Parenting

Our children play more online games than ever. Here's how you can take a more active role as a parent | Alexander Bacalja


With most students across Australia still learning from home, it’s no surprise that online gaming has increased significantly over the past few months.

Continued restrictions on community leisure activities coupled with parents juggling supporting their children’s transition to online learning with their own home-based work means the reins on screen time have been loosened. But should we be worried?

The trend of families spending more time gaming together has been rising for some time. The most recent Digital Australia Report tells us that nine out of 10 homes have a device that has been used for gaming, and 59% of parents play with their children. These trends are likely to have increased during the pandemic. Now is the perfect time to have a conversation about the types of digital storytelling we are engaging in, and how parents might rethink how gaming with their children impacts on literacy and learning.

Digital storytelling captures the rich, complex and entertaining narratives of our world. Podcasts, YouTube videos, TikToks and social media creative works, and a range of smartphone apps now give the everyday user the tools to create and share stories almost instantaneously.

While poetry was once held as the sole medium by which we could humanise and civilise the soul, the gaming industry has increasingly turned towards storytelling to create novel ways with words and stories. It is the learning taking place through these new forms of storytelling that should be of most interest to parents.

James Gee has written extensively about the benefits of gameplay in his book What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Australian researchers have also investigated the types of learning that takes place when digital games are introduced into primary and secondary classrooms. They have found that playing and studying games forces us to rethink how we teach literacy, that we teach young people to question the challenging ideas and representations they find in video games, and that the knowledge and skills that young Australians develop through digital culture prepare them to be effective and active participants in contemporary society.

Sadly, the obsession with Naplan and standardised literacy tests have led many parents to conclude that learning can be reduced to what a student does with pen and paper under timed conditions. Literacy learning has always been more than this: it is about how we use language with others. It is about how we make sense of linguistic, visual and musical representations. It also manifests in the way we engage with the plethora of digital media that now accompany new games’ releases.

So how can we take a more active role in our children’s gameplay?

Start by talking with your children about the games they play. Find out which genres and series they enjoy. Investigate other games that share similar features. Sit down and play with them. Take turns slaying a dragon and building a city. The evidence tells us that computer-mediated communication between children and their parents increases closeness. Sharing experiences in the virtual world involves first coming together in the real world.

Given the enormous range of high-quality games released in recent years, it is easier than ever to find story worlds that adults and children can enjoy together. Whether you want to travel back in time in the shoes of a deadly assassin (Assassin’s Creed), discover a post-nuclear war world (Fallout 4), ride your gallant steed across the American mid-west (Red Dead Redemption 2), escape to a deserted island to catch fish and insects, and develop your ideal home (Animal Crossing: New Horizons), or create an entirely new world in a faraway galaxy (No Man’s Sky).

There has never been a better time to journey to digital worlds with our children to build new stories and memories together.

Alexander Bacalja (PhD) is a lecturer in language and literacy and member of the Language and Literacy Research Hub in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne. He is the Victorian delegate for the Australian Association for the Teaching of English



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