Vocabulary acquisition in the video game Disco Elysium The lexical coverage of a video game

Abstract

A growing body of research has been dedicated to video games in the last decade, showing a connection between playing video games and successful vocabulary acquisition. One of the video game genres most suited for this type of learning is that of role-playing games (RPGs). In these a relatively fixed narrative and interactions with non-player characters let players regularly hear or read large amounts of dialogue. The aim of this paper is to present the role-playing game Disco Elysium as a possible aid in vocabulary acquisition. As the game uses written text for its dialogue as well as environmental and action descriptions, understanding these texts is of key importance when playing. Using the text of the game as a corpus, the frequency with which players encounter certain vocabulary items was examined. The results show that Disco Elysium may be ideal in aiding vocabulary acquisition owing to repeated exposure to lexical items. The results also show that knowledge of the most common 6,000 word families is required to play Disco Elysium without any particular comprehension problems.