Guest Post: Gabriella Page on Video Games and The Nardi Puzzle

Video games have had quite the bad rap over the last few years. They’ve shouldered much of the blame for the burgeoning literacy crisis and children’s waning attention spans. They’ve been accused of encouraging violence. And while I agree that excessive time spent playing games is not good for anyone, I don’t think it’s all doom and gloom, either.

Today, I’m a children’s author and professional opera chorister. Around the turn of the millennium, though, I was simply a kid who played a lot of games. Computer games, PlayStation games … I even had a Pokémon-themed Game Boy. As a primary-schooler, I’d go to my best friend’s house after school and we’d play on her computer. One of our favourites was a game called Storybook Weaver, which helped you write and illustrate your own stories. We wrote about a llama called Lissette. She dinged like a bell whenever you clicked on her, a gimmick we found endlessly funny.

Pictured: The author receiving a computer game for Christmas

Could we have handwritten and illustrated those stories without the use of a computer? Absolutely. But every age-appropriate path to literacy is valid, isn’t it? My friend and I were both into games, but we were avid readers, too. We loved stories, and playing video games didn’t take away from that. I’d go so far as to say it supported that passion of ours. Come high school, my friend showed me a novella she’d written. At the same time, I was dabbling in poetry and composing music; my plan was to write Wuthering Heights the opera, which I only learnt later had already been done.

Incidentally, video games are part of the reason I’m a professional musician today. As a child, the games in the Final Fantasy series captured my imagination in a way very few things did. For the uninitiated, Final Fantasy is an anthology of science fantasy role-playing games. Yes, the games contain a lot of magical fighting, but at their heart they are playable stories, complete with conflicted characters and plot twists. The games featured orchestral soundtracks by Japanese composer Nobuo Uematsu.

Pictured: A screenshot from Final Fantasy X

I adored those soundtracks.

I adored them so much that, at the age of twelve, I taught myself the piano so I could play them. To be fair, I wasn’t a complete musical novice at that point; I was taking group violin lessons through my primary school, and I’d been messing about on our family’s electric piano for years. Still, I couldn’t read bass clef, which translated to hours deciphering the score and pencilling in the names of the notes. My untrained fingers had to learn how to move over the keys, too. As I practised, I imagined the characters from the game, the moments of their lives that had struck me so profoundly. And I eventually got there.

I learnt to play the piano thanks to a PlayStation game.

I understand much of the criticism surrounding video games, but I don’t believe all games should be lumped together and demonised. Many nurture creativity. Some have a lot of heart. I’m certain that plenty of the children enthralled by the games on their screens are children with colourful imaginations, children who wish to escape into unknown worlds … children not so unlike the bookworms in our lives.

Rather than fight against their love of games, perhaps we could use it as a gateway to literacy. This idea spurred me to write my debut novel, The Nardi Puzzle. The main character of the book is a gamer, and it’s his passion for gaming that propels him into a real-life adventure. I’m also in the process of drafting another novel that features gaming at its core. It’s my hope that these books will encourage young gamers to branch out, to find new ways of consuming stories. Who knows? Perhaps these kids will become the readers (and authors) of tomorrow.

Gabriella Page is a Perth children’s author and opera chorister based in Italy. Her first novel, The Nardi Puzzle, will be released by Wombat Books in August 2026.