| Description | Book pairings with video games are an ideal yet underutilized approach to harnessing the potential of games and learning. This panel will explore narrative gaming in combination with literature, focusing on games that emphasize multimodal media's evocative, social, and exploratory potential. We discuss narrative video games that encourage exploration of 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." Or, looking at the classic canon, we will discuss how a pairing of "Walden, a game" with Thoreau's "Walden; or Life in the Woods," enables exploration of universal themes of humans' relationships with nature and society. Takeaways from this panel include examples of curriculum pairing books to games and a walkthrough of using such pairings in classrooms and libraries. |
