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So what I think is a really strong counterpoint to your argument is the simple fact that watching movies in a language is generally considered a great way to learn said language. That's passive learning in a similar manner to what you would get out of reading in a video game.

It fails to train you in actually synthesizing speech though. So you need a structured approach as well, similar to what you describe, to fill out the many other facets of learning.

But it's still insanely valuable to do so.

reading things likely makes you better at reading things

Well, I think doing things way above your level "works" sometimes in the sense that there's a subset of things that a learner happens to be most receptive to at any given time, and immersing yourself at the deep end is a bit like brute forcing through the entire subject matter until something happens to stick. But this is inefficient and not guaranteed to yield any results at all.

I have some insight into language learning myself, having had both positive and non-positive experiences. On the one hand, yes, games and movies did help me pick up english vocabulary, but this is because I also studied english from an early age in school, the fact that English borrows vocabulary heavily from romance languages (with which I am fluent), and perhaps most importantly, the fact that I've immersed myself in it quite deeply during my teens, often preferring to read and write in english. Ironically, though, learning through entertainment media left me with some curiously weird learning gaps. For example, I only learned in my 30s that "down" (as in Final Fantasy's "Phoenix down") refers to a type of plumage and not some weird in-universe usage of up/down/left/right.

Now contrast this experience with this: As a kid, I also learned Japanese (though not to the same extent as english, let alone the extent required to master it coming from a romance language). At one point, my dad brought over some Japanese RPG games from a business trip to Japan, and while I did have basic schooling on hiragana/katakana, the teen-level kanji from the games was way over my head at the time, and I ended up learning virtually no Japanese from those games (I had to quite literally sit down to actively study kanjis to make any sense of what the game text said). I also consumed quite a bit of anime and not a whole lot stuck with me either, due to a lack of what I can "active practice" (i.e. my exposure to the language was mostly on a as-needed consumption basis, with little to no active effort to write or speak).

In short, I do think games can help nail down stuff you've learned elsewhere, but upleveling language skills from games alone is very difficult.

> For example, I only learned in my 30s that "down" (as in Final Fantasy's "Phoenix down") refers to a type of plumage

For what it's worth, that's not at all what I'd consider a weird gap. As an educated 40-year-old native English speaker, I think it's possible I've gone my entire life without speaking aloud the word "down" in the sense of plumage. I'd only expect a non-native speaker to know it if they spent some time focusing on animal terminology.

> I'd only expect a non-native speaker to know it if they spent some time focusing on animal terminology.

Id imagine pillows and bedding are where most people use this word.

Yeah, after writing that comment I thought about it a bit more and realized that I have used the word "down" in the context of pillows before. But that may have been one or two conversations in my life.

> Game text is usually not structured with any didactic value in mind (other than maybe appropriate usage of furigana in Japanese in consideration of target audiences). A lot of game categories don't even require any reading beyond recognizing words (which is somewhere between kinder and 1st grade level reading skill)

> Also, even in games where text actually matters, you're typically spending a large amount of time doing other things (killing monster or whatever). In addition, the notion of games-as-reading-material ignores a fairly common phenomenon: a lot of people simply spam `A` to skip over dialogues - and even get stuck on one-off gimmicks that rely on reading the text carefully for instructions or clues.

This is a consequence of modern gaming trends and by no means an issue with video games themselves.

There are a lot of game categories that provide or even require extensive reading. We don't have to accept _all_ games a beneficial; it's not like we use magazines and tabloids to teach reading comprehension either.

There are games where killing monsters isn't the primary goal, or even if it is a significant aspect of game play can be averted by finding alternative solutions, usually through the in-game lore.

Deus Ex was a great example where several bosses could be entirely side stepped by reading emails throughout the game (though to be fair, only a few of them actually required _reading_ the email as opposed to simply discovering it). Arcanum is another that if you pieced together enough of the backstory and paid attention to the dialog you could talk the final boss down. There are even more out there, as you mention, that offer hints to puzzles and gimmicks, some of which even present it as a riddle ensuring you read and understand the text rather than just found it.

Sure, a lot of people will skip these things and save-scum or post on message boards to get the answer, but that's not much different than CliffNotes everyone used.

If you want to use video games in school do the same thing we do for books: Select the games the offer quality reading and evaluate based on comprehension rather than completion. You can even require students submit save files to verify they took the reading path.

There's no need for mental gymnastics, it's a lot easier to simply argue that educational games are educational. But this doesn't contradict what I said: that most games are not structured in terms of didactic value.

I do, however, want to specifically call out the learning value of an R-rated game: if you are learning to read from it, that says absolutely nothing about age-appropriate didactic value of the game. At that level, the game ought to be making you solve quadratic equations or something along those lines for us to even begin entertaining the idea that they may provide any actual didactic value.

Grammar/spelling/usage is almost all about memorizing and copying others, so engaging in tasks that use those skills will definitely get you further faster than a step-by-step progression. I was reading and writing at a level far beyond my peers in elementary school, not because I was smarter, but because I actively read books for fun.