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Register Studies: Online-First ArticlesMeasuring the linguistic similarity of discourse from open-world role-playing games to the real world through an additive multidimensional analysis
Digital games can provide rich sources of second language (L2) input; however, the extent to which gaming discourse is similar to real-world discourse has been a topic of debate in the computer-assisted language learning community. To quantitatively measure the extent to which gaming discourse shares linguistic similarity with real-world discourse, this study reports the findings of an additive multidimensional (MD) analysis comparing registers in open-world role-playing games to real-world registers using Biber’s (1988) Dimension 1: ‘Involved versus Informational Production.’ Results indicate that gaming discourse provides extensive language exposure that shares much linguistic similarity across a wide range of real-world contexts. Importantly, however, these similarities only become salient when the situational characteristics of gaming discourse are considered and parsed appropriately into register categories.
Keywords: digital games, video games, gaming discourse, L2 input, multidimensional analysis, register analysis
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Method
- 2.1The single player offline game corpus and its representativeness
- 2.1.1SPOC compilation
- 2.2Data analysis
- 2.3Calculating D1 scores
- 2.4Methodological limitations related to short text lengths
- 2.1The single player offline game corpus and its representativeness
- 3.Results and discussion
- 3.1Interactive and immersive speech
- 3.2Lore
- 3.3Quest Stages and Tutorial Text
- 3.4Quest objectives and character text
- 4.Conclusion, limitations, and direction for future research
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
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