Video Games Improve Reading Skills

2/15/06 Video Games Improve Reading Skills

Incentive trips have been and continue to be one of the best motivators for employee and sales performance, with speakers being a big part of that. Being able to not only hear but meet people like hall of fame coaches Don Shula or Pat Riley, explorer Robert Ballard, or Neil Armstrong, can create an air of excitement, as well as deliver a lasting impression on attendees.

Personally, I learned about the power of incentives at a pretty young age. Deep down inside my grandma 's soul, there burned a hope that each Ivy League school would have at least one of her grandchildren grace its halls. Therefore, if she saw any little tendency in a grandchild that showed promise, she would pounce. Around third grade or so, she saw that I liked reading sports and comic books, and made me a deal. For every Newberry Award-winning book or classic I read, she would give me $2. Little did she know that deep down inside Brian, there smouldered a hope that he would one day own an Atari. I put my math skills to work as well, figuring that a $50 Atari would require 25 books, and soon I had finished Bridge to Terabithia, The Westing Game, and From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, among others. I was nearing 25 books, but I soon realized that my love and subsequent purchase of jawbreakers, caramel cowtails, and Sprees was becoming my downfall. Willy Wonka, you are my nemesis! As third grade became fourth, I ventured into Stevenson, Lewis, and Dickens. A great American tradition, the massive accumulation of Tops, Fleer, and now Donruss baseball cards, threatened to derail my quest for the ever elusive Atari. I put myself on a schedule. In order to read the required 100 pages a day of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, I was forced to sneak the novels into Mrs. Langreck's class and covertly read during school, with the books open and partially hidden under my desk. Eventually, my attention turned to girls, and I got a Nintendo for Christmas, which by that time had become the gaming system of choice over Atari. But her efforts were not in vain. In high school, although I didn't quite achieve the SAT scores of my cousin Miles (who, out of a possible 1600, scored 2,780,407.3), my academic prowess was good enough to get me into and through DePauw. Looking back, I can not only thank my love of playing Galaga, Centipede, and Pitfall for my breadth and depth of literary education, but also the vision and love of my grandma, who gave me the gift of reading (but, alas, never the gift of an Atari...oh, well.)