I remember studying my various comic books for hours and hours and hours as a kid. I’d pour over every little detail, re-read the letters to the editor, and do everything in my power to milk a few extra nuggets of information out of them. Maybe things have changed… but I remember one of my cousins spending a ton of time at a family get-together reading the “Pokedex” in one of his Pokemon games. It was just an in-game encyclopedia… there was no gameplay to it at all. But since reading it enriched his in-game experience, he was more than happy to do it.

That gives me hope that if done *right*, you could trick kids into reading. But you’d have to make the in-game rewards strong enough juice that they’d be compelled to come back to the game for their next assignment… I mean *quest*.

What is the pull to play a game that can only be used in a certain real world context? Do I find myself in a place to play the game on a regular basis? Do I want to go out of my way to put myself in that situation? What if the book I need is not available?

The concept is great and I would love to play it. Please solve the potential problems with using real world interactions to solve in-game problems so I may steal your solutions.

I loved Carmen Sandiego as a kid but I always found myself cheating to get past the puzzles if the solution wasn’t immediately available to me. At the time I didn’t have Google or a library for research and I didn’t want to trek down to the local library to find the solution. Has this changed with the proliferation of the internet?

But give kids some credit… they like to feel smart, and they like to get jokes and references. If the entire fictional world is about these books and their authors, then the player that uses Google to skip ahead will be robbing himself of the full experience… and he’d probably know it.

And if push comes to shove, you could always include digital copies of these books on the game cart itself. But that might defeat my original purpose…