Modeling Language Acquisition in Commercial Off-the-Shelf Games: A Multiple Case Study

Recent years have seen an increase of game-based approaches to a variety of learning contexts, including languageacquisition. However, scoping literature reviews on existing games have revealed that while the learning approaches arecarefully considered when creating educational games, many such games lack fundamental design elements. In this regard,educational games can learn from commercial, entertainment-oriented video games, where careful game design andmaximizing player engagement are key considerations. Although niche, there is a genre of games where the core gameplayloop involves the player deciphering a language. This paper applies close reading techniques to commercial games that havelearning artificial languages as their core mechanics, exploring the game design techniques those games use to foster andencourage language learning. In particular, this paper focuses on how commercial games leverage their uniquecharacteristics, such as the ability to immerse the player in the context of the language they are learning and provide directand indirect feedback tailored to the player’s actions. This will be accomplished by analyzing the learning process throughthe lens of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) theory. The two games chosen for analysis are Heaven’s Vault, one of the firstgames to have language interpretation as the main game mechanics and Chants of Sennaar, arguably the most successfulcommercial game based on language learning. By analyzing the games, this paper aims to chart how different commercialgames facilitate language learning, and offer ideas on how those design elements can be implemented in educational games.