Game ON
By Eric (Discover English Teacher)
Ideally, I would’ve written this piece a few months ago in the cold heart of winter. But given that we’re all forced to remain couch potatoes for a few months more, it’s still applicable, even if we may want to be frolicking in Melbourne’s al fresco dining areas.
Today I’m going to write about video games. I’m old enough to have grown up in a period when these interactive entertainments were the realm of only the nerdy – my bespectacled friends and I would stay up late into the night, completing 8bit quests and conquering 256 colour worlds; safely isolated from the kids with more sporty abilities.
But of course, now we’re all isolated, and we’ve all got hours of couch time to fill; and also, video games are not the nerdy fringe culture they once were – they’re now a very mainstream and accepted part of modern life. Worth more than Hollywood, I believe.
The internet offers us an easy opportunity to play video games with other people, making them a social experience. And they can be a very useful way to improve your English, as many of them are recorded or written in English (of course, there’ll probably be a lot of strange vocabulary in there)
One thing that I did over the recent Stage 4 – and this is going to sound really weird – is, instead of playing a multiplayer game, I watched a friend play a game. It sounds like the most inanely boring thing, but it was actually like watching a very experimental animation. And of course, I could yell advice over the microphone.
We played two very interesting and weird games this way:
Creaks (https://store.steampowered.com/app/956030/Creaks/) is a bizarre but delightful little puzzle game. Everything is hand drawn, like a crazy sketchbook, as you explore a decaying underground world populated by spooky furniture creatures.
Lumino City (https://store.steampowered.com/app/205020/Lumino_City/) sees you play a young girl trying to find her missing grandfather. The whole game is made out of actual cardboard sets which were filmed – it’s possibly the sweetest thing I’ve ever seen.
Don’t feel like playing a game? Why not make a game? It’s an incredibly rewarding experience and I promise the lockdown weeks will just disappear.
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/
Adventure Game Studio is a tool for making old-style point and click games. It’s also got a huge collection of free, user-made games.
This one seems to be for making little platformers. Cute.
This one seems a little more intense. I haven’t used it, but it’s free and looks pretty cool.
So, whether we’ve run out of things to watch on Netflix, or decided it’s time to do something creative without having to order art supplies, we can turn to video games – a great way to pass these lockdown weeks.