Teen Reading project – do gamers read?

When the Teen Reading team conducted a pilot survey in 2016, it captured comments from young people who didn’t consider themselves readers, but who consume a significant amount of long-form text in their lives as gamers. For example, Minecraft spin-off novelisations can be found in many Australian bookstores.

Professor Michael Dezuanni @dezuanni is one of the Cultural Pathways Linkage Investigators. He was also a researcher with the Serious Games Linkage team, led by Professor Catherine Beavis from Deakin’s School of Education. Michael is interested in peer pedagogies, the way gamers and readers learn from each other in digital environments.

Michael has recently published a new book on Minecraft Let’s Play Videos, which focuses on how young people form relationships and learn from each other in digital environments and from digital genres. He talks here about the methodology he used and his key findings.