Videogames and Sensory Theory

Abstract

The act of playing video games is a multimodal experience, immersing the gamer in a sensorial experience in the digital world. Video games incorporate sensory literacies such as haptics, graphics, sound effects, music, auditory dialogue, visual text, and character movement. The sensory literacies allow gamers to connect the digital world to the physical world, becoming engrossed in the world and story of the video game. Thus, due to the multimodal and sensorial nature of video games, they have the potential to be a beneficial tool for increasing student engagement within the classroom and assisting students in further increasing literacy skills and content knowledge. In addition, a review of literature of classroom use of video games as an instructional tool found increased engagement, use of video games as texts, cross-literacies that supported traditional literacy processes and skills.