Not-so-Serious Games for Language Learning. Now with 99,9% More Humour on Top

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Procedia Computer Science 15 ( 2012 ) 148 – 158

doi: 10.1016/j.procs.2012.10.066

Virtual Worlds for Serious Applications (VS-GAMES'12)

Not-so-serious games for language learning. Now with 99,9%

more humour on top

Ivan Lombardi

ª*

ª _{Department Of Linguistic Sciences and Foreign Literatures, Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, via Necchi 9, 20123, Milan, Italy}

Abstract

Verbal and figurative humour characterise some of the most memorable commercial video games. Humour, in general, is also a precious strategy to enhance language learning. What happens if we embed humour in serious games for language learning? This paper will briefly cover: a) the origin of fun; b) the essence of humour; c) both the cultural dependence and the universality of humour; c) its meaningfulness to language learning. In the end, a proposal for integrating humour in serious games is formulated, along with several examples of 'teaching humour' extrapolated from a successful commercial video game (Day of the Tentacle).

Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of the scientific programme committee of VS-Games 2012

Keywords: humour; serious games; language learning; fun; culture

1. Introduction

Rule one in digital gaming: games ought to be compelling and fun to play. Successful commercial games are usually very compelling and inevitably enjoyable.

Video games with a purpose are becoming more and more compelling, too. That is good news, given that players of serious games are also usually supported by a strong intrinsic motivation. Moreover, recent serious games in the field of education at least are starting to consider fun as a key element of gameplay. Which is great, if we share Koster's [1] opinion that fun [ ] is the feedback the brain gives us when we are absorbing patterns for learning purposes , and fun is just another word for learning .

*

Corresponding author.

E-mail address: ivan.lombardi@unicatt.it.

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All blockbuster video games integrate fun into gameplay. Some of them also add sprinkles of humour on top. The wit of the Monkey Island series, the catchphrases in Duke Nukem 3D, the adorable foolishness of Raving Rabbids, the sarcastic comments in Fallout are all examples of embedded humour that made these games memorable.

Humour is also a powerful motivator to learning [2], and it is firmly intertwined with one language and its culture [3]. Therefore, this paper will discuss the need for serious games for language learning to also integrate, in addition to a fun gameplay, verbal and figurative humour, as a strategy to favour learning conditions and outcomes.

2. Literature review

To the best of my knowledge, the role of humour in video games for language learning has yet not been investigated. Some of the most important studies and projects in this field, in fact, do not rely much on wittiness or comedy to highlight vocabulary, use of the language, grammar or culture. It is not a top priority for Purushotma [4-5], nor for Meyer and Sørensen [6-7], and surely it is not the main focus of Tactical Language Training LLC's Operational Language & Culture Training System (which lies at the bottom of Tactical Iraqi, Tactical French, and many others) [8-9]. DeHaan [10] does not mention humour, and neither do Yip & Kwan [11] and Kim [12]; actually, not even I mentioned humour in language learning before [13], if not generically [14].

On the other hand, humour is quite a relevant topic in the literature on second and foreign language teaching. As a general idea, its use is encouraged by the advocates of communicative approaches. Humanistic-affective approaches also rely on humour to ease off and to reinforce learning [15]. Specifically, Mollica [2-15-16] is a primary source, and so are Fleming [17] and the issue of Le Français dans le monde coordinated by Cormansky and Robert in 2002 [18]. The works by Bosisio [19] and, in part, by Caon [20] are also worth mentioning.

What 'fun' means has been instead researched a lot from an incredibly wide variety of points of view. In the next paragraph a summary of the most recent theories on the inner origin and meaning of fun in video games will be presented.

3. Dissecting fun

Addressing the notion of fun is an overwhelming task, given the multi-faceted nature of the notion itself. To briefly analyse the role of fun in serious games, and how embedding humour can eventually contribute to the overall experience of fun, some useful insights can be found in neuropsychology and positive psychology.

3.1. Fun produced and experienced

Chemically speaking, what is usually called fun is the feeling provoked by the release of a flow of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the mesolimbic region of the brain the one that contains the human reward system [21]. This rush of dopamine, along with other chemicals like epinephrine (i.e. adrenaline) and norepinephrine (i.e. noradrenaline), is activated mostly when the brain accomplishes a difficult task, when it tackles and overcomes a challenge or solves a puzzle [22]. It should remembered, at this point, that good (i.e. fun) video games are, by definition, a continuous series of balanced challenges [1].

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We, as human beings, seem to enjoy the emotional high of fieroa_{( personal triumph over adversity [23]) so} much, that we crave it continuously, and look for it in games and video games. Still, not every game is able, or even meant, to recreate the same sensation. In this context, player experience expert Nicole Lazzaro has established the so-called four keys to fun [23] to explain why some (video) games are more appealing than others to different people and why, for example, some people may perceive as more enjoyable, more rewarding a casual coffee break game than the most complex and realistic hi-tech battlefield simulation on the marketb_.

In her model, Lazzaro distinguishes between four kinds of experiences that can be labeled 'fun':

easy fun comes from

exploration, the experience of stimulating (virtual) environments (like Myst);

hard fun, the usual responsible for fiero, originated by overcoming obstacles that separate the player from a meaningful goal (it is not unusual to see gamers cheer and throw their hands in the air after finally getting through a difficult mission in Grand Theft Auto IV);

people fun or people factor, i.e. the inherent amusement of cooperation and/or competition, along with the emotion of naches (the pride felt when someone we have helped, or trained, or mentored

accomplishes a goal [22-26]). A good, non-standard example of this kind of fun is found in Halo; Serious fun or altered states, the kind of fun that derives from games whose aim is to create emotions

and changes of state in the players (a recent and successful example of which is Journey).

The most successful games seem to be the ones that integrate all these kinds of fun the most evident example being World of Warcraft. This happens because many emotions that are perceived as 'fun' are triggered by games. In a survey conducted in 2010, cognitive psychologist and game designer Christopher Bateman was able to track down the ten most popular emotions felt by video games players. The results, summarized in [27], state that fiero, despite being a very strong feeling, is not even in the top three, with the leading emotions being amusement, contentment and wonderment. This means that what is known as fun is a concept that cannot be explained by only looking at neurobiological evidence [28]. Fun is also largely psychologically, idiosyncratically and most likely even socio-culturally dependent.

3.2. The relationship between fun and humour

The same is true when humour is concerned, as will become clear in the next section.

Still, humour has a neurobiological basis itself. It is hardwired into the human brain, in the same mesolimbic region that is responsible for the several sensations that we include in the category of 'fun' [21]. However, many scientists have postulated that, in addition to being deeply embedded in this very visceral region of the brain, humour being an exclusive human trait is most probably processed mainly in the right frontal lobe [29], one of the upper regions of the encephalon, more developed in humans compared to other vertebrates. Philosopher John Morreal, supported by hard science evidence, asserts that humour might have found its way in a more evolved region of the human brain because humour is not a primordial trait of the homo sapiens: my

a

Fiero is one of the most powerful neurochemical highs we can experience. It involves three different structures of the reward circuitry of the brain, including the mesocorticolimbic center, which is most typically associated with reward and addiction. Fiero is a rush unlike b It is worth noting that Lazzaro's model is not the only tool for analyzing the different facets of fun. Equally useful models are found in the MDA framework [24], which acknowledges eight kinds of fun, and in the work by Bartle [25], who outlines the profile of four different types of players, depending on the priority they give to a peculiar kind of fun. Kim [26] has then recently proposed an improvement of Bartle's model, known as Social Engagement Verbs, which also takes into account the most common actions that lead to fun states in social and collaborative video games.

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explanation for all these dissimilarities between amusement and standard emotions is that amusement is not, like emotions, a direct adaptation to dangers and opportunities, and so it does not involve the cognitive and practical engagement of beliefs, desires, an

Humour is thus likely to share some characteristics with fun, which are reflected in the sensations we feel when amused by jokes, comics, and people slipping on banana peels. In this sense, humour is a kind of fun, or even better a category of fun. On the other hand, humour is more intellectually challenging than other emotions that lead to fun states so much that it lead to the creation of a whole new field of study, gelotology.

Gelotology studies have eventually confirmed what teachers have been advocating for ages, with just the aid of common sense and positive feedback from pupils: humour is a very powerful, intellectually stimulating strategy that leads to meaningful learning. Its peculiarities will be discussed in the next paragraph.

4. Issues on hunour and language

Another base statement of gelotogy is that, given the neurophysiological nature of humour, every non-pathological human being is sensitive to its power, and laughs as a consequence. What is self-evident, though, is that not everyone laughs about the same things. What is funny, and what is not, also depends on the cultural and social context, as well as on personal taste.

4.1. Humour is culturally driven

Verbal humour is especially dependent from the context. Jokes, in particular, tend to be hard to translate, or even to understand, when containing information that may not be shared by foreigners. To give an example: all jokes about Carabinieri in Italy are based on the commonplace that Carabinieri are people with somehow limited intellectual powers. If the recipient of the message does not possess this piece of information, he or she may miss the inference, and thus fail to get the joke. Every Italian shares this knowledge, even if it is based on a historic cultural cliché, rather than on evidence; the same does not apply for people who have not had the chance to penetrate into Italian costumes and traditions as deep as the humour on Carabinieri is rooted.

The same applies, of course, for jokes on Ossis and Wessis in Germany: in order to infer the wit, you need to have a smattering of German history, geography and social development, at least. In the US, jokes on rednecks are pretty common if the listener or reader does not possess the cultural relativism needed to properly receive and interpret the joke, he or she might easily find it rude or insensitive, and not funny at all.

Phraseologisms, or ways of saying, are also a potential threat to the inter-comprehension of humour, because they are not usually shared across languages (and thus cultures). A peculiar example of such failure in crossing the cultural boundary is curiously found in one of the funniest commercial computer games ever published: The Secret of Monkey Island.

As highlighted by non-English-speaking researchers in [13] and [31], one of the puzzles that Guybrush Threepwood has to solve early in the game is hardly comprehensible in translation not to mention the fact that it totally loses its wittiness. In short:

1. The bridge in Mêlée Island is guarded by a troll. He will not let Guybrush pass unless he gets, 2. In his inventory, Guybrush owns a red fish. On closer examination, the fish turns out to be a herring

namely, a red herring;

3. Guybrush feeds the troll with the (literal) red herring, and is able to pass through the bridge and continue his adventure.

In English, the joke clearly plays on the ambiguity of the phraseologism red herring , which means misleading clue . But when I, native speaker of Italian, played the game for the first time in its Italian

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translation, I had a hard time figuring out the solution of the enigma. Actually, I had to solve it by trial and error. The clue provided by the examination of the fish, in fact, did not help me at all, because the translated description sembra un'aringa could not guide me towards the solution: the semantic field of aringa rossa in Italian does definitely not overlap the one of red herring in English. As pointed out in [31], the same happens with the Spanish translation: 'arenque rojo' does not have the figurative sense it has in English, so the puzzle remained cryptic. The puzzle with the troll and the fish makes perfect sense to me now, but only after playing the game in English .

Figurative humour is also a powerful means to express the sense of humour of a nation. In his analysis of comics and cartoons, Mollica [2-16] lists several topics that are typical of Italian humour: women, marriage and sex, work and leisure, politics and satire. Death, on the contrary, tends to be a taboo subject. In other cultures, e.g. the German one, dark humour and schadenfreude are much more acceptable.

The taste in figurative humour, then, also varies with time: what is acceptable in a decade may be perceived as politically incorrect in the next.

Ultimately, as Robert [32] states: understanding the humour of a foreign language needs a linguistic competence [ ], but also a cultural competence, the knowledge of a lexiculture .

4.2. Beyond culture: the universality of humour

Of course, there are funny situations, and even jokes which are perfectly transferrable from one culture to another. Otherwise, the world would not have laughed at Chaplin's The great dictator, and would not have spent a total of $2,955,797,005 at the box office to watch the Shrek series. In digital gaming, then, we are in these very days witnessing the incredible result of Double Fine Adventure's Kickstarter fundraising: a crowd of 87,142 aficionados from all over the world have donated a total of $3,336,372 to bring back the typical humour of Ron Gilbert's games on their PCs.

An interesting experiment concerning the universality of humour was conducted by Richard Wiseman in 2002. The goal of LaughLab was to find the world s funniest joke and answer important questions about the psychology of humour [33]. The winning joke is reported here below:

A couple of New Jersey hunters are out in the woods when one of them falls to the ground. He doesn't seem to be breathing, his eyes are rolled back in his head. The other guy whips out his cell phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps to the operator: My friend is dead! What can I do? The operator, in a calm soothing voice says: Just take it easy. I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead. There is a silence, then a shot is heard. The guy's voice comes back on the line. He says: OK, now what?

In the words of Wiseman [33], this joke is interesting because it works across many different countries, appeals to men and women, and young and old alike. Many of the jokes submitted received higher ratings from certain groups of people, but this one had real universal appeal .

Of course, it is very hard to appeal to everyone, and it might be to all intents and purposes impossible, as personal taste is involved. Why should then designers of serious games, and serious games for language learning specifically, struggle to include humour in their products?

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5. Humour and language learning: towards not-so-serious games

5.1. Why humour?

The enjoyment that a good laughter provides in the language classroom has been demonstrated to have several benefits on the general learning process [16-17]. It helps to:

relieve the strain;

establish a closer student-teacher relationship; reinforce creativity and rote learning;

attract the attention;

create bonds within the learning group.

Moreover, humour is a powerful boost for motivation, as it inevitably triggers off the human reward system [21], which also originates pleasure-based motivation (through an engagement loop) [20]. I argue that humour, though, should be employed only once in a while, in order to be more effective. Otherwise, it could dramatically reduce the aura of meaningfulness of the learning task, and thus the same task risks being perceived as frivolous and not serious at all [14]; moreover, humour is cognitively demanding, and an abuse may result in an overload. To take up again the metaphor used above, humour should be sprinkled upon the whole learning process, and upon teaching tools and materials (in this case, serious games) especially.

Lots of commercial video games, not originally intended for language teaching and learning, constitute a good example of how scattered humour can actually teach something. Chris Person, a blogger for the video game portal Kotaku, has made an interesting videoc_{on how Sam & Max Hit the Road, a game which relies} highly on verbal and situational humour, (unintentionally?) succeeds in teaching the player uncommon English vocabulary. Most of the humour in the game, in fact, is originated by the unusual choice of words made by the two main characters which often turns their sentences into memorable quotes, like: shall I confront, subdue, and pummel the suspected perpetrator, Sam? and my mind is a swirling miasma of scintillating thoughts and turgid ideas .

Serious games aimed at vocabulary teaching should consider including this kind of humour in their scripts. Inserting jokes, paradoxical dialogues, funny iconic situations is in fact an excellent strategy to help learners retain information

5.2. How does humour work?

When processed correctly, humour triggers a positive emotional reaction, whose external expression is laughter. This positive emotion contributes to the arousal of eustress, or positive stress [34], the rush of adrenaline that supports motivation and confidence [22]. Thanks to cognitive sciences, it is now demonstrated

[35-processes it makes no sense to talk about one aspect [cognition] without the other [emotion], because learning This demonstration gives credit to the hypothesis of the affective filter, proposed by Stevick in the late 70s [37] and made popular by Krashen [38], which has been since then highly considered in second language learning approaches and methodologies. The hypothesis of the affective filter states that attitude and emotion

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play a relevant, filter-like role in language acquisition: when the learner feels at ease while learning, he or she lowers this psychological filter and is more likely to transform the input in intake the latter being the correct retention in the long-term memory. On the contrary, if the emotional context is negative, i.e. the learner feels anxiety, stress, unease, fear, the filter is raised, and (language) learning less likely to happen.

Humour, then, along with the regular cognitive processes and proper motivation, may help the learner to build up the most efficient strategies that lead to language acquisition [36]. But if its role is so relevant, why should it be used sparingly and scattered here and there within the serious game?

To answer this question it is vital to remember that, even if learning happens in the head, teaching materials are not meant to address a cranium, but a person as a whole [39]. The 'downside' of humour in (language) learning, in fact, is that it has much to do with the brain and the mind, but even more with culture and self-determination. It is personally meaningful.

As stated above, both verbal and figurative humour in a foreign language need a prior linguistic and cultural knowledge (Robert's lexiculture [19]), in order to be understood. The input will inevitably be filtered through the learner's personal experience and understanding of the elements that characterize humour itself (polysemy, ambiguity, incongruities, metaphors, cross-references, idioms... [16]). This process makes humour a particularly complex input, because it does not imply a mechanical or instinctive response, but rather reflection, critical thinking, evaluation, and finally relation to existing knowledge [40]. The feedback of achievement that such a complex task gives is tremendous: it is one of the most powerful feedback on meaningful language internalization that a learner can ever get [18-19], since it provides proof of an attained communicative competence [41].

5.3. Embedding humour in serious games

Despite being the described condition ideal, an excessively reiterated use of humour in teaching materials is very likely to interfere with the learning process itself, for humour has the tendency to:

monopolize the attention, and being associated with frivolousness.

When integrating humour into serious games it is important not to transfer in humour the whole didactic potential, thus transforming the gameplay into a series of non-meaningful actions, with players/learners just waiting for the next gag to come up on the screen. Such design would inevitably shift the attention only on the humorous content, and would thus disrupt the flow [42-43] of the the game. Keeping players in flow should instead be a key feature for designing fun and compelling serious games [43]. If humour is preponderant, rather than being functional to flow, its function is destined to become the signal, the highlight of a learning object with a mechanical response to a stimulus not much different from the one that characterized earlier edutainment 'video games'.

Humour, then, is culturally (in western culture, at least) related to non-serious tasks and situations despite having been welcomed by thinkers and philosophers of all times (Aristotle, Bacon, Kant, Schopenhauer, Freud, Bergson and Bateson, among others) as a 'medicine for the intellect'. This common thought is at the basis of the general difficulty, well known by teachers, to bring humorous and funny materials into the language classroom [14-44]. The issue of the postulated equivalence between seriousness and meaningfulness (and thus effectiveness) needs to be taken into account when designing serious games for all educational purposes. Again, humour is generally acceptable in moderation, i.e. when not the primary means of transmitting the learning content.

A feasible solution to embed comedy in serious games to enhance learning objects, without debasing the elements of gameplay at the same, might be the above-mentioned metaphor of sprinkled humour.

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I specifically insist on the metaphor, because it involves one fundamental element, that is that of

non-predictability. To sprinkle, in fact, means to randomly intersperse without a clear and recognizable pattern.

This strategy is optimal when trying to 'trick' the brain a wonderfully functional pattern recognizer , into avoiding the constant expectation for regularities. Having no regular pattern is very likely to force the brain (and the learner as a consequence) to be more constantly involved in the learning process (i.e. playing the game), with the result of enhanced attention and, hopefully, higher motivation. Since, to the best of my knowledge, no experiment of implementation has yet been carried out in the context of serious games, there is a growing need for data that can corroborate or deny the hypothesis which clearly works so well when applied to commercial computer games.

The last claim can be supported by several examples, among which I have chosen one for a brief analysis. Day of the Tentacle (DotT) is a 1993 graphic adventure by Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer, which relies heavily on iconic, linguistic and cultural comedy. Since the beginning, the role of humour in the game is plain but it is wisely blended into a well-constructed narrative, design and gameplay. The experience of playing DotT is enjoyable because of the smooth interaction among its characterizing elements, and not because of a fixed pattern of humorous stimuli following one after the other. The proof of the pudding is in the eating in this case, in the critical success of the game [45].

As claimed above, the humorous fil rouge of DotT has a lot of teaching potential, and not just in regard of the linguistic sphere of language. Of course, several lexical choices and chunks of dialogues like the following would be of extreme interest for a learner of English as a foreign language:

Dr. Fred: Leaping lab rats! Bernard: Dr. Fred!

Dr. Fred: What have you done this time, you meddling milquetoast? Now Purple Tentacle is free to use his

evil mutant powers to take over the world, and ENSLAVE ALL HUMANITY!

Bernard: Whoops.

Hoagie: I'm not the marble delivery man, but rock is my life!

But most of the humour in DotT has a cultural gloss that opens the way to an enhanced meaningfulness for learners, in terms of communicative (and thus socio-cultural) goals in the target language. Suitable examples in DotT involve the participation of Benjamin Franklin, George Washington and the Founding Fathers of the United States, and also some tiny meddling with the American Constitution and the design of the Star Spangled Banner. Related verbal humour includes:

Hoagie: Is it true about you and the cherry tree?

George Washington: Oh yes, it's quite true. Why, I've cut down ACRES of cherry trees in my day. Hoagie: I bet you've lost it. You couldn't cut down a tree to save your grandmother.

George Washington: Lost it, have I? Why, I'd show you a thing or two if there were a cherry tree nearby.

But as you can see, there... uh... well, what do you know! There IS a cherry tree out there. Well, let's go chop the sucker down.

Popular culture and beliefs are also mentioned throughout the game:

Bernard: Some people think that washing one's vehicle will make it rain. Laverne: Will the Sharks ever have a winning season?

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Other jokes and gags, instead, are not immediately relevant to teaching and learning purposes, while still contributing to the enjoyability of the game. Those are found mostly in the introductory cutscene which features the hilarious scene of a bird choking to death when breathing the miasma of the toxic waste responsible for the evil mutation of Purple Tentacle, the villain of the storyd_.

Verbal samples of this type of humour include:

Hoagie: Er... Hi, horsey. Horse: Hi yourself. Hoagie: Wow, you can talk!

Horse: Wow, so can you! What a coincidence. Hoagie: I didn't think horses could talk.

Horse: Maybe they just never had anything to say to you. Ever think of that? Hoagie: You mean horses have been snubbing me my whole life?

Horse: If you want to put it that way. Bernard: Hey, Dr. Fred! We have to DO something!

Dr. Fred: What do you suggest, college boy? No diamond for the central unit, no power for the

Chron-O-Johns, a mutant monster of my own creation roaming the countryside, taking over the world! It's a dark day for mad science.

Bernard: What if we unpollute the river?

Dr. Fred: I could just shut off my Sludge-O-Matic, but it is too late... Bernard: You have a machine whose sole function is producing toxic waste?

Dr. Fred: You can't have a high-tech laboratory like this and NOT spew poisonous filth! All the other mad

scientists would laugh!

6. Conclusion: bearing in mind the big picture

It would be great to have humorous and enjoyable serious games for language learning. Still, not even the best-made and most compelling game should ever be considered as a stand-alone product. It is vital to remember that the placement of video games in the language teaching framework is that of teaching technologies that is, tools. As tools, games must be framed into teaching techniques, whether in a scholastic or in a self-study context. Techniques, then, need to be an effective practical translation of language teaching methodologies. In turn, methodologies have to refer to different approaches and theories on language learning.

In short, using digital games in language education needs to be carefully planned within a top-down strategy, whose aim is to enhance the learners' communicative competence according to their communicative needs.

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d It is peculiar to notice how a brief and honestly funny cutscene can lose all of its humorous content (and turn into a quite tragic story) when told instead of shown in its original, cartoon-like form. The introduction of DotT can be seen on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BRXmgcBHBM.

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