When I was young I didn’t know anything about WW2 era aircraft before playing Their Finest Hour: The Battle of Britain. (Other than that B-17 Bombers existed, thanks Intellivision)
A weird one that sticks out in my head is that in one of the Pokemon games (don't remember which, probably GBA) there were some NPCs who were scientists or engineers or something and they explained buoyancy. I was pretty young and I remember that being where I learned about it, specifically. For some reason.
Oh and then more recently I was playing this Gamate game called One Million Whys that's sorta like a Chinese edutainment adventure game. Lot of questions about agriculture in there. I memorized a bunch of that through trial and error mostly.
MGS Peace Walker got me to read multiple books about the Zapatistas in Chiapas. So like… Somos Todos Vic Boss.
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Subcomandante Hídeo
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One time my sister was confused how I knew all about sumerian king Gilgamesh they were teaching in art history classes. Thanks FF5.
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I was at one point half-ass-edly self-studying japanese (I should get back on that, I‘m zero-assing it now) and every new installment of a Yakuza game i pick up new vocab that isn’t of much use. eg yakuza 0 got me the japanese word for “real estate” — 不動産 — permanently etched into my neurons now. that one has actually come up like…once since I played that game 4 or so years ago, so that‘s not nothing I guess. the word for “yakuza” that isn’t “yakuza,” 極道, I also got forever, but that's also not probably gonna be useful in normal convo lol
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Update: not only did I learn mahjong through Yakuza, I have joined an IRL mahjong club!
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These fine fellas taught me about unions.
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i learned what the coordinate grid was from minecraft
i learned that perestroika was a thing from watching a did you know gaming video about dendy when i was in, like, 4th grade? 5th? before middle school, i’m pretty sure.
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I learned a fair amount of vocabulary words from Pokemon moves. Didn’t help with pronunciation though.
One that sticks out: “Mom, what does fay-cade mean?”
“Oh, you mean facade”. I even remember it was a Slaking using that move!
I also learned some wrong things this way. In a vacuum, I assumed Nincada was pronounced Nin-cahda. Then when I experienced cicadas for the first time in real life, I was pretty sure it was pronounced ca-cahda.
Also “fanatic”! I thought it was pronounced like lunatic until I was corrected.
OK, so I guess Pokemon exposed me to words but didn’t educate me.
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Before I committed to learning Japanese, while playing Yakuza 3 I began to pick up katakana. The first ever word in Japanese I read was “burger” on a sign outside the Smile Burger. Then I worked back from “burger”, and that’s how I learned katakana.
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Learning fighting game frame data actually turned out to be very helpful when I started animating sprites. Gave me a reference for what 1/30th of a second feels like.
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Besides mahjong, I also know how to play both 8-ball and 9-ball in pool/billiards thanks to Yakuza. Who says video games can’t be educational?
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i learned how to play poker from the casino royale promo website minigame
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The helpers in Professor Birch’s lab from Pokémon Sapphire taught me the word “ergo”
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I just realized a year later I posted about learning pool/billiards from Yakuza again because my brain is oatmeal. At least I did keep my vow and learned mahjong.
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Something really cool to me is the authenticity of the maps in Hell Let Loose, and how that can help to aid your perspective on how those historical battles may have played out, and what they may have been like for the soldiers. Maps like Remagen and Kursk inspired me to go and learn more about them, because I had just been less familiar with them.
*Deleted the rest as I think it missed the point of the thread maybe.
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