It's actually very simple: translate all the voice acting into your language of choice - let's say Norwegian. (Probably dumb the vocabulary down a bit.) Now add subtitles.
You're done. Go play the game. You'll absorb the language as you play, and because (unlike a film) you'll hear the same phrases multiple times, it'll actually sink in to a useful extent. I've only played about 20 hours of Skyrim so far, but I'm pretty sure if I was playing the subtitled version I'd already be able to say "Are you looking to defend yourself, or do some damage?" in Norwegian.
(Of course, I'd still have to add modern language to my knowledge after 200 hours, but hey, it's easier than learning the entire grammatical structure and all verbs.)
For a much more effective but much more offputting version - don't have subtitles. Have a few characters who can speak a bit of English, but have most of them only talk in Norwegian. You'll need to customise the dialogue a fair bit too so that the player doesn't miss important bits (essentially, have the NPCs periodically stop and say "WTF? Are you stupid? THERE'S THE GODDAMN DRAGON!"), and probably have the usual range of dialogue options - in Norwegian - plus a standard "I'm sorry, I don't speak Nord" which will get you all the really essential stuff.
That would be very, very hard to play - although surprisingly immersive if you're playing a non-Nord character, particularly if the other non-Nords were the characters who were likely to speak your language - but would definitely teach you the language.
This is already happening, though unintentionally and in the other direction. A recent study found a correlation between time spent playing computer and console games and good English grades among Finnish high school kids. The effect is surprisingly large: the grades of students who play more than 15 hours a week are on average 1.5 points higher on a six-point scale than those of students who don't play at all.
On an anecdotal level, I can attest that some of the first English words my brothers learned were "load" and "save", for obvious reasons.
Alelo deveoped a multiplayer online language learning role-playing game (Mission to Senegal) that uses speech recognition for conversations with NPCs. There's no combat, but there are skills, intrigue, leveling-up, exploration, etc. Practicing your language skills through interactions with NPCs is a big component of gaining levels. Unity 3D was used and the game will be demonstrated at I/ITSEC later this month.
It's not an open world, but it's not entirely linear - the game is a 4-5 hour story-driven role-playing game in an immersive world designed to help teach French and the culture of Senegal. The game is intergrated with an online and social curriculum to learn French and is a supplement to the online course, not a complete replacement.
Mission to Senegal isn't Skyrim by any means. =) But it is fun and it does utilize gameplay.
Its actual effectiveness in helping players learning French is still being evaluated - the game is part of a research project - the Integrated System for Language Education and Training (ISLET) funded by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and performed by the Academic Consortium for Global Education (ACGE).
ISLET is being used in an active study with U.S. Navy and Marines to assess how they learn through the system. A goal of the research project was to assess learner behavior and how the game component might impact the learning process and motivation.
This approach might be very useful once you've done some classroom work to give you a running start. But seriously, without knowing any of grammar, word order, pronunciation rules, verb conjugation or vocabulary, you simply cannot learn a language this way.
Why not? I've learned several languages to varying degrees as an adult, and only had classroom instruction for three of them. I haven't used this method, but I have gotten a great deal out of Chinese video games and I do know a Finnish girl who has learned Japanese to a functional level almost entirely through watching TV. She did some self study on the writing, but nothing beyond what can be (and in fact is!) done in some children's edu games in Japan.
Similarly, I have multiple friends who have learned Cantonese with no classroom time at all.
Well, there's a bunch of mitigating circumstances there. You mentioned classroom instruction for yourself. Many languages are similar so you could have picked up one language quite easily because of its similarity to one you knew already. You mentioned self study. A child (if that's what you mean by "girl") is obviously going to pick up new languages faster than an adult. A children's education game is obviously going to use slower, clearer, simpler language specifically for the purposes of teaching the child. And without more information, for all I know your Cantonese-speaking friends are actually Chinese.
The main reason why I maintain that you do need some classroom time or tutoring or book-learning is that we are adults now.
I think she got into anime in high school. It was definitely well after the critical period for language learning (which btw, many linguists believe is only a critical period for learning a first language).
>for all I know your Cantonese-speaking friends are actually Chinese
None of the Cantonese learners I mentioned were Chinese nationals (though 2 are ethnically Chinese). Even if they were Chinese nationals, it's still far from easy. Cantonese is more different from Mandarin than romance languages are from each other in terms of mutual intelligibility.
My own study history has been French classes with little effect in high school, Japanese classes with much better results in college, Spanish through immersion with mediocre results, many years of living in a bilingual Mandarin environment as well as some classes, and more recently, a bit of Taiwanese, Cantonese and Swedish almost entirely via media until learning enough to try some of it out on people. Taiwanese and Cantonese both have features that are totally alien to me, despite have some distant relationship to Mandarin via classical Chinese. Swedish is totally out there.
I'm 100% sure you can learn languages to a fluent level as an adult through large amounts of exposure to the target language. I've seen it first hand many times and I've essentially abandoned classes for any reason other than visas in foreign countries. That said, reading is great! It's probably the fastest way to build up your vocabulary, even in your native language. After getting enough listening input to have some handle on phonics, I'm all for reading as much as possible. Actually I think not doing that is why my Mandarin progressed fairly slowly until I got into... some video games!
Back to the topic of the article, I would be amongst the first in line to by a Skyrim-style game for learning Swedish or Korean or any other language I want to learn! Anything that's both a source of L2 input and fun is gold.
In games like Skyrim, I already do learn. For example, I can now identify several different types of plant (potato, leek, cabbage) by their above-ground shape and color. It's not tremendously useful, but I can imagine that this sort of compressed pattern-matching experience could teach any sort of rote memorization: periodic table, birdcalls, gross anatomy, musical chords, geography, astronomy, run-time performance of algorithms, etc.... The hard part is getting people to actually want to play your game, so that you can "trick" them into learning.
You can only interactively teach what you know how to make an interactive environment for. That's the real problem, we're not very good at making interactive environments, and we're really good at making the interactive environments look way more interesting than they actually are. See "through the matrix" of an Elder Scrolls game and there isn't all that much behind the graphics.
We do have some games like that: Civilization and SimCity, both games that teach the critical skill of resource management, which won't appear on any high school curriculum... but the deficiency there is on the high school side, not the game side.
I'm not sure what you mean by interactive environments - there's actually a lot going on behind the graphics of Elder Scrolls. E.g., in Oblivion, each NPC exhibited goal-oriented behavior to better mimic what real-world people might do, sometimes leading to amusing and unrealistic scenarios. There isn't a highly developed physics engine in Elder Scrolls, but that's based on the needs of the game; and there aren't lots of small parts to manage, but again, that's based on the genre.
Do you have any other examples, real or hypothetical, of highly developed interactive environments?
"in Oblivion, each NPC exhibited goal-oriented behavior to better mimic what real-world people might do, sometimes leading to amusing and unrealistic scenarios."
Yes, but what does that lead to in terms of teaching? Is one going to go from autism to a deeper understanding of human motivations by playing Skyrim? No. It isn't anywhere near rich enough to do that, and it isn't because we wouldn't like to have characters in a game that rich, it's because we really don't know how to make them. It's all skin deep. Pretty much everything is.
Since my thesis is that we don't know how to make highly developed interactive environments that one can learn from, I am at a loss as to why you think I'm going to come up with an example of one.
We've invested an enormous amount of money into making things look good. There's nothing wrong with that. But we have, as a consequence, the ability to make something that looks almost photorealistic and looks like the real world, where in fact it's just a glorified toy, and it fools people into thinking we have a lot more power to create games than we actually do. At best we can manage tinkertoys or legos, as in the Civilization or SimCity examples I gave. But how would we build a game to teach History qua teaching History? To actually teach it and not merely allude to it, or merely wrap the game up in the stylistic ambiance? Or merely be a glorified flash-card simulator? Beats me, and I've been pondering the question and watching everybody else's attempts to answer the question for a long time. I don't see any evidence anyone has anything like an implementable idea at our current level of technology.
As mentioned by another comment look at the Assassins Creed games to see how an interactive history lesson might look.
However it sounds like you are waiting for games that are "Reality++" before you can see a use for the medium as a teaching tool. That's just just crazy. We use books, images and video for that purpose despite their significant shortcomings.
Games are a product of the intentions of the developers. Edutainment is usually pretty low on the priority list therefore you don't see much of it.
Funny you should mention history, as it is one of the easier topics to teach via games. The history channel has their name on several RTSs based on historical wars. You go into battles with historically accurate forces and goals with the cut scenes between battles delivering the political and historical background. Then there are RPGs like Romance of the Three Kingdoms where sure it is more historical fiction than historical fact, but the events and setting portrayed are fairly accurately captured.
There. That's the reason why. That game sounds boring as shit, and no one would buy it.
Learning in a game has to be implicit, if you make it explicit users will sniff out your agenda and run away. For example, you can't just make the gamer write an essay about Shakespeare to open the treasure chest, but if you somehow included subtle Shakespeare references in Zelda that could work.
And with that in mind, maybe games are already doing this. You're certainly learning something about economics in Roller Coaster Tycoon, and I definitely had to flex my brain muscles for some of the puzzles in Zelda. It has to continue to be implicit though.
> "And with that in mind, maybe games are already doing this."
They are. I'm playing the new Assassin's Creed right now, and as you explore the city of Constantinople you'll run into landmarks and people, each of whom have an in-game encyclopedia entry that you can quick-key into. It doesn't have anything to do with gameplay, and is merely there to satisfy your curiosity. The dialogue and story also make an attempt to communicate the political and economic intrigue of the era.
That and it takes place in a specific period of history that also touches on many famous people in that era, albeit fictionally. I have to say, every time I play an AC game I end up reading Wikipedia about the real-life people, places, and history that it depicts, because it's just so damned interesting.
I can't be the only one. But it certainly beats most "educational" games that smack you over the head. "Now, who can tell me when the Byzantine Empire fell?"
That's a great point. It is certainly possible to teach history through interactive gaming.
The question is, can we do this for science/engineering/math? Is there a way to make learning STEM material through interactive gaming? Perhaps a 3d gaming world where you put together atoms, or a minecraft-type game where you learn about physics or civil engineering principles...the options are endless, and it could do a lot of good in getting kids interested and skilled at the more technical subjects
Or maybe a game that allows you to use real-life physics and maths knowledge to your in-game advantage? Like, giving you enough data to compute the angle for a cannon to shoot at, while hinting you very delicately towards what knowledge you need to acquire to do that?
One of the biggest problems of maths and science education is that they're useless and boring as hell. Or, at least that's how it looks like from kids' perspective. I think that a first step towards teaching them those skills in an interactive way would be to create an interactive environment where maths (or physics, or chemistry, or biology, or astronomy) could be actually useful. Some way for knowledge to give you in-game advantage, or at least expand your gameplay. A game in which you could actually read where's north from the trees and stars. Etc.
There are several bridge building games, the oldest I can think of is called Pontifex. In the original Pontifex when you went to test your bridge it would dynamically color all of your beams according load and stresses and was my first introduction to Statics and Dynamics. It gave me a chance to explore why bridges are the way they are long before I learned calculus.
You don't have to lead players along by the nose - open-world games are surprisingly attractive even to kids (maybe especially to kids, who haven't yet been conditioned that everything needs to be structured with explicit step-by-step goals).
When I was in high school I did a lot of volunteering at the local science-museum where we had terminals set up with the Incredible Machine. They were always occupied.
Kids have an innate love for exploring, moreso than adults. We beat it out of them later, but in the mean time open world, unstructured games are some of the best ways to teach things to people. Look at SimCity, Incredible Machine, etc etc.
As bizarre as it is I kind of liked Eternal Sonata. The basic idea is that Chopin is on his death bed and has become delirious. His delusions just so happen to be a typical JRPG, but his life is narrated during moments of clarity. So I don't know I could see a Hamlet RPG or a ren'ai(dating sim) of Romeo And Juliet.
Yeah, as a classical musician (and huge Chopin fan) and gamer I found Eternal Sonata to be an awesome game. Loved the interludes the most, of course...!
It's hard enough to design a good game when the only constraint is that it has to be fun. Designing a fun game that also covers an entire year of calculus requires a stroke of genius. You have to find the fun that is inherent in the subject. Unless you're the type of person who just naturally finds calculus to be fun, it's unlikely you ever will.
There are games that find fun in seemingly mundane things, like parking or washing windows, but these are very simple things. And even then, the game takes many liberties with realism in order to make them fun.
Remember that Skyrim's budget is probably something like 50-100 million dollars.
Another thing: Skyrim and current CRPGs in general are not skill-based games, like FPS'es. They reward for time-played, not for skill. This does not translate well to learning actual skills.
I teach game design and programming, and one of the huge problems is that new students think that making games is not much harder than playing games. Wat, I need to know math?
OTOH, I learned a lot of history through playing miniature and computer war games.
Have we considered, frankly, the cost of a AAA title these days? IMDB Estimates the budget of Skyrim at $100m (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1814884/). That isn't an unreasonable number – there have been a number of recent games which hit that as well. Grand Theft Auto IV had a budget estimated at $100m as well.
This points to the fact that the engine and the tools available are but a small part of what is needed. Granted, a big start would be getting publishers to donate their game engines to development teams for learning environments.
But... what makes these games incredible is the millions of dollars that goes into voice acting, motion capture (as I recall much of the model rendering is informed via mocap. Look at things like the woodcutting animations in Skyrim to see where this benefits), model rendering, textures, etc.
What's needed is to figure out how to reduce the cost of these things, or get collaboration from professional teams/publishers willing to donate time and/or resources to projects.
Otherwise, you'll end up with a bunch of learning environments using the same game engine as skyrim but with none of the magic.
X for math and Y for reading? Age 9 I obsessed over Civilization, Sim City, Myst and the Journeyman Project. I distinctly remember playing these games and wanting to "be smart", sitting at the computer with a dictionary in hand and a jotter for working out puzzles. I have no doubt that the mastering of these games played a significant role in my academic achievement.
At UT Austin, we've been building a 3-D interactive environment called Nero [1] for some time now. The project's goal is to have an all-in-one, visually appealing platform to teach and explain different concepts in AI. It was started as a closed-source collaboration with a games company and has since been rewritten as an open source project. I've been contributing to the codebase for the last few months, so I have some experience here.
First off, teaching anything non-trivial is difficult. By non-trivial, I mean formal knowledge that requires you to actually have a deep understanding of the material, as opposed to rote learning or reusable strategies like most games involve. I haven't played Skyrim, so if there is some actual expertise you acquire through playing it, I'd be happy to hear about it.
Imagine you're trying to teach statistics. You start out with some gambling game to teach basic odds and probabilities, and that's great. Now how does that transition to Gaussian distributions and standard deviations, one of the most fundamental and comparatively simple concepts in statistics, without simply being boring? It's not so clear.
Second, is there any real money in it? I suppose if you can get lots of schools to use your game, then great. But of course we know how long those sales cycles are, and you can't really expect your game to look all that awesome in 3 years after you've finally worked your way up the organizational ladder and closed. So you probably need to either sell your game directly to consumers or give it away.
If you're going to sell it to consumers, you have to compete with other games in your market. This is tough because a game that requires little critical thinking will likely be more appealing to a broad audience. Again, maybe Skyrim requires truly critical thinking along the lines of understanding derivatives and integrals, and if it does please correct me, but I doubt it. Most people buy videogames to play in their downtime, so they want to relax. This means your market will be very niche and I just do not see the long-term potential.
The other option, giving it away, puts you in a similar situation to what we're doing at UT. If you are giving it away, you probably need to find people who will work for cheap because grants do not end up paying much for this sort of thing, enter students. Our situation is such that we have had literally dozens of people adding, changing, and branching the code with varying degrees of quality in commits (looking at you, undergrads), creating lots of technical debt. We also are not experts in game development, so the graphics and mechanics are a little rough. That said, it's a pretty decent platform for teaching and demoing different concepts in AI. But is it as awesome, polished, and fun as Skyrim looks? Of course not-- you get what you pay for.
I guess my main point is that there are plenty of legitimate reasons that such teaching environments are not pervasive in modern education. It's one of those ideas that is easy on the surface but quickly breaks down in practice. When it works, it makes for neat demos, but to make it work at the same scale as a commercially successful video game just seems infeasible in today's market.
I love Skyrim, and in fact it has taken up way too much of my time over the past week. And I will probably waste many days over the next few years, if Oblivion is any indication, both playing this and screwing around with making mods. But the answer to this guy's question is really simple.
There aren't learning environments that are just like Skyrim because you don't learn shit in Skyrim. The basic mechanics of the game are very simple and can be picked up in less than five minutes. It has enormous depth, more than its predecessor and arguably more than TES3 which is famous for it, but you can learn all of it in an hour (not playtime mind you, but an hour browsing some wiki). Its much-lauded lore, while compelling and among the best in video games, is comparable to any second-rate novel. When I say it has enormous depth I mean for a game. Compared to math, physics, programming, history, politics, or virtually any other intellectual pursuit, it is as shallow as an issue of Maxim. This is not an insult. It is entertainment.
Skyrim is not 'hard'. It is not hard in the sense that it could require athletic ability, and it is not hard in the sense that it could be difficult to progress in the game. A bright eight year-old could solve the hardest puzzle in Skyrim. If you play the game long enough, you will finish even if you are as dumb and incurious as a rock. You will not master mathematics by playing a mathematics game if you are dumb as a rock, or if you are naturally intelligent for that matter. Mastering such skills takes decades. And it is hard work. You have to do a lot of boring shit. And it is not always clear, the way forward. You can spend a lot of time on a thing where you later find out that most of your efforts didn't have much point, after all. It can become very tempting to give up, and if you aren't dedicated that's what you will do. Intellectual achievement is brutal and unforgiving, because you are dealing with reality and not a fantasy that someone else has created for you.
If I played Skyrim 8-10 hours a day, every day, I would get bored with it pretty quickly. There just isn't a lot of material to digest. I have been programming for 8-10 hours a day for years, and I still find it immensely rewarding and satisfying. No game can match that, and no game can provide the mostly self-directed exploration that true learning requires.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to playing Skyrim :-D
"You will not master mathematics by playing a mathematics game if you are dumb as a rock, or if you are naturally intelligent for that matter. Mastering such skills takes decades. And it is hard work. You have to do a lot of boring shit. And it is not always clear, the way forward. You can spend a lot of time on a thing where you later find out that most of your efforts didn't have much point, after all. It can become very tempting to give up, and if you aren't dedicated that's what you will do. Intellectual achievement is brutal and unforgiving, because you are dealing with reality and not a fantasy that someone else has created for you."
This, this, a thousand times this.
The worst part about it all is that because you only ever see other people's successes published in papers, textbooks, and etc., it can seem from confirmation bias that no one else makes mistakes or even really struggles with mathematics, but of course the truth is very far away from this.
It's actually very simple: translate all the voice acting into your language of choice - let's say Norwegian. (Probably dumb the vocabulary down a bit.) Now add subtitles.
You're done. Go play the game. You'll absorb the language as you play, and because (unlike a film) you'll hear the same phrases multiple times, it'll actually sink in to a useful extent. I've only played about 20 hours of Skyrim so far, but I'm pretty sure if I was playing the subtitled version I'd already be able to say "Are you looking to defend yourself, or do some damage?" in Norwegian.
(Of course, I'd still have to add modern language to my knowledge after 200 hours, but hey, it's easier than learning the entire grammatical structure and all verbs.)
For a much more effective but much more offputting version - don't have subtitles. Have a few characters who can speak a bit of English, but have most of them only talk in Norwegian. You'll need to customise the dialogue a fair bit too so that the player doesn't miss important bits (essentially, have the NPCs periodically stop and say "WTF? Are you stupid? THERE'S THE GODDAMN DRAGON!"), and probably have the usual range of dialogue options - in Norwegian - plus a standard "I'm sorry, I don't speak Nord" which will get you all the really essential stuff.
That would be very, very hard to play - although surprisingly immersive if you're playing a non-Nord character, particularly if the other non-Nords were the characters who were likely to speak your language - but would definitely teach you the language.