Thinking differently about reading, gaming, and cheating

"The problem is that educational game designers have approached the problem backward: Rather than striving to get games into education, educators should be investigating ways to get education into games." -- Karl Royle, University of Wolverhampton School of Education

I pulled this quote from the most recent issue of Innovate, in which Royle writes about how to improve upon popular videogames (including first-person shooters for, presumably, adolescents) to slip in more opportunities for learning, whether introducing scientific concepts or higher-level reading skills.

His article reminds me of recent findings from the Cooney Center, which issued a call to fill the edu-game gap. And it also ties into the work of James Paul Gee, author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Royle dives into a discussion of "cheats" that reminds me of Gee's proposal that children gain skills in reading when they pore over the extra textual stuff that come with games, like "cheats" (hints for moving forward in a game) and web sites that help them to master the videogame's world.

Royle continues the theme: "External cheats require users to read complex instructional text in order to solve a problem, promoting literacy. The search for cheats is itself pedagogically important; the moment a player searches for extra knowledge, an independent learning strategy is invoked."

It would be fascinating to see some research on this, comparing children with and without access to (or with and without the desire or encouragement to use) those texts and documents that might push the envelope of their literacy learning. Perhaps studies like that are out there and I haven't yet come across them?