Originally Posted by
Greg
Although I'm natively English speaking growing up playing Runescape definitely helped expand my vocabulary.
I can totally see how playing it taught so many people English though,
The dialogues "Use ... on ..." which then gives the feedback "You used ... on ... and made ..." teaches basic sentence structure
The social aspect of talking with lots of other people is great for practice as it's so common in-game.
But most importantly I think it's the associations which make it such a good teaching tool, you don't just read "pickaxe" and what one is. You want some armour, you ask someone, they say go mine with a pickaxe, bob gives you a pickaxe, you go to bob, bob gives you a pickaxe, now you know what a pickaxe looks like, you go mining, now you know what a pickaxe is used for and you've also learnt the basic process for how metals are made. It makes memory so much easier. I'd classify it as active learning rather than passive learning.
Even still I can name every type of tree, ore, tool etc... used in runescape and where to get them all. And most of the names have a basis in real-life (yew, maple, willow, copper, tin, iron etc....)
Depending on how much time you have, say 1h, average attention span is 20mins so that'd leave 30mins to play and 10 mins to sumarise. Just make sure you let them play after you've done the explaining.