The main affordances of MMORPGs for language learning are the immersive interactive environments and multiple options for players to engage in authentic communication through listening, speaking, reading, and writing in the target language with other interlocutors ( Rama et al., 2012). However, MMORPGs can also provide players with benefits such as feelings of achievement and sense of community ( Sublette and Mullan, 2012), and possibilities for educational use ( González-González and Blanco-Izquierdo, 2012).Īpplying MMORPGs to foreign language (FL) or second language (L2) learning has become a research focus in that, gamers/learners immersed in MMORPGs learning context are more relaxed and motivated to interact with peers or gaming instructions ( Bytheway, 2014), and they outperform those attending traditional classrooms in terms of language skills ( Rankin et al., 2009 Suh et al., 2010 Kim et al., 2013). Notably, MMORPGs may bring about some negative effects such as excessive playing or gaming addiction ( Petry and O’Brien, 2013), and psychiatric comorbidity ( Han et al., 2015). Guild membership offers novices opportunities to get their gaming skills promoted through interaction with more experienced players ( Peterson, 2012).
The players’ ultimate purpose is to get reward so as to progress through the game hierarchy by undertaking game tasks known as quests, usually with the help of game-based organizations known as guilds. The main feature of MMORPGs is gamers’ purposeful interaction with peers and game-embedded narratives elicited by the game design. Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) are gaining more and more popularity compared to other genres of commercial games.
Moreover, with a moderating role played by activation of reward circuit, playing the MMORPGs may strengthen or increase functional connectivity from seed regions such as left anterior insular/frontal operculum (AI/FO) and visual word form area to other language-related brain areas. We suggest that attentional bias makes gamers/learners allocate more cognitive resources toward task-related stimuli in a controlled or an automatic way. Mechanisms underlying the educational assistant role of MMORPGs in second language learning are discussed from both behavioral and neural perspectives. This paper reviews the educational application of the MMORPGs based on relevant macroscopic and microscopic studies, showing that gamers’ overall language proficiency or some specific language skills can be enhanced by real-time online interaction with peers and game narratives or instructions embedded in the MMORPGs. However, there are few studies on the underlying behavioral or neural mechanism of such effect.
MMORPGs can be applied to enhancing language learning, which is drawing researchers’ attention from different fields and many studies have validated MMORPGs’ positive effect on language learning. Massive Multiple Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) have increased in popularity among children, juveniles, and adults since MMORPGs’ appearance in this digital age.
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