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The New York Times recently published an article that discusses the emerging role of video games--especially those based on books--as a tool to get young people hooked into reading.

Here's one of the more interesting questions raised in the article that considers the new digital world we live in:

"I think we have to ask ourselves, 'What exactly is reading?' " said Jack Martin, assistant director for young adult programs at the New York Public Library. "Reading is no longer just in the traditional sense of reading words in English or another language on a paper."

I know how hard it is to get young people to read. Mainly because I know how hard it is to get adults to read as well. So I am definitely open to creative ideas that connect reading with other mediums. But I do think there is something to say about the way the connection is made.

Here's another interesting snippet:

"Games are teaching critical thinking skills and a sense of yourself as an agent having to make choices and live with those choices," said James Paul Gee, the author of the book "What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy." "You can't screw up a Dostoevsky book, but you can screw up a game."

Skeptics point out that psychological research consistently shows that skills often don't transfer from one setting to another.

Nevertheless, some educators argue that students may learn more by playing an active role in the simulated world of a game than they might by simply reading a book.

And:

"I actually think reading is pretty great and can compete with video games easily," said Mark S. Seidenberg, a professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison who specializes in reading research. "So rather than say, 'Oh, books are irrelevant in the modern era because there are all these other media available,' I would ask shouldn't we be doing a better job of teaching kids how to read?"

Some gaming advocates suggest that video games may help with that. The reading that gamers do in instructional manuals, strategy guides or message boards, though often cryptic and more technical than narrative, might serve as a "gateway drug for literacy," said Constance Steinkuehler, an assistant professor in the school of education also at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

For the past year, Ms. Steinkuehler has been testing this hypothesis with a group of teenage boys who play World of Warcraft.

Noah Tropp, 14, who participated in Ms. Steinkuehler's program for several months this year, regularly reads sites like gamewinners.com and supercheat.com. While looking for hints online, he read about "Death Note," a novel based on a Japanese video game. Over the summer, he read it.

Clearly there's a lot of work to do across the board. And that work must be both creative and effective in execution.