WTF is up with kids? Although from my experience, I can definitely say that while I did read for pleasure at 17, I read a lot more now. Maybe it's an age thing.
WTF is up with kids is that there are far more ways to consume media than there used to be. Interestingly enough, the Harry Potter series caused a bump in literacy, but once the books were all done, the kids went back to doing other things. It's driven some interesting trends - Hunger Games doesn't happen without Harry Potter, but neither does Twilight - but the fact of the matter is, a book has to be worth it and most "children's books" are derivative of other media. A video game is going to be a more immersive experience than a book. It's also going to be a more profitable sale. What we're left with is an uphill push to get the books that aren't yet videogames into the hands of kids looking for adventure and escapism. Based on what I've been reading we simply aren't accounting for the massive shift in content from the written word to the interactive tale.
Exactly. I love reading as much as the next guy, but all the talk of kids "not reading enough" to me reeks of a sort of literary exceptionalism - books are a great way of transmitting information from one person to another, but at the end of the day, so are the Internet, video games, and television. IMO we should be much more concerned about what media, not what kind of media, our kids consume.WTF is up with kids is that there are far more ways to consume media than there used to be.
Your point on children's books is spot on, I think. Children's books follow trends and are as low-effort as any other garbage in any other medium, with rare exceptions - again, like any other medium. Harry Potter is the exception. The Wire is the exception. Shadow of the Colossus is the exception. First it was wizards. Then it was post-apocalyptic. My next guess is mermaids. Riding a trend is just as frequent in books as in anything else, and the quality is reflected in that.
That's the exact opposite of what most people find appealing about the game: cut out the creeps, cut out the grind, cut out the side quests, leave behind only the bosses with a bit of pacing in between. It's a game with only epic fights. With enemies so gargantuan that are composed of the landscape in which they reside: And it's one of the first games that turned "It's swinging a sword at you!" into "Quick, run up the sword and grab the wrist!"
Cut out the story, cut out the narrative, cut out the world, and leave that lovely "we're going to make you deal with our limited game mechanics by figuring out what contrived bullshit sequence of tedious keypresses will let you advance if you beat your fucking head against it for enough hours with a copy of gamefaqs open next to you on the sofa" aspect fully intact. Shadow of the Collosus is an utter and total bullshit game.
I'd heard so much about it that I bought it off PSN last year and played though it. There's a great feeling of accomplishment when you finish, but I think that's mostly relief that it's over. I finished it with no cheats or hints, but I found zero replay value in the game. It was really pretty, and unusual, and it was featured in some movie too, so it had that going for it...
[edit] I found playing through GTA San Andreas to be a much more literary experience - that's some good story there.
Okay I lied. I remember now that I did have to consult the internet for how to defeat the final colossus, I didn't know what to do after getting onto his hand [hangs head in shame]
I'm not a gamer and I loved the fuck out of that game. It was mysterious and cool and while the gameplay wasn't perfect at least it was interesting.
Right. It's Myst without the puzzles, interrupted by boss battles. The fact that a generation of nerdy gamers spent half their lives trying to find out if there really was something more does not alter that. I'll defer for a moment, though, and say this: My experience with Shadow was sitting through an intolerably long cutscene, riding across nothing, hopping and climbing and doing other things that were entirely too dependent on timing and entirely not dependent enough on game mechanics, and then attempting to fight some big golem thing that not only meant me absolutely no harm, but that could kill me in two blows. And the learning curve - the lack of reward - the incredibly BAD camera tracking Made it a terrible gaming experience. Hated that game.
That it was. Know what I dig? Know what you do in Journey? Stuff. Not a lot of stuff. Very little stuff, in fact. But for not doing a lot of stuff, you also don't have to learn a lot of commands, figure out a lot of arbitrary shit, or die over and over and over again because you pressed square-circle up up instead of circle-square up up.
To be fair, the camera tracking and frame rate were awful in SotC, but so were most games on the PS2. It ain't far to compare the graphics to Journey, which came out seven years after. PS2 games had to take a different approach when they wanted atmosphere; pixels weren't just handed to the devs on a shiny SDK platter back then!
It definitely used way too many polygon landscapes when it could have gotten away with with a simple matte background. But, hey, my experience is extra clouded by an extra-terrible emulator that put horse-riding around 10 fps. Look at what you can get away with when you make things 2D!Yeah, but to be fair, Myst looked pretty dope. Okami was dope. Metroid was dope. All of them use less horsepower than SotC.
Please tell me that wasn't the first time you saw Mean Girls? Because that movie is rich dense amazing chocolate mousse in our cultural landscape. I swear it was the only movie I watched in high school. Well, not only, Lord of the Rings was coming out while I was in high school, so it was like a 50/50 split. Delicious.
Best way is to fill in the gaps in your life with reading a book.
Oh taking a dump? Take a book.
Waiting for someone/something? Read a book.
Tossing and turning in bed at night? Read a book,
Bored? Read a book. Just by filling tiny gaps in your life by reading, no matter how tiny the gap is, you can finish off a book astonishingly fast. Always carry one around(or if you are an ebook person then your tablet/reader is good enough) Just building a habit of reading a few pages here and there will develop you into a voracious reader.
The fact that my 13-year-old grandson is a huge fan of the Percy Jackson books pleases me more than I can say. I'll claim the credit too, I probably read to him more than anyone else when he was a baby.
I know I read more before I was 18 than I read now. There are two distinct reasons for this: 1. I had the time. 2. I didn't have the internet and internet articles to entertain me. Growing up, we spent a lot of time vacationing. Whether it was a road trip, a weekend trip to Catalina, a 2 week long vacation to Costa Rica, my family loved to escape. We also had a steadfast rule of "no electronics" on these vacations. No phones, no gameboys, no television, no nintendo. So I read. A lot. For a 7 day trip to Catalina, I would bring 14 books and read them all. Sometimes I would finish them and was forced to re-read the old Sagan books on the boat or (the horror!) my mother's books. Now, I find it hard to sit down and read a book. When I get a good one, I crank through it in a day or two. But getting started and staying interested past the first 10 pages is hard. I would much rather be reading and commenting on Hubski or my RSS feed. When I go on vacation, I still read a lot if I don't have my computer or phone. That's one of the reasons I love Jalama beach: no cell service! A lot of times, I'll go down to the boat with a purposefully low cell phone battery and leave my computer at home so I can sit and read and soak in the sun. I can't remember the last time I lounged around the house or laid in bed and read though. It just doesn't happen.
I feel like people dismiss things read on the internet as "internetting" and therefore not worthy. I read a lot, I read a SHIT TON, and it's because of all the interesting good long reads and other stuff that people put up on Hubski. No, it's not a book, but we're fooling ourselves if we say it's not constant reading.internet articles
Seems like fear-mongering to me. I don't think the number of kids that enjoy reading and don't enjoy reading has changed in scale. Granted, there was a time after high-school where I was burnt out on reading, exhausted of it because of all the reading that was required of me. But, a tablet got me to read more. It was convenient, it could carry multiple books at a time if I ever got bored of one and wanted to switch it up, all in a half-pound device. I did tons of reading over the summer because of that thing. All that being said, this sort of thing starts at home. My parents instilled in me my love for reading, and without them I don't think I'd be reading as much as I do today. Technology isn't the biggest issue, I don't think.