’s definitely different but games like Concrete Genie take creative approaches to creating notebooks.
Screen cap from Concrete Genie with paint brush pattern panel showing on the left.
I have been enamored with Concrete Genie for the last year; it might just be my current favorite game. Concrete Genie is an all-ages game with a creative premise: playing as drawing enthusiast Ash, players must rescue a rundown town, Denska, by painting colorful murals to drive evil out; with a magic paint brush, of course. That’s right, the point of the game is to create art to save the world! Like all games, players begin with a few basic painting skills and build up the colors and patterns they can paint as they advance in the game. How the skills are stored for players is what is unique and reminiscent of those old timey commonplace books and Hamlet’s tables. Painting patterns are organized in a chart by categories like Landscape (see image above). Painting and drawing techniques are practiced in a digital books, which is also where new characters, or genies, are stored for reference. The pattern chart appears for reference and to toggle through whenever a player is painting on a surface and the sketchbook/notebook is accessible for reference and recording with the touch of a button. While many games will log items procured, few make the player active in recording their new skills. Using the sketchbook requires specific motions with the game controller which are then mimic when painting a wall to rescue it from evil. That repetition and reinforcement of memory mentioned above is translated digitally in Concrete Genie.
Screen cap of a genie being colored in in Concrete Genie.
Some people love digital reading (Technophiles), some hate it (Book-Lovers), and other are indifferent (Pragmatists) (Revelle, Messner, Shrimplin, and Hurst, 2011). I really think that anything that encourages engagement with text, stories, and absorbing new information is a positive thing. Every humans learns, reads, and experiences the world differently and having a variety of ways to engage with information is important; there’s space for everyone. Books are rectangular objects with pages of paper printed with text, and they have been for centuries. But remember, books used to be {and still are} people who are good at engaging a crowd, cave walls, and pieces of rock. As technology advances why can’t they also be accessed through a computer screen, gaming device, or smart device?
Citations
Revelle, A., Messner, K., Shrimplin, A., and Hurst, S. (2011). Book lovers, technophiles, pragmatists, and printers: The social and demographic structure of user attitudes toward e-books. Proceedings of the 15th Annual Conference Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL).
Stallybrass, P., Charter, R., Mowery, J.F., and Wolfe, H. (2004). Hamlet’s tables and the technologies of writing in Renaissance England. Shakespeare Quarterly, (4)55, pp,379-419.
Yeo, R.R. (2007). Lost encyclopedias: Before and after the Enlightenment. Book History #10, pp. 47-68.