Book pairings with video games are an ideal yet underutilized approach to harnessing the interests of child readers. This talk, based on a recently peer-reviewed article in the Children's & Libraries journal, co-authored by the presenter, will explore narrative gaming in combination with literature, focusing on games that emphasize multimodal media's evocative, social, and exploratory potential. Narrative video games can support exploring thematic and topical connections between games and literature. These include “Lost Words: Beyond the Page,” which deals with grief and loss, a game that could effectively be paired with the similarly themed young adult novel Ali Benjamin's "The Thing About Jellyfish."" From the classic canon, a discussion of how a pairing of "Walden, a game" with Thoreau's "Walden; or Life in the Woods", explores universal themes of human's relationship with nature and society.
Pairing Games And Books: An Underutilized Approach For Games And Learning