Just a game?

Hello visitors!

This week topic will be related to the impact that games in general had in my life, is well known that there are several arguments in favor and against them, however this will not be a discussion about that, instead it will be a review of the things that I have learned playing during my life.

Let’s begin with the influence that videogames had in my early stages. During the 90s the videogame localization (local adaptation/translation of them) was almost inexistent. Latin Americans were not part of videogame companies’ aim, for this reason videogames arrived only in English. At first, games such as duck hunt (shooting ducks with a Nintendo Zapper ™) were not a problem, but different kinds of videogames demand different abilities to solve certain tasks.

RPG (Role-Playing Games) basically consist in doing quests interacting with NPC (Non-player characters) helping you to complete your adventure or to reach your goal.  One specific example is the famous franchise Pokémon ™ which contributed enormously in my acquisition and motivation towards the English language. Because it included different elements, especially in terms of vocabulary such as items, attacks, elements, colors, etc. 

As a teenager new kinds of games caught my attention, for instance, Graphic novels such as Phoenix Wright (A visual novel with a rookie lawyer as a protagonist) increased my critical thinking and my ability to see one idea from different perspectives, I remember myself spending hours reading and trying to figure out solutions to solve different, unusual and crazy cases.

I challenged what I have learned in English and started playing it completely in the foreign language, in the end it was a worth and valuable experience.

Currently I am trying board games such as Cards Against Humanity, Scrabble, Pictionary and other games to encourage social interaction, creativity, vocabulary acquisition and allowing people to be themselves with a little bit of entertainment.  To conclude, games are a great tools to learn and practice a lot of things, but as the law of diminishing returns states the more technology you get the less you have in return.