Videogames: Influence in English language learning

This is the main topic of an asignment I have to do with Karol for the subject Metodologia de la Investigacion.

At first view, many might think this is stupid, because how a videogame can help youngsters learn a new language? But it is true! in addition to the music, videogames CAN help the young ones learn and practice a new language , in this case, English.
Though the games are most related to violence and nonsense there still are few videogames (not focused to teaching languages) that are helpful in a very unnoticed way.

Teachers are always the students that they need to practise constantly in order to learn better and have a hard to forget aquired knowledge, but the dullness of homework exercises designed primarily to be educational has difficulty competing with popular media designed solely to be entertaining. Recently, numerous attempts have been made to develop "edutainment (educational entertainment)" titles that seek to merge educational goals with entertainment content; oftentimes, however, they fail to achieve either goal and fall instead into niche markets. There are some titles for the most popular videogame consoles, that are focused in teaching a new language. But, as written above they're not so popular amongst the young learners of a new language.

Nevertheless, there are popular vidoegame titles that are very helpful in learning a new language, one of the is The Sims, is a game designed to simulate normal everyday life. Players control the daily routines of a virtual family, guiding them through tasks such as managing personal hygiene, cooking food, finding jobs, entertaining guests, and so forth. After assigning professions to their characters, players then manage the family finances, deciding how to best purchase furniture and appliances to develop their house based on analysis of the emotional states of their characters, interact with other Sims (Simulants) have fun, go on a date, take care of sick Sims, because if you don't take care of your own Sim (s) it/they may get sick, an lots and lots and lots of things that everyone does in his daily life, but, how this may help those who play these kind of videogames to lear or practice a new language? Does the "Sims" speak? Well, they do not speak, they interact with everything in the game, you just click on anything and a menu wil pop up with its respective interactive options or with the things that the Sim can do with that thing or Sim.

While there have already been numerous suggestions for using commercial simulation games as language learning contexts, most are based on designing external activities without modifying the games themselves. Traditionally, modifying a commercial game's interface or language data was an impossible task, as its programming was often locked away in compiled binary code. Today, however, most game designers separate game data into external files and actively encourage third-party customizations. For games like The Sims, this has led to an explosion of enhancements for the entertainment value of the game, though so far little has been done to take advantage of this customizability for educational extensions. One freely available customization toll provides users with direct acces to the language data used in the game. By using macros, or scripts, educators can rapidly extract the parts of the first language (L1) game data they feel necessary for scaffolding learners and then integrate them as available translations within the second language (L2) version of the game.

In the following link you can see in the image, how teacher can take advantage of this functionality, adding the translation from German to English, http://llt.msu.edu/vol9num1/purushotma/figure1.jpg

This is a powerful tool for teachers and students who are teaching/learning a new language, if both know how to use it. As a personal remark I started to learn English by playing videogames when I was a child. When a videogame likes you, you're going to make anything that is in your hands to accomplish all the missions, even learning a new language.

Some parts of this text were extracted from the following website: http://llt.msu.edu/vol9num1/purushotma/default.html