Part One: NES to StarCraft
Global Pedestrian Park Young Gun has interacted with 외국인 (foreigners) in his travels and at home in rural Korea. That's how he learned to speak English. Oddly enough, the Korean school system can't take responsibility for his successes. His English skills came from video games.VIDEO GAMES? Yes, that's right. Here's his account about how technology led him to find an international community in his rural hometown and socially flourish, making friends from all around the world.
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| Illustration by Park Young Gun http://park0g.deviantart.com |
I didn't learn a lot then, though. Only the menu had English words.
My first intimate contact with English happened on the day I went to my first year of elementary school in 1996. My dad bought a MS-DOS PC computer, the kind with an enormous floppy disk drive, a 3.5" drive, and CD-ROM .
I didn't touch floppy disks much. Most of my games came on CD-ROM.
Along with a few hundred demo games, there was 'Doom.' I hated that one, although somehow I kept playing it. I was young and got scared easily. That one gave me nightmares, but I kept playing it.
There were also two full games that came with the computer. One was 'Novastorm', which was an hour-or-two long arcade shooting game, and that was one of my favorites.
The other one, a very curious one, was called 'Lost Eden'.
Now, I didn't know what 'Eden' meant for a very long time after. I just knew one of the convenience stores in my neighborhood was called Eden as well. And the game was a first-person adventure game with a lot of 2D and 3D animated objects that talk a lot and social puzzles to solve.
For years I played that game and I couldn't finish the game, even with my parent's help. There were tutorials and explanations available with solutions. I couldn't understand anything they said. A little past the half-way point in the game I always gave up and couldn't advance further. It wasn't one of my most successful interactions with English. But my ears got used to a few phrases eventually, and by the turn of the millenium, I was able to play through the whole game in 5 hours. It was easy. I just needed to understand the tutorials.
Back to 1996, along with that demo version of Doom, I found the first version of Warcraft. I was more successful with Warcraft than I was with Lost Eden or Doom.
But it wasn't without some minor difficulties.
Units in the game don't move when you just click on the ground. You need to select a unit, select an order, and then select a section of ground or an object to perform that order. But I didn't know what any of those buttons meant.
"What is this 'repair' button, and why do only weak ones have it?"
"Ow, it cleaned up that big building I started with."
"That green guy with axe looks dirty and angry too. Can I repair him?"
"No! He killed my guy."
"This 'attack' button is doing some confusing things. It made my guys kill each other."
"If I click on the ground, it just makes him move?" (It probably moved my unit to attack any hostiles in the path of their destination. Didn't figure that one out until Starcraft.)
"What is this 'quit' button, and why is it making my game glitch out to the DOS menu? Annoying. I'll never know what it does. But at least I can use it to go to another game without rebooting the computer."
There was another adventure game that I've felt nostalgic about to this day. It was like Lost Eden, but much more movable, interactive and cute, with aliens and magic all together. The game was called 'Little Big Adventure 2', though I didn't know its real title until a couple of years ago. I called the game by the name of the main character, 'Twinsen.' Released at 1997, LBA2 is not an easy game to find these days. But it has a nice story with characters and an environment that I really loved at the time. There were also a lot of friendly dialogues. I could not understand most of them. But something happened every time I did something differently, and I enjoyed every bit of those explorations. I got used to listening to a lot of their curious dialogues. I got to see LBA2's ending a few times. And I actually understood what was going on in the story, mostly.
A couple of other games interested me in 1997: the first Half-Life and Unreal Tournament.
Beside being a couple of my favorite shooting games at the time, I learned English from them. Useful phrases such as, 'I'm getting riddled by a chaingun' and 'I've exploded.' Most importantly, Half-Life taught me the word 'use' and Unreal Tournament taught me the words, 'team', 'deathmatch', 'flag' and 'capture'.
StarCraft was released in 1998. But I never played the full games until PC방, Korean Internet cafes, became the main activity for young Koreans years later and SC had been installed on school computers.
I'd already tried the demo version in 1997. I jerked around with it for a couple of months and quickly got over it.
Nonetheless, it taught me to say the word 'go' three times in a row. But that's all the English education it gave me.
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