Video Games Are a Playful Way to Guide Students to Unlock Meaning in Literature

Teachers have long embraced the power of books to spark curiosity, empathy, and critical thinking in young readers. From picture books to novels, literature invites students to make meaning, form personal connections, and explore complex ideas. But in today’s media-rich world, students also encounter stories through narrative video games. What would it look like to treat some games as texts worthy of the same thoughtful interpretation we bring to books? After all, games, like written texts, can be discussed, debated, and reflected upon. By thinking of some games as texts, teachers can open up new entry points for struggling readers, deepen classroom dialogue, and foster the same sense of wonder and inquiry that great literature inspires.

Playful Ways to Learn How to Read Literature

Before exploring games, let’s start with Maurice Sendak’s classic picture book, Where the Wild Things Are. In many classrooms, teachers read the book aloud to foster a love of literacy. Some may engage students in readers’ theater, where children playact roles from the book in skits or with puppets. The book can be paired with other media to deepen understanding. Sendak’s classic text can also become a playful tool for teaching how to read literature.

In the book, Max is a young boy who is sent to his room for misbehaving. While there, he imagines sailing to an island of wild creatures, where he becomes their king. Eventually, he returns home, realizing he is loved and belongs.

When a child first reads the book, they may see it simply as a story about calming down after a tantrum—what media theorist Stuart Hall refers to as a compliant reading of a text. A reread might uncover a negotiated reading, where readers interpret Max’s journey as both a punishment and an empowering space for imaginative exploration. In his imagined world, he is the king; he is in control. Readers may also push back on the author’s intent entirely with an oppositional reading, questioning why Max gets sent to bed without supper in the first place and observing that the “wild things” were more nurturing than the adults encountered in his real life.

Reading Books and Reading Games

Like books, video games can be “read” with compliant, negotiated, and oppositional readings. In our new book, The Well-Read Game: On Playing Thoughtfully, Tracy Fullerton and I propose a new theory of player response, describing how emotional and personal interpretations are evoked during play.

Book pairings with video games offer an ideal yet underutilized approach for struggling readers to learn how to make meaning from texts. To support teachers and students in this process, we have a website with tool kit materials, such as a Player Response Journal, designed to help teachers structure reflection as students play games, much like the capturing of thoughts when reading books. Prompts to scaffold student journaling include “As the game unfolds, what happens that moves you? Do you relate to any characters or situations? What do you bring to the game from your own lived experiences?”

We use Lost Words: Beyond the Page as an example of a video game that can be played in an elementary school classroom and paired with Where the Wild Things Are. Both the game and the book take place in intertwined fantasy and real-world settings. In Lost Words, a narrative game written by Rhianna Pratchett, daughter of famed fantasy novelist Terry Pratchett, players control Izzy, a young aspiring writer who encounters grief and loss after her grandmother suffers a stroke. She processes her difficult emotions both in a real-life journal and in a made-up fantasy world, similar to that of young Max and his wild things.

Middle and high school students can also play the game while reading a more complex text, such as Ali Benjamin’s The Thing About Jellyfish, a novel about a grieving girl who becomes obsessed with jellyfish as she searches for a scientific explanation for her best friend’s sudden drowning. As with reading any work of literature, students can be invited to question and even resist what they experience, embodying oppositional or negotiated stances that lead to deeper critical thinking. Beyond the compliant reading and playing of the game’s narrative, students can discuss how Izzy, like the characters in both books, feels powerless in a world of adults. Perhaps they feel the same at times.

If having students play a video game in class seems out of reach, try showing clips of playthroughs from YouTube. Search for ones without commentary so that students can make their own connections. Games for Change has a terrific directory of social impact games tagged thematically, such as games about grief or love.

From Journals to Discussions

Teachers can build on reflective journaling by integrating games into existing literature discussion formats. In literature circles, for example, students take on collaborative roles, such as “questioner,” “connector,” or “critic,” while responding to video game narratives, much as they would with books. What if students studied and discussed Shakespeare by reading Hamlet and also playing Elsinore, a time-loop game inspired by the play? In this setting, the game isn’t “teaching” Shakespeare; rather, like a film or other media form, it presents a different multimodal experience for students who may struggle reading a centuries-old play written in Early Modern English.

In a jigsaw strategy, students break into groups to explore different segments of a text, which can also include games. In this scenario, students are “experts” on their assigned part. For example, after reading Lois Lowry's dystopian book The Giver, middle school students might each analyze a different chapter or theme alongside corresponding scenes from the game Before I Forget. A short narrative game, the story follows Sunita, a woman living with early-onset dementia, as she pieces together memories of her past in a fragmented, emotionally resonant exploration of identity and loss.

Both the book and the game explore themes of memory, identity, and the cost of forgetting. Students can share insights and draw connections across both texts, responding by bringing their own lived experiences to how the book’s and game’s protagonists confront what it means to remember the past—and how memory shapes who we are.

Classroom discussions can be central to how children make meaning from texts—and not just stories on the page, but from all the media they encounter. These are just some approaches that center students’ voices in understanding literature. They are intended to cultivate rich dialogues between the reader and texts, discussed socially in classrooms, where learners bring their own values, identities, and experiences into the interpretive process.