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Comment by bravura | Hacker News Reader

I don't want to diminish your experience at all. But here's my story:

I learned to read and write by playing Sierra games. I played them with my dad. And I guess I wanted to be able to play them alone.

So the crappy text parsing forced me to learn written English. "Get knife" -> "What is a knife?", "Get sword" -> "I don't see a sword", "Get dagger" -> "You have the dagger". Over and over with many different circumstances. So I also learned to type.

I entered pre-school already knowing how to read and write, much to the chagrin of some teachers.

I am not saying this style of gaming was overall good. But it hard a weird unique impact on my development.

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Hopelessly intrigued by Chrono Trigger, I learned English by playing it back to back on ZSNES, banging my head as I was looking for some place, object or task I hadn't quite fully grasped, progressing from frankly mediocre to seriously nice reading skills by the end (or rather, 10+ ends) of the game. Next stop was DOTT, and since the Full Talkie novelty was only available in English, well, so be it! With all the wit and puns and accents, 5 min in I was like "Holy crap what have I got myself into?", but that was too late, I was hooked, there was no way I would not beat this game. With no other guide than a Harrap's I made it through the hard way. A delightfully painful experience it was to go way beyond my comfort zone with such good games, to which I owe to be fluent in English today.

Very similar here. To this day I can remember the frustration of trying to type "use handcuffs" in Police Quest, which was one of the few timed actions. (I think you got shot of you took too long) Single digit pecking at the keyboard made this extremely hard.

wow, that is amazing

I'm actually surprised that to this day, learning reading, writing and math has not been very incentivized/gamified.

Makes you think about the nature of learning and education a bit, and that modern schools aren't designed to teach people anything. Reminds me of PG's essay about why nerds hate school: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

There's plenty of gamified learning out there. It's just not something most educators want to use for some reason. Learning has to be boring and dull after all!

Meanwhile, I started learning english (not a native speaker) at age 5 because all the broadcasted cartoons were in english, with subtitles. I remember my dad loading up gamified math puzzle games on the Commodore 64 for me to play. And this was some 32 years ago.

I don't know why it's so underused. Perhaps educator are afraid they'll be seen as lazy or not serious about their teaching if they use such measures?

What I do know is that gamification was one of the best ways of being educated as a kid.

Gamification is used a lot in UK education, at least PBL appears everywhere.

The problems with gamification centre mainly around intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation. Some studies strongly suggest that you're teaching kids to seek the rewards of games rather than helping them to find fulfillment in their education.

Gamification works well if you're looking for mechanical responses; it might work better for deeper thinking if the game element is well designed.

Kids feel that fun education is better, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is/isn't the best method.

Some things in studies - money - turn out to be bad motivators for tasks, with larger sums interfering more in people completing more complex tasks. PBL probably follows a similar model.

https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation/ is worth a look.

> helping them to find fulfillment in their education

This did not happen to me or my friends until university. I doubt anything would've fooled us into liking school, but learning games at least would have passed the time quicker.

The point and click ones taught me english a lot, as the verbs and dialogs were in english as well, with no translations.

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