The Impacts of The Cherry Orchard Video Game on Players’ Reading Comprehension

Abstract

Abstract This article discusses the impacts of The Cherry Orchard video game on students’ reading comprehension. Simply defined, reading comprehension isstudents’ ability to comprehend the content and the story of the (multimodal) texts they read. The Cherry Orchard is a self-produced video game based on Anton Chekov’s play with the same name. There are two problems to be discussed in this article: the impacts of playing the video game on participants’ reading comprehension and the participants’ opinions about the video game. Experiments were done to a group of students who used this video to support their understanding of the cherry orchard play and one controlled group of students who simply read the printed version of the play. Both groups’ comprehension was tested after reading. The results showed a major difference in score with the experimental group performed much better in their grades. Students’ opinions about the game, however, were not all positive as many of them claimed that the video game was too long and monotonous. Despite the criticism on the video game, the study justified previous studies on the positive impacts of video games on students’ reading comprehension. The paper suggests that video games for educational purposes should be kept short, provide voice over, and entail users’ sense of accomplishment to keep them engaged.