The Gee article for this week reminded me of a series of Nancy Drew-themed video games that I used to play on my computer in middle and high school. In each game, you are Nancy Drew and you get to solve a mystery. They have titles like “Nancy Drew and the Haunted Mansion” and “Nancy Drew and the Secret of the Scarlet Hand.” In the games, you control Nancy as she walks around the game world. There was a lot of reading involved because there would inevitably be a creepy library full of books or a bunch of old love letters that Nancy found hidden in a secret box, and some of the clues to solve the mystery were contained in the written text, so literacy was directly involved in the game in that way. Nancy also got to interview lots of suspicious people and talk to them throughout the game, so you had to listen carefully to what they said to pick out clues.

My favorite part of the games was that there would be a lot of puzzles to solve. The puzzles could be anything from organizing  a lot of objects in the right order to reading up on how to play chess and then having to beat another character at chess in order to “win” some vital information for the case. Solving these puzzles applies to many of the points Gee brought up about video games, such as co-design, distributed knowledge, well-ordered problems, system thinking, and skills as strategies. The puzzles also relate to the Frey and Fisher article about motivation. I felt motivated to complete each task because it was a do-able challenge and I could contribute to the outcome.

I always played the Nancy Drew games collaboratively with my younger sister. We would fight about whose turn it was to “be the mouse.” Whoever didn’t get to control the mouse that day was the secretary. We kept meticulous notes on each game and wrote down clues, observations, and numbers we had to remember like lock combinations. Sometimes we would have to identify specific objects, like in one game where we had to know the difference between various types of clouds (stratus, cirrus, cumulus, etc.), so the secretary had to draw pictures of all the different clouds so we could identify them later in the game. Taking notes outside the game helped us keep track of our thoughts so we could better analyze the game. I think this example shows that video games can be much more social than we assume. We often picture “gamers” as nerds with no people skills who sit at home playing video games all day to avoid social contact. However, video games can be a collaborative effort. Sometimes my sister would be better than me at solving a certain puzzle and she could teach me how to do it, so I learned new skills with her help. Three of my (female) cousins also played the Nancy Drew games around the same time that we did, so we had a LOT of discussions and debates about them: which game was the best, which was the scariest, which was the hardest, which had the best characters, etc. Video games can promote thoughtful discussion and engage various literacy skills.