Most people probably don’t think of reading and playing video games as being on the same plane in terms of their entertainment value. From an early age we are conditioned to think that books are boring and video games are fun. You don’t have to write drab summaries, give dull reports or take stressful tests after playing video games. Nor are you ever mandated to reach a certain level by a certain time in a game that your teacher has forced you play. Even the language that we use to describe books and games tends to portray the former as a chore and the latter as a pleasurable pastime. We read books but we play video games. We have to read during class time, but we get to play during recess. From the time that we enter elementary school, we are led to believe that reading is just another one of those boring tasks that grown ups make us do. Video games, on the other hand, are portrayed and perceived as an escape from the oppressively tedious obligations of everyday life. Contrary to the cues from my conditioning, I believe that reading is fun — far more fun than playing video games.
Books and video games are actually more similar than they might appear at first glance. Both serve as portals into an alternative reality, enabling the reader or user to travel to a fantastic, far-away land or a distant time period. Each medium conjures a world strikingly different from our own. Even non-fiction offers readers a window into lives and situations that they might otherwise never have access to. The major difference between the realms contained in video games and those that emerge from the pages of books is our ability to participate in their formation.
Video games present a rigid, pixelated world that leaves little room for imaginative manipulation. While many games allow us to customize our avatars, or shape the environment in some way, we must do so within the confines set by the game’s creators. However, when we engage a world that is conveyed to us through words, our imagination is solely responsible for shaping it. Of course we take cues from the author, but their ideas are necessarily channeled through the experiences of our own lives. People, places, things and circumstances described in a book can only be constructed in relation to our own unique understandings and predispositions towards them. For instance, we might see traits in characters that remind us of ourselves, or people that we know, giving a particularly personalized life to those characters. With video games, you can play the exact same avatar as someone else, and have a nearly identical experience. But with a book, even though the words are the same, each person creates characters that are exclusively their own. A hundred people can play a video game and have the same exact experience, but no two people ever read the same book.
One of the elements of video games that makes them so fun and addictive is that they offer the user helpful rewards for overcoming challenges. If you complete a quest, or get a certain number of kills in a row, you are rewarded with new gear, skills and/or experience. But as soon as you set the controller down, all of your hard earned loot is lost until your next gaming session. You may have temporarily lowered your stress level, and if the game is mentally challenging, you might have slightly improved your problem solving skills. Other than that, you’re basically walking away from the console or computer empty handed. Books are not so hollow. They serve to improve your intelligence, enhance your empathy and cultivate your creativity.
It should come as no surprise that reading makes us smarter. Books endow readers with new ideas — or new associations for old ones — fresh facts and an enhanced vocabulary. The ways in which reading makes us more empathetic, and improves our ability to communicate with others is less obvious. Yet, consider what you are really doing when you read a book. You are getting an intimate tour of some other person, or group of people’s life or lives. They say you only live once, but that’s not true for those who read. A single book can afford the reader many lifetimes worth of emphatic capital, allowing them to relate to and connect with a more diverse range of people, on a wider variety of levels than would otherwise be possible.
In summation, books are cooler than video games because they inspire imagination, creativity, intelligence and empathy to a far greater degree than their digitally-devised counterparts ever could. These benefits don’t disappear when you close the book, and each reading experience is distinct to the individual. There’s really nothing like reading, and it’s almost unfair to compare it to the relatively empty experience of gaming.