The crappiest video game ever

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Yay, it’s analogy time!

Ok, let’s say you bought the hottest and coolest RGP such as Final Fantasy Millennium or Dragon Quest MMMCMXLIX but the game designers got a little too creative. The game is supposed to take 70-100 hours to beat but it’s networked and you play with 19 other people. The only catch is, you only get to play a couple minutes at a time. The rest of the time you’re watching the other 18 people take turns playing exactly same thing. Now, lets say the game was something else like Final Fantasy 8-2 and it’s not that much fun to begin with. And you don’t even get to play that much because 80% of the game is filled with cut scenes that are kind of boring and lecturing. To further spice it up, let’s say the game is supposed to take several years to finish. Congratulations, you’ve decided to take Japanese language classes!

Here’s another analogy. Let’s say you throw that game out the window and buy another one that lets you play all the time by yourself. Awesome! But you find out that the game has a critical bug of never saving your progress correctly. Every time you start playing, you start off at random parts of the game. So most of the time you either have to repeat what you did already or you’re completely lost. The gameplay is also really complicated and there’s no instructions anywhere of how to play. The only way to get any information is to meet up with experts that know the game backwards and forwards. The only problem is that these experts have been playing this game ever since they were a child. It’s so natural to them, they don’t really know how to explain it very well. Also, there’s so much new terminology, you can’t even understand what they’re saying half the time. Congratulations, you’ve decided to study Japanese on your own while meeting up with native speakers!

Why are you messing with that crap? Don’t you want a game that remembers how much you’ve progressed, challenges you at the right level, and can explain to you what required step-by-step as you go? That’s right, you want to partner with a private tutor that knows the language, how to learn the language, and how much you know. So go ahead and send me an email. 🙂

8 thoughts on “The crappiest video game ever”

  2. I agree. Genius was the first word that popped into my head after reading that; that was a really creative analogy.

  4. Haha, great analogy! I’m going to have to add my voice to the “genius” chorus.

    I think you could take that analogy even farther and apply it to things like software-aided learning, etc.

  5. Great way to describe Japanese class 🙂 Though, I think teaching Japanese yourself while meeting up with native speakers, is not as hard as you make it out to be. After all, we have Tae Kim’s Japanese Guide to Japanese Grammar, not to mention AJATT, RTK, iKnow, and ten million other resources. Of course, I could be a poor judge since I’ve been a hardcore autodidact since I was in junior high…

  7. Urg… then imagine the second game being the only game on the shelf.

    What i wouldn’t give to live in tokyo instead of yokosuka.

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