Apply HN: VR ESL MMORPG – VR Video Games in Education

[mikejkelley]

Nickel City Pixels is creating the VR gamification of education. Given the evolutionary psychological origins of play, education is video games' greatest pairing. Our first title teaches English as a Second Language via VR Role Playing Game. Korea is our entry market.

Korea spends 15 billion USD on English education. Results suck. The country's broken educational system is a big reason for its record suicide rates. Police raid after-hours schools to ensure students don't study past legally mandated curfews! Despite hard work and extravagant spending, Korea ranks just 15 of 20 on IELTS scores.

ESL education fails in Asia because the learning materials are written by Romance language speakers. They mistakenly assume Romance language equivalencies are universal (this is also a reason for the failure of machine translations). The world's majority of ESL learners face obstacles that are too numerous to list here. Shockingly, these issues are not addressed by educators simply because they do not know any better.

Exception: founder Michael Kelley taught ESL overseas while teaching himself Korean. In his spare time he became an award-winning indie developer. Upon returning home he pioneered and taught game development courses at University and is a publishing author on the subject. He currently works to realize the full potential of the video game medium and use it to do some good!

As a result we have a unique understanding of the aforementioned obstacles and an ability to create a far greater level of engagement and immersion than has ever been possible. Nothing does engagement and immersion better than video games. Not coincidentally, engagement and immersion are the hallmarks of a successful language learning curriculum.

There's a global need for greater communication and understanding. The VR gamification of (ESL) education can and will cure societal ills, empowering a new generation as never before. Nickel City Pixels will help to make it so!

[bestattack]

This is very ambitious!

Has there ever been an educational game of this nature that was extremely successful? Oregon Trail, Civ, etc. don't count because they do their teaching through the environment. I'm not saying it would be impossible to make something really impactful, but I'd be worried about plowing a ton of dev effort into a new platform with lots of graphics PLUS enough ESL content to make it worthwhile and actually be fun.

Hmm though: I realized that English, at least written, is one of those things that people can improve at greatly through online interactions with others.

Anyway, the other fear I have about this product is that it seems like "a solution looking for a problem" -- it seems like you know ESL, and you are excited about VR, and you want to combine the two. But that's not the way to create a company; you need a market demand and then design a product to fill the demand.

[mikejkelley]

Hi bestattack,

Thanks for your great questions! Questions regarding scope (ambition) are especially pertinent. Most independent games fail due to an inability to reign in their ambitions. With that in mind we're engineering this project to be both modular and scalable according to our resources. Ideally we want to create an MMORPG so that, as you've identified, players can improve their English through online interactions. At this point our players would be essentially creating content as they play! If we weren't able to raise enough money to produce an MMORPG we'd create a single-player campaign. At our most lean, we could break the RPG down into episodes, taking cues from the publishing industry. Thankfully, monetization strategies of this sort are much more flexible in Asia.

The closest comparison to a "successful" game would be to Koe (声), which attempts to teach Japanese through an RPG game. They managed to raise over $125,000 on Kickstarter (no mean feat). While they have yet to release (scope mismanagement), it does demonstrate market demand for language learning video games. Keep in mind it's estimated that there are more people learning English than speak it natively and you get an even better sense of demand.

That being said, I feel as if the market demand should already be clear; Koreans spend 15bn USD on English education with disastrous results. If we can create an educational system in which students get better test scores and don't feel compelled to kill themselves, well, that's worth something. I'm not just combining my two biggest passions, I'm combining Korea's two biggest manias: education and gaming. Korea is the world's 4th largest games consumer.

Thanks for your great questions bestattack (let me know if my answers have/haven't been sufficient)!

[johnsoncreek]

Cool idea, but I may have missed how the VR aspect comes into play?

[mikejkelley]

Hi johnsoncreek,

Thanks for your question, it gives me the ability to nerd out on linguistics a little bit!

As mentioned, the hallmarks of a successful language learning curriculum are engagement and immersion. I misspoke when I said that "nothing does engagement and immersion better than video games." One thing does engagement and immersion better than video games: VR video games.

VR does other things better than video games too, and a million times better than textbooks. For one, VR excels at spatial conceptualization. This is important because one of the many obstacles Korean speakers face when learning English, believe it or don't, is spatial reasoning. Consider the following sentence:

The teacher is in front of the whiteboard.

In Korean, a literal (machine) translation looks like this:

Teacher whiteboard in front of is+polite participle.

If you parse this incorrectly you will focus on the "whiteboard in front," and in instances without contextualization, get the objects' spatial relationships completely backward.

Here we're working from English to Korean but believe me, the confusion goes both ways! Ask any native speaker teaching in Korea, prepositions wind up being the longest, most frustrating modules there are. Sadly, they don't understand Korean sentence structure and so they haven't a clue as to why. They simply repeat the book's lessons louder.

By standing my students up and having them orientate themselves according to prepositional imperatives, they were better able to understand the spatial relationships, and by extension, English. Again, this isn't something that can be accomplished in a book.

It can only be accomplished (mass produced) in VR.

Thanks again for your fantastic question johnsoncreek (let me know if my answers have/haven't been sufficient)!