Introduction

Have you ever tried to learn a foreign language? I speculate that millions of people suffer thousands of hours of tedium while learning a foreign language. For me, the language was Korean, and the tedium was vocabulary drills. Since 1996 I have lived in Korea for more than 300 days, mostly while directing programmers and artists at Nexon. Colleagues at Nexon treated me like a brother. To talk with them, I tried to learn Korean from books, college courses, language tapes, CDs, flash cards, and chatting. Still, I found I needed more practice, yet practicing was tedious, and available software did not apply context to learning.

When selecting my thesis at USC School of Cinematic Arts, I chose to make a game to learn Korean. So for two years, from June 2007 until May 2009, I dedicated my research, programming and animation to a game to practice speaking and spelling Korean. In this postmortem, I will only review how I produced Runesinger. For the game itself, the video, the thesis, and papers on theory and design see http://runesinger.com/

The problem: gameplay != language

While researching assessment, a theme emerged from the prior art. An exercise in Rosetta Stone presents four photographs, and asks the user to click the one that matches the foreign word. An exercise in KebiKids illustrates an object, shows two Korean words, and asks the user to click the right word. An exercise in My Spanish Coach presents foreign words and ask the user to click on the translation. An exercise in Mission to Iraq puts an avatar in a 3D maze, and asks the user to speak Arabic to move.

In all prior art, the rules of play never refer to the rules of the foreign language. Rosetta Stone and My Spanish/French/Chinese/Japanese Coach applied the same rules to diverse languages. Similarly, the rules of KebiKids never referred to the rules of Korean. The rules of this maze game in Mission to Iraq never referred to the rules of Arabic. Why have they decoupled game rules from language rules? Out-of-context words are easier to design and score. But out-of-context words do not help me get what I want. For research, I passed a dozen levels in My Spanish Coach, yet I still could not speak to the Spanish-speaking barber near USC's campus that "I'd like a number zero."