On April 4, 2025, the Department of Business Foreign Languages and Translation held a gamification class entitled “Die Ringe der Gamifizierung: gaming techniques in learning German medical terminology.” A game is an activity in which a person simulates another type of activity for entertainment or educational purposes. There are three main Olympic values (Excellence, Respect, Friendship), and under these three values, five educational values can be identified. These are the joy of effort, fair play, the practice of respect, the pursuit of excellence, and the balance between body, will, and mind.
Perhaps the most important thing that games give us is experience and skills. Depending on the genre, they can vary: reaction speed as an element of action games, ingenuity as a result of puzzles and detective stories, and creative thinking, one of the key qualities of modern humans, is acquired in sandbox games or open-world games.
One of the main sources for learning English, for example, can be gaming experience in English, and a challenge in learning German can be narrative games in that language. Very often, when you immerse yourself in the world of a game, you as a player have to understand its lore, that is, all the elements that make up the narrative of the game world: history, culture, traditions, and more. Absorbing this content in English or German gives the gaming community a boost in foreign language proficiency. Games provide strong motivation to learn a language through the player’s motivation to complete the game itself. Games and their gameplay elements develop language skills just as well as others. For example, quick communication reactions are developed in games with multiple choice options in dialogue, logical thinking is developed when solving problems in another language, and language use is developed when listening to narrative games or communicating with other players. Learning languages is as exciting and interesting a process as playing a video game.
So, play and win!