gaming Have Role-Playing Video Games improved your vocabulary or reading skill?

[Cash In 21,471]

...I'm mostly doing this for my Informatics assignment, to be perfectly honest .

Role-Playing games (RPGs) tend to have a large amount of information and dialogue in them. They help build the game's world and can make the experience more enjoyable. Because of the amount of different words and phrases utilised, they may be able to help improve one's vocabulary and reading comprehension. Have they managed improve yours to any degree?

As for me, RPGs have helped me out a fair bit. My vocabulary and reading comprehension used to be behind most kids my age, until I started playing RPGs such as Pokemon and Paper Mario. It wasn't an instant spike in skill, but as time passed and more hours were played, my vocabulary saw some substantial improvement and so did my reading ability. Writing stories is one of my hidden passions and I doubt that would remain, had my reading ability didn't improve. 

[Quinch 1,119]

I rather think that my vocabulary and reading skills improved my appreciation of roleplaying games instead.

[Discordian 6,013]

1 hour ago, Quinch said:

I rather think that my vocabulary and reading skills improved my appreciation of roleplaying games instead.

Probably more like this. Or they worked in tandem. I can definitely say a desire to understand more was born from text heavy games I saw when I was a child though.

[Jordan D 149]

I was going to say "quite a bit", but in hindsight, I think they increased by pattern recognition skills more, since I played a few RPGs before I could even read, but managed to get decently far in them by recognizing patterns, skills, character stats, etc.

[碇 シンジン 27,427]

Rather they helped me to help appreciate multilayered, deep storyline and progression in that storyline. What improved my vocabulary was comics.

[Passion 3,478]

Not at all.

If they have contributed to improving something, it would be my English knowledge. Due to gaming I've known English even before I've started learning it for good.

But what enriched my ability to express myself would be regular books, written specifically in language designed to captivate the reader as opposed to simple language of many RPGs aiming to relay the message across at all costs.

[Lord Midnight Madness 1,542]

I think video games helped out a little bit but not as much as all the tv I've watched. I think tv shows are the reason why my vocabulary is very vast. 

[Misty Shadow 7,059]

Of course. I'm eternally grateful to Final Fantasy V for putting "piratey pirate" into my vocabulary. The Final Fantasy games did genuinely teach me some new words, like procure, advent, dissension, unveiled, and of course, spoony. "Lucid" was a word I just learned from Dark Souls last night. Never knew its meaning outside of the term, "lucid dream". 

[Midnight Solace 5,129]

As a kid, I would skip all the dialogue in an RPG. 

[hollow-shades 129]

i actually only got contact with RPGs when i was like, 9 or 10, and by then my english was already decent enough for me to understand everything they said

so while RPGs in general didnt help me, games in general helped me a lot with learning english (also, google translate helped tbh)

i remember being a little kid and translating every single word that came before "man" in the megaman series' robot masters (and never getting a definite translation for "splash woman")

[Snow Frostflame 3,567]

An old MMORPG called Wizard 101 helped me with my typing speed, and spelling. Because that game had no mic chat, there was no Discord at the time, and the game censored misspelled words for anyone under 18 for their own safety.

That's as much as video games have helped me in that regard... they mostly taught me how to solve puzzles, and problem solve.

Come to think about it, there are only two traditional RPGs I've played as a kid. Paper Mario 2, and Tactics Ogre 2... I was more into platformers and racing games.

[Here No Longer 5,270]

Being that I played plenty of RPGs among other things as a kid, it improved my vocabulary quite a bit. My knowledge of the English language was actually below average for my age as a kid. For a show of how bad it was, had a kindergarten reading level in 3rd grade...

But after playing RPGs like Contact, Etrian Odyssey, and Final Fantasy on my DS, I noticed a significant improvement. Within 2 years, my reading level jumped 6 entire grade levels. By 6th grade, I was able to read Watership Down in a span of a week. I strongly believe that playing them, along with the fact that I actually started to pay attention to the dialogue in Pokémon games, were a significant help. Now I'd say it's above average. Nothing like my proficiency in the area of mathematics, but I still know my way around the English language.

[Once In A Blue Moon 894]

I've played a few computer RPGs, but it pales to nothing in comparison to the number of books I've read. I won't say I haven't learnt anything, but I don't think that it did much more for my vocabulary or reading skills in the grand scheme of things.

Now, games have done a fair bit for my knowledge of history (from the Greek and Roman Empires to the cold war.) Face-to-face RPGs have done a lot for my social skills too, but the meeting of the two hasn't done a huge amount for either.

Edited December 6, 2018 by Once In A Blue Moon