Literacy and my upbringing —in education, at least, had a weird relationship with each other growing up. Going by the bare bones definition, I was certainly literate in English by late-elementary school, being able to somewhat read, write, and speak English. But that’s a questionable benchmark, isn’t it? If I was dropped to America at that age, I probably wouldn’t be able to communicate or write with others effectively enough to get my point across (granted I was eight or something, but still).
In middle school it was much of the same, as I struggled to write a thesis statement for a solid two years. During that period of thesis existential crisis I was introduced to World of Warcraft. At first I played with friends, though after some time I started to interact more with the community and learn from them — as I’d reached end level, most of my time was spent conversing and chatting with others. Gradually, through communicating with other WoW speakers, my English comprehension rose to native fluency and I was able to effectively read light novels, visual novels, and so forth.
My English education was more of a foundation for me to experience the basics of English, while games, manga, and entertainment was what invested me into the language in the long run. Prior to WRD I was a game dev major, and before that I’d plan to major in bio engineering. Literacy’s taken me in some weird turns.
It’s interesting to hear your story about how a computer game was another tool in your arsenal to gain literacy. I think games are stigmatized in a way that movies and television used to be. WoW is interesting, because there really is so much to read inside of the world. Before it was an mmo, it was more like campaign Starcraft, and had years of world-building ‘history’ that keeps being built upon. It also has its own user-created ‘culture’ and economy, it’s such an interesting microcosm to learn from. I thought that MOBAs would be the end for WoW.