That recent thread of conversation over in It’s That GOT-damned-Y Time of the Year Once Again: The Forum Community GOTY Thread 2024 reminds me how much books are also about, as yeso put it,
I think the true strength of videogames is in the way they present place, atmosphere, duration, and a combination of visual, text, music, etc.
Edit that a bit and that describes one of the key points of attraction for books. It’s the texture, emphasis on text, that draws me to reading. It’s the way things go described or undescribed, the elaborateness or sparseness of description, the building and unbuilding of threads, and the feeling of potential consequence even at the level of word and phrase.
Atmosphere for a book doesn’t mean the same thing as a video game, but it aligns with things like tone, voice, and all the potential ways texts make literal meanings and figurative associations. Narrative and other elements matter too, but it’s the capacity to mull over and move through language that distinguishes the literary text as we discuss it from, say, the Wikipedia version of the text.
I am fine with the concept of a gloss. Breaking a text down can be an invaluable exercise, and I see nothing inherently wrong with reading others’ glosses. Heck, sometimes it offers scaffolding to get into the experience. (Compare: changing difficulties in a game.) What I react to instead is, first, the veer away from curiosity in the framing of hard as something to avoid and easy as something to enjoy. Sometimes we can read things without knowing everything that’s going on, and that’s OK.
More broadly, the use-case of a tool like this is most likely for students wanting to get by in a class they don’t particularly care about. The ad is a symptom of the way that plot knowledge is often incentivized over close textual engagement in class assessments, which in turn is a symptom of universities giving literature instructors massive courses (100+ students with TAs) and high schools giving teachers too much other stuff to do. I’d wager there isn’t a large audience going, “I would read The Great Gatsby but it’s too hard,” but there is an audience going, “If I have to read The Great Gatsby, I want it to be as painless as possible.” 30 years ago, they bought Cliff Notes; today, they might use this.
The rhetorical challenge is to get students who have been steeped in that environment to value reading. Can I convince them that “maximize your reading potential” and “avoid difficult language” are at odds with one another? Can I convince them of the value of the text? Can we start to talk about reading as an art, rather than a fifth-choice medium to slog through?