Yes, a lot of people improve their English by playing video games, and there is some research behind it. But the games were made for fun, not for learners, so some are much more useful than others. This page explains why games help, rates six well-known games by how hard their English is, and looks at what a normal game can’t do for you.
Why so many people learn English from games
If you grew up playing games in English, you probably know words you never studied. Menus, quests, item names and chat messages repeat hundreds of times, and you have to understand them to keep playing. Nobody tests you on any of it, because all you’re trying to do is win.
Researchers have looked at this. Pia Sundqvist and Liss Kerstin Sylvén studied Swedish children aged 11 and 12 and published the results in 2012. Children who played games in English often scored higher on vocabulary, reading and listening than children who played less or not at all. In 2020, Vanessa De Wilde, Marc Brysbaert and June Eyckmans tested 780 Dutch-speaking children aged 10 to 12 who had not yet had English at school. They found that gaming, social media and speaking English were the most useful kinds of contact with the language.
These studies show a link between gaming and better English, but they can’t prove that the games caused it. Children who already like English may simply play more games in English. Both studies also looked at children, so we don’t know how well the results carry over to adults. The basic reason games help is easy to see, though. In a game, English is useful right now, and you read the quest because you want the reward.
How hard is the English in popular games?
Here are six games that people often use for English, from easiest to hardest. The levels are our own rough guide, using the CEFR scale (A1 is a total beginner, C1 is advanced). We only list facts about each game that we could check.
Minecraft (A1, but very little English). The villagers in Minecraft don’t speak words. They mumble and grunt, and trading happens in a menu where you swap items for emeralds. So the English you meet is mostly item names, menus and short messages. That is good for a first set of nouns, like “iron”, “wood” and “chest”, and not much more. The real English around Minecraft is in multiplayer chat and in videos about the game.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons (A2). The villagers talk in Animalese, a made-up sound that follows the letters of the text, so every line is something you read, not something you hear. The conversations are short and friendly, about everyday life on the island. Because the text waits for you, you can read at your own speed. You won’t get listening practice from it.
Pokémon Scarlet and Violet (A2 to B1). These games have no voice acting for dialogue, and Pokémon is a role-playing game with a lot of text. That makes it good reading practice at your own pace. The language is simple and the story is easy to follow, but again, you get no listening practice.
Stardew Valley (B1). The base game is text only. A fan-made mod adds voices for some characters, but the game itself has none. You’re meant to talk to the villagers every day, and their lines become friendlier as you get to know them, so you read a lot of small talk from many different people. Some characters have their own style, and the amount of daily text makes it good steady reading for a B1 learner.
Life is Strange (B1 to B2). This is a story game with full voice acting, set in a small town in Oregon. Its best feature for learners is the main mechanic: you can rewind time, and conversations can be rewound too, so you can hear a scene again and try a different answer. The characters are teenagers, and one review said the dialogue is full of hip slang that feels forced. That’s useful to recognise, but don’t copy all of it. It also has strong language, so check the age rating.
Disco Elysium: The Final Cut (C1). This is one of the hardest games you could pick. The Final Cut has full voice acting for a script of over a million words, including the narrator and the voices in your character’s head. The vocabulary is literary, political and often strange. It does help that the conversation stays in a column on the screen, and you can scroll back up to reread it. Save it for when English novels feel comfortable.
What about online multiplayer?
Multiplayer games are where you actually speak English with real people. If you play team games with voice chat on international servers, you have to listen fast and answer fast, and that is real speaking practice. The downside is that strangers in voice chat are often impatient, and some are rude. Nobody slows down for you, and a mistake at the wrong moment can get you shouted at. Advanced learners often enjoy this. Beginners may find it discouraging, so it can help to start with friends or text chat.
What a normal game can’t do for you
Commercial games are made for people who already speak the language, and that has a cost for learners. The level never changes. If the English is too difficult for you, it stays too difficult, and if it’s too easy, you stop learning anything new.
A game also can’t tell when you’re lost. A character says the important line once and walks away, and most games have no way to say it again more simply. Many popular games have no voices at all, so they do nothing for your listening.
In a single-player game you also don’t really speak. You choose from answers someone else wrote, so you never have to build a sentence of your own. And when you stop playing, the words you met are gone unless you wrote them down yourself.
How a game built for learners handles this
This is the idea we call comprehensible gaming: a game made so a learner can follow it, where understanding changes what happens. The games on mossyrune are built this way.
In the dungeon game, you’re locked up with an old prisoner, a nervous merchant, a dramatic ghost and a bored guard, and they speak to you in English. You can escape by bribing the guard or by working out a three-number combination, and both need you to understand what people tell you. In the bomb game the timer is running, and you need the commander’s briefing, an informant’s tip and a professor’s disarm code.
The English is set to your level. On beginner, characters use simple English, speak slowly, gesture and hold up the things they talk about, and on advanced they speak at full native speed. You can play any line at half speed or up to double speed, and replay any turn as many times as you want.
You decide how much help you get. You can play with none, or turn on word translations when you tap, keyword hints, full-sentence translations, or an interpreter with grammar notes and ideas for what to say. Hint tokens ask a character to say the last line again more simply.
You also make your own sentences, by voice or by typing. The game judges what you meant rather than your exact words. On beginner, if your sentence comes out wrong, the character says it back correctly and carries on, and you don’t get a list of mistakes. If you aren’t ready to speak English yet, you can answer in the language you already speak and the character still replies in English. This is called crosstalk. It’s on by default on beginner and intermediate, and on advanced it’s off by default but you can turn it on.
When you finish, the whole game is in your notes, including the conversation, the translations you looked at and the hints you used. You can also save any word or sentence to your notes in the middle of a scene.
The games run in your browser, on a phone too. You need a free account, and your first full game is free (20 credits). After that there’s a monthly plan or a credit pack that doesn’t expire, and every game, language and difficulty is on every plan. There’s more on the English conversation practice page.
Use both
Normal games give you hours of English you actually want. Nothing built for learners can match the size of Stardew Valley or the writing of Disco Elysium, so keep playing them. What they can’t do is change to your level, slow down, or ask you to speak. A game built for learners is for that part. It’s somewhere to practise speaking and check what you really understand. Play what you love in English, and spend part of your time somewhere the English is aimed at you.