We've talked a lot about gamification this past week and how it can be used as a teaching device. While I do certainly have problems with gamification and lean towards Ian Bogost's point of view on the subject, there has been one application of gamification that we haven't really discussed which I think can very effective: language learning.
What I'm talking about here is a game that uses embedded learning to teach its players a language as the game unfolds. Now this is very different from creating a game about learning a language. The sort of game that explicitly makes itself out to be about the language. These games, I believe, lose much of their effectiveness, or at least quickly lose their ability to motivate study. These games are often just glorified matching games (like Influent), or gamified flashcard apps (like Memrise). Such games might be great for memorizing lists of vocabulary, but that isn't the same as learning a language. To me, these games are essentially study tools that have been gamified, rather than games which are used as tools. What I want to talk about are games that are designed more as games first, and learning tools second.[1]
Truthfully, I have struggled to find any video games that fit this definition in my eyes. However, I have come across the tabletop game Magicians: Language Learning RPG. While I have no personal experience with this game, and based off of reviews that I have seen, I am not sure how successful it has been in achieving its goals, I do think that it is an example of how certain genres of games, namely RPGs, are apt for language learning. Features present in this tabletop game are all the more emphasized in RPGs that are video games. Most traditional RPGs feature large amounts of text and extended dialogue, most RPGs featured a lot of repeated vocabulary or phrases (think battle sequences), and most RPGs often require some sort of text/language based player input (usually through dialogue options). All of these are key aspects of language learning (high volume, repetition, and generation).
So how would one design a RPG that treats itself as a game first and learning tool second? Well I think that we can again look at Magicians for some insight. Magicians also features another interesting mechanic. It appears that as one progresses, the language skills required on the player's end get more and more difficult. This means that the player is constantly being challenged by new and harder material. While traditional RPGs don't usually have this sort of difficulty curve to the language that they use over the course of a game, a game designer could easily incorporate such a mechanic into an otherwise traditional RPG to facilitate it's function as a language tool. This wouldn't explicitly make the game a learning tool, but instead give it a mechanic that non-native speakers of the language might find useful.
I certainly don't think that such games would be replacement for structured learning environments like a classroom, but I do see them as a sort of supplementary material. Their engagement comes from their being games first, and not thinly veiled study tools. Indeed, it's with this in mind that I have been slowly working on my own sort of language learning game, namely Pokémon Red in Latin. A problem that plagues a lot of early Latin students is the lack of available texts that they can read when just starting out. There are a number of reasons for this, and it can end up severely curtailing a beginner's ability to quickly learn the basics of the language. Video games, like Pokémon Red, could provide ample material for such students to work through and exist in a medium that students might find more engaging than a book or traditional language study game. In fact, some of these games already exist. For example, a Latin translation for the original Final Fantasy already exists and can be found here. Now I would squarely put this game, and my own personal project, into the realm of "translation" rather than "language learning tool," but with a few tweaks (like increasing difficulty of the text as the game progresses), I think they could easily be converted into a more effective tool.
I doubt I'll ever finish my translation of Pokémon Red, and as far as I can tell there is still a general lack of games that are built as games first but with language tools added in, but I do think this is a topic that is worth considering. I'd love to hear what other people think about using more traditional games, like Pokémon Red or Final Fantasy, in this way.
[1] I do want to quickly note that there is a difference between games that are simply in another language and games that are designed to also be learning tools. The former certainly have their merits and can often be used effectively (I thought that this article on Ever Quest 2 provides an interesting example), but the latter is what I'm interested in since I wonder if they could prove to be more effective.