Technolandy

Day 160 (of 2025/26) The missing literacy unit: video games

The publishing industry is worth around $200 billion globally.
Television and streaming? Somewhere north of $300 billion.
Movies: roughly $150 billion.
Music: $35 billion.
Sports media: $100 billion.
Social media platforms and creator ecosystems: over $200 billion.

All of these receive at least some attention in traditional Language Arts classrooms. Books obviously. Film studies occasionally. Media literacy increasingly. Even social media is slowly entering the conversation — reluctantly at times — though honestly it probably deserves more explicit teaching than it currently gets. We tend to assume that because students grow up with social media, they automatically know how to navigate it effectively, critically, ethically, or creatively. That assumption feels increasingly dangerous.

But one massive storytelling industry still largely sits outside the walls of school:

Video games.

Now making some inroads through esports and game design programs, video games have quietly become one of the largest entertainment industries on earth — roughly a $250 billion global industry. Bigger than movies. Bigger than music. Rivaling television.

And yet we rarely discuss games as texts.

Why?

If literacy is about stories, symbolism, character development, decision-making, world-building, ethics, emotional response, audience engagement, collaboration, and interpretation… video games check almost every box.

I’m preparing a short share for our Comic Con on Friday and thinking about some of the games that have built fan communities every bit as passionate as those surrounding books, television shows, musicians, sports teams, or film franchises.

A few examples:

The Legend of Zelda (all ages)
A franchise spanning generations, evolving from pixelated adventure puzzles into sprawling open-world storytelling. Entire communities debate timelines, lore, theories, symbols, and hidden meanings. That little green-clothed adventurer has somehow become one of the most enduring storytelling icons in modern media.

The Last of Us (mature)
Yes, violent. Also deeply human. A dystopian narrative exploring grief, morality, love, loss, survival, and what it means to protect others. The HBO adaptation worked because the source material was already cinematic storytelling of the highest level.

Red Dead Redemption 2 (mature)
I’ve never actually played it, yet I still know major plot points because of how widespread the fandom and storytelling discussions became. A Western exploring mortality, loyalty, redemption, and the blurry line between protagonist and antagonist. Honestly, there are essay prompts all over this thing.

Pokémon (all ages)
Part game, part social experience, part collectible mythology. An entire generation learned systems thinking, strategy, collaboration, and storytelling through pocket monsters evolving over time.

And yes — there are questionable games. There are also questionable books, movies, television shows, and social media spaces.

But dismissing an entire medium because some examples are poor feels shortsighted.

Schools already analyze heroes’ journeys, moral dilemmas, unreliable narrators, symbolism, conflict, setting, and audience impact. Students are already engaging with those things… just increasingly through interactive media rather than static text.

Maybe the question isn’t whether video games belong in literacy conversations.

Maybe the question is why we still pretend they don’t.

Or perhaps even more importantly:

What happens when schools ignore one of the dominant storytelling mediums of an entire generation?

Many turn a blind eye to video games…. Meanwhile an entire generation learned to analyze raids, lore, livestreams, team strategies, patch notes, fan theories, speedruns, Discord debates, and interactive narratives…

…mostly without us noticing.

After all, within esports and gaming culture, Students are not just playing games.

They are:

• interpreting narratives,
• participating in communities,
• creating identities,
• analyzing strategies,
• following serialized stories,
• engaging with multimodal media,
• consuming live commentary,
• producing fan content,
• and navigating digital social spaces.

That’s literacy. Just not 1995 literacy.