The Scrapbook is now at the middle station of life, and for as long as we can remember, bright people have been devising clever ways to get kids to read books. “Educational” television programs that encourage reading, ad campaigns promoting book-reading, kids’ books full of flatulent humor, book giveaways . . . nothing seems to work. Pixelated screens keep winning. True, our proof for this pessimistic conclusion consists largely of anecdotal evidence—all the kids on the D.C. Metro are staring into their phones, not reading books—but we’re pretty sure that book-reading among young people (and older people!) is still in decline.
The latest dumb idea is upon us: basing video games on classic children’s books. A new version of the popular game Minecraft will mimic Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. An enthusiastic notice in the Guardian explains: “From Spyglass Hill to Ben Gunn’s cave, children can explore every nook and cranny of Skeleton Island as part of Litcraft, a new partnership between Lancaster University and Microsoft, which bought the game for $2.5bn (£1.9bn) in 2015 and which is now played by 74 million people each month.”
Litcraft isn’t just a fun game, though. Not at all! It’s “peppered with educational tasks that aim to re-engage reluctant readers with the book it is based on.” Indeed, the project’s “lead researcher,” Professor Sally Bushell, head of the English department at Lancaster University in England, assures us that Litcraft is “an educational model that connects the imaginative spatial experience of reading the text to an immersive experience in the game world.” In other words: Kids will play the game, express just enough interest in Stevenson’s book to keep the grant money flowing to Bushnell’s project, and go back to playing on their phones.
Readers will have to pardon our skepticism, but it is our unshakable belief that the reading of books by young people will never be encouraged by the use of electronic media. There are, in The Scrapbook’s admittedly hidebound view of these things, exactly two ways to encourage kids to read important works of literature. The first one is more difficult: Separate them from screens. The second is easy: Leave books lying around here and there—and whatever you do, don’t let on that you want the kids to read them.
