FRAPS Test and Musings on Second Language Acquisition

Finally got the full license for FRAPS yesterday and I decided to take it for a spin around the Battlefield 2142 neighborhood to see what it would do. All in all, I'm very impressed with the software and consider it $37 well spent. It will be especially useful when I begin to document gameplay for my book project and describe the development work I am doing in Blender. While making the video, I also started to reflect on 3D digital game-based learning for second language acquisition:

To summarize what I say in the video: I think that the sense of presence these 3D games provide can be a powerful platform on which to design second language instruction. Specifically, the simulated social contexts found in these game environments - when coupled with well-designed second language instruction - could potentially create learning situations that combine embodied action with spatially-situated knowledge. Or, in other words, the student will know what to do and when to do it.

I think that this type of research is really sorely needed at the moment as the humanities continue to flounder. As essays in The New York Times recently pointed out, the outlook for the humanities is particularly bleak and the recession has hit graduate students especially hard. Not that digital game-based learning is the panacea for all these problems, but perhaps it is a new direction (like the neurological approach to English literature) that will help us to re-conceptualize what we do and lead us to see it in a new light.