An investigation into language complexity of World-of-Warcraft game-external texts

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the language complexity of World of Warcraft community texts, comparing them to general web English, revealing similarities and differences that can inform educational uses of game-related content.

Contribution

It provides a detailed complexity analysis of WoW texts across multiple measures, offering insights into their linguistic features compared to general web English.

Findings

WoW texts are similar to general web English in some complexity aspects.

WoW texts are more specialized in certain linguistic measures.

Results can inform educational integration of game-based language activities.

Abstract

We present a language complexity analysis of World of Warcraft (WoW) community texts, which we compare to texts from a general corpus of web English. Results from several complexity types are presented, including lexical diversity, density, readability and syntactic complexity. The language of WoW texts is found to be comparable to the general corpus on some complexity measures, yet more specialized on other measures. Our findings can be used by educators willing to include game-related activities into school curricula.