Zon: A Chinese Learning Game

What a disappointment this game was. I’m going to China in a year or two, and will need to know some Chinese in order to navigate myself. For this reason, I have a vested interest in learning Chinese and was very excited about this assignment. It looks like the game is partly research project, partly community service and partly game class assignment. I noticed that it is distributed by a University. Let me just take this opportunity to say, IT SHOWS. Some pieces of the game are really cool and other pieces are amazingly bad. Through it all, there’s no real sense of a goal that the player is trying to accomplish or how the player can move on to the next level.

I never got a really great sense of how to use the learning features of the game, and actually found myself wishing I was back at Runescape. At least Runescape made sure players knew how to accomplish the tasks in the game. I was able to listen to a dialog in Zon, but it went really quickly, and I was unable to get at the individual words or phrases that were being used.

There was an arcade game segment of Zon that seemed really promising, but the games were really hard to understand. These seemed like they were part of a class project with some games more polished than others.

When Chris saw that I was playing a game about learning Chinese he too was very, very interested, but lost interested when he saw me trying to play.

The makers of Zon should have started out with something much more simple than a baggage claim area. In fact, if they had just stuck to the arcade games and made them really good arcade games, I would keep playing them outside of our class. As it is, I might look for another game to learn Chinese.