Are mobile games better for learning?

Games come in all manner of styles and you can find that AAA titles have an abundance of content to read through, however you may have noticed up to this point that a lot of the games I’ve played and reviewed are mobile games. In gaming circles its a fairly common viewpoint that, for the most part, mobile gaming isn’t “real gaming”. I would actively disagree that this is the case but I will admit I can see where these opinions stem from. The difference here is that when it comes to using the games as a tool for learning, mobile very often has the consoles beat.

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For anyone who has played any amount of games you should be familiar that one accolade that is often held in high regard when it comes to the quality of a game is graphics. Even within the console groups this has been debated as mostly being like proverbial piss in the wind but that’s another matter. The hardware of consoles has improved consistently to the point that games on these platforms have high quality visuals and much more extensive capacity for stories and content. You’ll also find that budgets for aspects such as voice acting and full action cutscenes with dialogue are much more frequent. This isn’t to say that mobile game don’t, or won’t, have features like this but our mobile phones simply aren’t cut out to compete with devices that are essentially family-fit entertainment centres.

However, and it is a big however, mobile phones come with heaps of advantages when it comes to finding the right content and the accompanying information to make it useful. The first and biggest aspect is that mobile games outnumber AAA titles by an order of magnitude and the majority of these games on the app stores are free. This means that, regardless of what topics and characters you like, there is likely to be a game out there for you. Not only that but you can very easily install, play and uninstall games with no cost until you find the one that’s right for you. When it comes to console, if you want to expand your roster of games in your target language you will quickly find that 1. the games are expensive to buy in a lot of cases and 2. even if you buy the game it may not have language options for the language you are learning. This can be avoided by reviewing certain console stores (Playstation and Nintendo Switch display language options) but not all consoles do this and even if they do the language can be limited, hard to follow or even poorly translated. Mobile games minimize the risk of you wasting your time and money to find the right games for you to study.

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The next big advantage of mobile gaming is the commitment required in order to invest your time into them. These games are built so that they can essentially be picked up at any time and played for even the shortest durations. This means you can sink some time into a game you enjoy while commuting, waiting for a meeting or even while you’re in the bath. Consoles however have you fixed within the confines of the room they’re in and tend to have longer periods of play and, if you’re unlucky, distant checkpoints that need to be met before you can turn them off. Personally speaking, I also find that my commitment to completing a game is weaker when it comes to mobile games. I rarely, if ever, have any desire to complete a mobile game as they are typically unending. I also find that console games, especially older ones are built into our history and become talking points between gamers. Mobile games aren’t so built in to our culture meaning it’s unlikely you’ll be having any water cooler moments about them and you won’t be incentivized to pull away from the task at hand. If I buy a console game I will likely want to play it to completion which takes me away from my goal of learning and pushes me into states of play that are more focused on muscle memory and story progress.

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Lastly, mobile phones are essentially tools in themselves. You can find all manner of dictionaries, grammar apps and organizational tools on the app stores across all mobile platforms and in a lot of phones you have the functionality to switch between tabs at will. This means you can have the game tab open alongside a dictionary or web browser and search for any terms and grammar you don’t understand. Not only this, but phones are becoming the digest magazines of the past. You can find articles relating to topics you enjoy but also any number of puzzle and mind-bender games too. These games include wordsearches, crosswords and quiz games, and you’ll find that they are more built towards testing knowledge than telling stories. These games can be found on console too but being honest they pail in comparison to the mobile equivalents. Mobiles have been dominating this field for longer and as such have the competitive edge and quality that consoles don’t in this area. It’s almost like an ironic antithesis of the graphics and quality mentioned before.

The interchangeability of functions with a mobile is paramount to it’s success in my eyes. Switching between tools, games and webpages makes for quicker and more well rounded learning. For the selection of games I have I spend equal time playing “brain games” in Japanese as I do playing “regular games” on my phone and find that the variety and balance strengthens multiple fields of my knowledge.

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The versatility of things a phone can be for your study is endless and ever increasing. I truly love consoles and will always be a console gamer at heart but it’s easy to concede defeat to the phones when it comes to learning language. In my journey so far I have experienced so many more mobile games that have proven effective to learning and I imagine this trend will continue. The only major difference, that will always define my love of all things games, is that at the end of the day when I’m exhausted from a hard days graft I won’t be putting my feet up and playing words with friends. It’ll be the console that wins at everything else.