Words Acquired Through Games
This series of images showcases
the words that I acquired through video games as a child.
Final major project submission for
MA in Graphic Design & Typography.
Exhibited at:
MA Show: Parachute, Cambridge School of Art, September 2018
Women in Computing Festival: Her Story, The Centre for Computing History, October 2018
What's this?
Here I aimed to demonstrate that I learned these words from games, taking them into the outside world as I grew up. Having long been aware of how much of my own vocabulary can be attributed to computer games, I wished to use these to convey that video games can be and are a valid source of education, whether marketed as such or not.
Why?
Many of these collected words do not even originate from educational software. There is an extra motivation to understand the meaning of a word when a child is immersed in the universe of a game. Many of these words are Tier 3 Vocabulary (content-specific) words that may not have acquired elsewhere, or certainly not as early. There are numerous words that may be specific to a specialist subject, colloquialisms, or from different cultures entirely - note many Americanisms rarely found in British English.
The look is intended to echo those computer game origins, with the isometric angles, and colours extracted from operating systems. The glitches in the text are real, gained from intenionally overloading my graphics software with demands.