“GG” Good Gaming Wordlists: Insight Into Single-Player Commercial Off-the-Shelf Games and Action-Roleplay Game Vocabulary

The purpose of this study is to create two pedagogical wordlists for videogames to be used by ESL/EFL teachers and learners. Using a multimethod design, the present research utilizes both quantitative and qualitative measures. A keyness analysis using the Minimal Ratio index provided by the Keyworder software was conducted to investigate a game corpus' distinctive words. The corpus of ten videogame scripts from Rodgers and Heidt (in press) (5.7 million tokens) was compared to the SUBTLEXus TV/movie corpus (50.5 million tokens) to identify flemmas that are significantly more frequent in videogames. With Schmitt's (2019) call for a better understanding of the vocabulary found in games and game-genres in mind, two wordlists were created: a common game wordlist and an action-roleplay game (ARPG) wordlist to investigate variation in game vocabulary. To facilitate vocabulary acquisition, the listed words were coded for ludic/diegetic properties and patterns. Results regarding learning are discussed.