Conversational gaming is a kind of game where talking with characters is the main way you play. For language learners, it means those conversations happen in the language you’re learning, so getting anywhere depends on understanding people and answering them.
It’s the plain-English name for a genre, and it’s broader than our other term. Comprehensible gaming is the learner-focused version, where the game is also built so you can follow it at your level. Every comprehensible game is a conversational game, but a conversational game in your native language, or one that pitches its dialogue at native speakers, isn’t necessarily comprehensible.
What makes a game conversational
Plenty of games have dialogue you click through between the real action. A conversational game needs three things on top of that.
The first is that conversation is the way forward. Talking to someone is how you open the door, get the item or learn the code, so there’s no puzzle or fight that does the job in its place. If you skipped every conversation, you’d be stuck.
The characters also need their own motives. A bored guard wants something different from a nervous merchant, and what you say lands differently with each of them. If nobody in the game can refuse you, talking to them doesn’t decide much.
And your replies have to be open. You say or type what you want to say, and you don’t pick from a list of three options. Dialogue wheels and numbered answer menus give you conversation-shaped choices, but the writers have already decided every line you could say. In a conversational game you have to come up with the words yourself.
Why AI characters made the genre practical
People have tried to build this kind of game for a long time. Text adventures in the 1980s let you type commands, though they understood a small set of verbs. Façade, released in 2005 by Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern, let players type freely to a couple arguing in their apartment, and people still bring it up because so few games have attempted the same thing. Writing a character who can answer anything a player might say, by hand, was close to impossible.
Modern AI made it workable. A character can now be given a personality, a goal and some things it knows, and then respond to whatever you actually say. The game still has to decide what counts. On mossyrune, characters trigger real changes in the game, such as handing over a key or accepting a bribe, and those changes follow rules the characters can’t talk their way around, so the stakes stay real even though the dialogue is improvised.
Why it suits language learners
Most speaking practice happens without a reason to speak. You repeat a sentence to an app, or describe your weekend to a tutor who already knows you’re practicing. A conversational game gives you a reason. You want the guard to let you out, and he’ll only do it if you get the message across.
The setting helps as well. The characters on mossyrune gesture, hold up the things they’re talking about and change expression, so the scene carries part of the meaning. The AI judges what you meant rather than your exact wording, and on beginner a character who hears a clumsy sentence recasts it correctly and carries on, without a list of corrections or a grammar score.
Embarrassment is the other reason. Many learners freeze in front of real people, and foreign language anxiety has been studied since at least Horwitz, Horwitz and Cope (1986). A game character doesn’t sigh or glance at the next person in line. You can fumble the same sentence ten times, replay what someone said, slow it to half speed and try again. That doesn’t replace talking to people, but it gives you somewhere to get the first few awkward attempts out of the way.
An example from a mossyrune game
In the dungeon game you are trapped with an old prisoner, a nervous merchant, a dramatic ghost and a bored guard. They all speak only the language you’re learning. You can get out by bribing the guard or by working out a three-number combination, and either way you have to talk. The ghost responds to flattery, and the guard hears you picking up gold and calls out, so you end up improvising an excuse you didn’t plan. Later the old prisoner asks what you found, and you have to describe it.
You aren’t choosing any of this from a menu, so if the guard doesn’t buy what you say, you have to find another way to put it or another way out.
How it relates to talk-to-play and comprehensible gaming
We use three terms that overlap, and each one describes a different layer of the same thing.
Talk-to-play is about the controls. Your voice or your typing is what moves the story, instead of a controller button or a list of answers. There’s more on it in what is a talk-to-play game.
Conversational gaming names the genre. It covers games where conversation with characters is the main mechanic, whatever language they’re in and however they’re controlled.
Comprehensible gaming adds the learner. It means a conversational game built so a learner can follow along, with speech pitched just above your level and a scene that helps carry the meaning.
The dungeon is all three at once. A murder mystery in your own language where you question suspects by voice would be talk-to-play and conversational, but it wouldn’t be comprehensible gaming, because nothing is adjusted for someone learning.
The limits
Conversational games for learners are new, and a lot is still unknown. Nobody has studied this genre as a language-learning method yet, so we can’t point to evidence that it works better than other practice. The approach rests on older ideas about understanding input and using the language for a real purpose.
AI characters also make mistakes. They can misread what you meant, or occasionally say something slightly off in the language you’re learning. A game is also not a person. It won’t teach you how a real stranger reacts when you’re tired and in a hurry, and it won’t give you the friendships that come from a language exchange. It’s a place to practice before those moments.
A game session is also short next to the hundreds of hours of listening most learners need, so these games work best alongside video, reading and real conversation rather than in place of them.
Trying it
The games on mossyrune run in the browser, including on phones. You need a free account, and new accounts get 20 free credits, enough for one full game. After that there’s a monthly plan or a credit pack that doesn’t expire, with every game, language and difficulty on every plan.
See how the games work, or read the longer definition of comprehensible gaming.