![]() The rules might have to be altered but it’s entirely possible. Every so often my mind would identify Chinese pinyin**, throwing me the suggestion that maybe this game could operate in other languages as well. ![]() Pinyin Versionīilingualism is a curse I couldn’t shake when playing this game. Where the child learns new words from the parent’s assistance. There’s also great merit in including definitions for people playing this game co-operatively as a parent-child team. It’d go lengths to justify some of the more obtuse words I guessed up – our inherent grasp of morpheme management makes it easy to sense out random, validated words. My idea being that you spell a word and maybe the definition of that word appears somewhere on screen. He’s pretty chic for a little worm! Let’s go with the flow and assume that this is an educational game, it surprised me early on that dictionary definitions were strangely absent. Obviously it has the educational, children’s software attire going for it, but the writing and some of the jokes are particularly high caliber. I honestly can’t grasp the intended audience for this title. I regret not building a list of unrecognized vocabulary to further prove my point, but trust me on this time, the dictionary can be a little off. I say this because, despite how wonderful Bookworm is, the dictionary sometimes fails to recognize some pretty common words, and yet accepts some bizarre inputs, including straight, meaningless morphemes. It’s rare that as native speakers we’d ever need to consider such a thing as how our language is constructed, it’s naturally invisible to us yet extremely visible to second language learners of English, which is why I think Bookworm is successful at placing you in the mentality of someone understanding English from an outsider’s perspective as a second language learner.Ībove I mentioned that it was difficult to tell whether or not the morpheme education was/wasn’t intended. ![]() To play Bookworm is to construct words, and to do that (in English) you look at the grid, piece together some basic morphemes, then try to glue those together to form a complete word. It’s difficult to decipher whether intentional or not, but Bookworm is a fantastic way to, in a sense, re-familiarize yourself with these, or at least become more conscious of them. Morphemes are chunks of words, such as ‘ment’, ‘ion’, ‘ain’ and so forth. If you’re going to purchase, the Steam version is dramatically cheaper.* Teaching of Morphemes You can download a trial version of the game from the PopCap website, and Steam as well. Anyways, here are some ideas that I wanted to share about the game. Most of them have the background music muted for some reason, kinda destroys the atmosphere. That’s the low down, you can find some (pretty cruddy) videos on Youtube showing the game in motion. It’s one of those games ideal for playing with a parent or child. It’s a very polished package, with a lot of thought invested into it, rounded off by utterly charming characterization. Within this framework, RPG elements are sprinkled throughout such as status effects (poison, burn, freeze), a 6 item inventory (3 items, 3 pre-selected equipment) and powered up attacks through special letter blocks. Several battles, concluding with a boss battle make up a chapter, and overall Lex has several books to worm his way through. You use these letters to form words which power Lex to attack an opposing enemy. The core mechanic is set around a 4×4 grid filled with 16 random letters. ![]() The premise is relatively simple, but difficult to muster into words as many simple game mechanics tend to be. ![]() Having already fried enough grey matter with the seductive strangle of Zuma‘s colour crunching excellence, I figured that I’d take a more traditional route of gaming education and try out another one of Pop Cap’s success stories: Bookworm Adventures.īookworm was originally an Up-Words-eqsue word formation game, later the characteristic worm (Lex) made the leap into his own fully realized word ’em up RPG with Bookworm Adventures. Bookworm Adventures Deluxe – Linguistic Observations April 6th, 2009 ![]()
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