From DiG!T@L to DIGITAL

Narrative video games and literary reading in high school.

Abstract

Young people today live immersed in a fragmented, superficial, and hyper-connected digital world, which creates serious challenges for literary education, which has always been based on deep and linear reading. Neuroscientists and linguists such as Wolf (2007, 2018), Baron (2021), and Desmurget (2021) have warned about the cognitive impact of accelerated digital consumption, showing how it affects the ability to concentrate and read deeply. This article starts from these concerns but explores the potential of multimodality as a way to overcome obstacles. We argue that, instead of viewing students' digital culture as a threat, we can integrate it pedagogically to lead them to the reading of literary texts, promoting contact with great canonical works. This article describes several concrete pedagogical projects developed in secondary education, in which students recreated works from the Portuguese literary canon—such as Crónica de D. João I, Os Maias and Mensagem —in narrative video game formats, using tools like Twine or RPG Maker. The description aims to demonstrate that this strategy requires a comprehensive, critical, and creative reading to construct the digital artifacts and proves effective in promoting in-depth reading, interpretive autonomy, and critical thinking. We thus intend to suggest multimodal work methodologies that leverage digital skills and students, emerging as fundamental allies in revitalizing the pedagogy of literature in the 21st century.