#gamesaregood

We have two brand new players in this group and I was worried they might be overwhelmed, but they got super into it once they started building. They made a fantastic half-elf ranger and halfling druid and seeing how excited they got about their characters is so very gratifying and surprisingly humbling.

I know that sounds idiotic depending how you read it for some people. But it is true. Many don't know it and many do notice it themself that they are acutally learning something while they either play a game or wanna try and understand it. 

For many of us who ain't born in a native English, like myself. It wasn't always easy to play some games as a kid. Take for instance Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening. One of the best GameBoy games as I know of. Played it alot on my red GameBoy as a kid. But here is the one problem you have as a young non-english speaking/reading kid. YOU CAN'T READ ANYTHING, or at least most of it. 

So if you can't read it and people around you are bad at reading it, what do you do? Learn to read it of course! I actual use a dictionary as a kid playing Link's Awakening. All words I didn't understand I looked up and then retry to understand. By doing this and also replay the game it made my english better. Same as you do in school. You practice something and keep practicing yourself until it just something you know without thinking to much about it. 

This is something I think never change not even today. Since I am a huge fan of the Final Fantasy series this is something that always came back to me. One of the most played games on my Playstation was Final Fantasy VII and that game just like Link's Awakening forced me to learn English better 

Not because I had so much problem as the first time playing Link's Awakening but because I wanted to understand the games story. It wasn't always easy to understand everything that was on the screen even if I this time understood most of it, it still forced me to learn some new words. 

But games don't only make you learn new languges it can also make you learn about history as an example. Whereever people like to admit it or not you  mostly have got anykind of interest in a countrys history. I just gonna take a quick guess here and say: Japan. You sitting there playing a game about ninjas or samurais or whatever with your friends and some of you either gonna see it on the screen it is from japan or one of you already started to talk about it because you READ more about Japan after playing the game yourself.

Games has that thing that attracts you to learning something new. Another example from myself was that I got better at Chinese history after that interest came from the game Dynasty Warriors series. At first I didn't know that the game was true based or at least as true as they think it is from history. But after playing Dynasty Warriors 3 a couple of times and then learned that the game is true based and that many of the character actually existed in history it made me open a history book and started to search for it on Internet.

Same thing goes for other games like Europe Universalis games were they try and create these existing kingdoms but let you decide how the world will change.