As a child I could recite to you the names of all one-hundred-and-fifty-one Pokémon, in order, from memory. While that knowledge has mostly been replaced with useless information such as what the capital of Cyprus is and how to play Stairway to Heaven on the ukulele, even today I could probably score pretty high on a flash who’s-that-Pokémon quiz despite not really having thought about Pocket Monsters in a decade. Right now I can remember reams of rules about the systems of games like XCOM, Dark Souls or the Settlers of Catan without ever having to look them up, and I have no issue recalling the exact series of steps needed to get into hell in Spelunky. This couldn’t be further from extraordinary.
I have a fairly short attention span. The rules to cricket have been explained to me any number of times and I still can’t reliably remember how many balls are in an over. I’ve begun learning a foreign language more than once but usually stopped at around the time I’ve had to memorize grammar. The main writing practice I get is that of scrawling everything I need to remember down before I forget it. Because I probably will forget it, whatever “it” is.
But for anybody playing a good game, even me, being able to remember often complicated information about systems, rules and controls is a non-issue. The barrier to learning something is more often than not our own disinterest in what we’re being told, but games have the amazing ability of making us interested, and can teach us things in a nice, controlled manner that doesn’t overwhelm (even in games like Spelunky which presents almost no information within the game explicitly). We quickly memorize rules, such as the card combinations in Catan, and words such as the names of Pokémon, or spells in Persona, and we have fun doing so.
This is the reason that I’ve always thought that there must be some ingenious solution to learning a foreign language involving games. Most “gameifications” of language learning are little more than digital clones of flash cards and pop quizzes, which I find about as effective at helping you learn a language as being beaten over the head with a national food product. I previously mentioned Persona, where many of the spell names are derived from words from various languages, creating a vocabulary all its own that players quickly pick up. “Agi” means fire, “Bufu” means ice, “Ma” means more, “Dyne” means a lot more. So Agi is a fire spell, Mabufu is a strong ice spell, and Maragidyne is a very strong fire spell.
What Persona does is teach you a simple language, and it uses no more complicated a trick to do so than making the player want to know what his or her spells do at a glance. A game that tries to do this with a real language could be an extraordinary teaching tool, especially for the chronically distracted such as me. I’m moving from my cozy home in the English Midlands to a cold student flat in Copenhagen next month, where I’ll be living on and off for the next two years. Even though everybody in Denmark speaks English, often better than the average English person, I’m planning on taking this opportunity to learn a language while immersed in it and hopefully become fairly good at Danish before the end of my degree.
Much like being in a physical location, games can immerse you in a world of specific cultures and laws. As an ignorant Englishman who knows about two words of French and about four words of Dutch, I’m not really the person to be able to design a game that could fully take advantage of its ability to teach a language. I hope someone does give it a shot though, and hey, maybe in two years I’ll be nearly fluent enough in Danish and I’ll be able to try it myself.
