A few days ago, I talked to best-selling author James Patterson about his new Facebook game, Catch a Killer. In addition to being a prolific writer (and having a small collection of games based on his work), Patterson also has a distinguished background in advertising (he was at various times the creative director, CEO, and Chairman of a division of the J. Walter Thompson ad agency). As a writer who is known for being deeply involved with both the creative and business sides of publishing, I thought he might have some interesting insights about how to make a game out of books and reading.
Turns out, Patterson was more interested in adding better narrative to games (a worthy cause, IMHO), but seemed skeptical about the idea of gamifying the book experience.
“I think there are [ways to do that], but I don’t know anyone that’s done it very successfully. There have been a couple of tries. Scholastic has a series that combines books and video so there’s some of that… I think one of the things is that people get habits and it’s very hard to shift the habits, so it seems to be difficult for the book public — even kids — who are playing games and reading books, but it seems difficult for them to combine the two.”
