My Word Coach (DS)
As a writer I am certainly interested in learning new words to spice up my vocabulary, but at some point using advanced terminology only hurts your ability to be understood as you are using words that limit the broader comprehension of what you’re writing. Still, I was interested enough in learning new words that I created a vocabulary focused club back in high school, so I still would be happy to pick up a few new terms from a game like My Word Coach.
When you start a profile in My Word Coach, you are first given a test where you are presented a word and you need to identify it as real or fake. This is used to build up an Expression Potential number, a percentage meant to embody your ability to adequately say what you mean to say. It does feel like a bit of a fallacy to think a larger word bank to draw from will make a person better able to speak with others since once you get to the higher levels the terminology starts to be more niche and likely unknown to those you speak with, but EP’s main purpose seems to be mostly determining your difficulty level for the words it presents and if you play the game daily as it expects you can slowly bump up the number so there’s a long term goal to shoot for.
No matter where your EP might land though, My Word Coach has a funny approach to the vocabulary it chooses to use in its language learning minigames. In the same game that will present you words like insalubrious or gimcrack you’ll get surprisingly simple vocabulary like bleachers and rookie, but these could possibly be present more as encouraging easy wins and filler so that you can focus your mind on the words you wouldn’t know. Many of the minigames featured in this DS game throw a lot of words at you before they’re over so padding it out with ones you won’t have any trouble with can ensure its not a wave of information you’ll struggle to retain. Where the vocabulary choice feels like it actually comes up short is in its word pool once you get deeper in. To try and provide words you likely wouldn’t know, My Word Coach starts dipping into oddly specific areas like specific species of lesser known plants and birds. While it would be nice to learn about a piece of cultural clothing unique to a subset of people, definitions are often short for these terms that are best learned with a visual aid. Merely reading a few words on what a lapwing is doesn’t compare to the immediate understanding of a picture, but My Word Coach is pretty strictly focused only on providing a word and a definition. It sometimes takes the odd route with a term too, like having its definition of epiphany reference the specific Christian event rather than its broadly applicable use as a sudden realization.
Despite the oddities in vocabulary selection and valuation, My Word Coach still has some room to at least provide a few new terms you can pick up through regular play, the game even making sure to occasionally reuse a term a day or two later to test to see if you retained the understanding. However, the actual minigame design doesn’t feel totally conducive to this game’s stated goal. My Word Coach is made up of a handful of word-focused games that do have their difficulty determined somewhat by your EP, but the structure of a fair few aren’t really conducive to picking up new terms. The first minigame that’s presented to you is Missing Letter where a word is shown with one letter missing and you need to write it on the bottom screen. The game does have some issue detecting certain letters like O, H, and E, although this may vary based on your handwriting and the game even provides a minigame that’s actual stated purpose is to try and figure out how to make the game recognize the letter you mean by writing them before they disappear off-screen. In Missing Letter though, being presented with a word where you need to fill in a letter blank doesn’t teach you what it means or how to use it, and the game in general fails to provide any guidance on pronunciation. On the other hand though, it is a decently fun game of trying to identify a word despite its missing character and quickly writing it to see how quickly you can clear the challenge, and a higher difficulty version of Missing Letter adds a nice complication of instead swapping out one letter in the word for a fake one you’ll need to identify.
After clearing a minigame a small index of words used in that game appears so you can read the definitions, but at that point it’s not much different than looking at a run of the mill vocabulary list. Missing Letter is not an immersive learning tool, but it is a tiny bit of word-focused fun, and that will become a bit of a common factor among the games My Word Coach presents. Block Letters takes the form of a block dropping puzzle game where letters drop in on the touch screen, the system now held sideways as what is now the left screen shows a small word bank of terms. You won’t get told what they mean until afterwards, your only goal being to tap the letters regardless of their placement in the letter stacks to spell a word to dispel it from your word bank. Early on Block Letters is incredibly easy, letters coming in incredibly slowly unless you tell it to hurry up and they come in batches clearly meant to spell specific terms. Once you unlock higher difficulties or the for-fun endless mode though, you can actually begin to struggle a bit to keep up with the demands, letters not provided in such accommodating batches so you really need to search to spell out a word.
Block Letters can become a fun time waster even though it does almost nothing to teach you the words it presents, but at least most of the other main games that count towards building your EP try to pretend they’re there for more than just a word-focused amusement. Split Decision shows you a word and has two definitions given, the player needing to pick the correct one. Sometimes the definitions aren’t even close in meaning so you can make an assumption with an unfamiliar word rather than making baseless guesses, and many of the other vocabulary games also have similar elements since otherwise you’d conceivably lose repeatedly as it tries to present words you have no familiarity with. Pasta Letters presents a definition on the top screen with the letters need to spell the word it defines mixed up in some alphabet soup, the player needing to guess at the term but the blanks you fill with the letters will reject them if they’re wrong without penalizing you so you can drag some around to experiment and hopefully then be put on the right path if the initial word jumble wasn’t clicking for you. Safe Cracker is somewhat similar except you’re competing against another player or the game itself to spell a word by spinning a safe dial, the definition presented alongside a set of blanks but no other clues. However, you can linger your dial on a letter without penalty and perhaps get a letter that might get you started on recognizing what’s being defined, this approach not likely to win the spelling race unless you’re also looking at what letters the opponent has as a hint. Word Shuffle presents a set of definitions and a set of words that you’ll need to match, the game again not getting after you if you have one wrong at first and a process of elimination approach can make up for any gaps in your knowledge.
The efficacy of these learning games still feels dubious, the quick matching of word with definition not exactly solidifying it in the player’s mind, especially since a few will be guessing games and you’ll be presented many words in a rapid fire way rather than lingering to ensure the information is retained. However, if we set aside the game’s stated purpose for a bit though, many of these are fairly decent in the entertainment value they provide. It does make you feel a little smart when you can puzzle out what word it’s looking for and the EP system throws in some curveballs so that filling in a missing letter or matching a definition isn’t always going to be guaranteed. Your level of word knowledge is almost there to keep these games from being too simple, and while it is possible you can still get through them without too many guesses, you’re more likely to need a moment to think on terms that don’t come up commonly in everyday life. Again, having specific flora and fauna in the mix can lead to some moments where you feel like you’re being unfairly judged for not having broad biological knowledge, but these simple games do find a nice spot where they can entertain for a short bit even if you’re likely to have to put in extra work if you want to commit any of them to memory.
My Word Coach does require you to play it over the course of many days to unlock new minigames and their increased difficulty levels that help some like Block Letters come into their own, the game expecting you to only play for a few minutes per sitting to try and help with word retention instead of adding to perhaps a deluge of new terms that is already too strong. New days require you to complete more words to increase your EP though so you can eventually spend quite a bit of time playing it without being lightly admonished by your cartoon coach of choice, but the scattershot presentation of vocabulary to learn doesn’t feel like it should be the focus anyway. If you’re fine with the frequent reminders that you won’t be learning from a game that perhaps doesn’t teach the best anyway, you can carry on and keep playing a fairly decent batch of word-focused minigames to your heart’s content, some even offering multiplayer options. Although most of these are just competitions to get the words before the other player, some like Cube Battle take the Block Letters game and add at least a little direct interaction since you can use a bomb to send some of your tiles to the other side.
THE VERDICT: My Word Coach doesn’t really live up to its name, many of its minigames barely putting in the work to try and make you remember the vocabulary it pretends to be teaching you. Some of the definition focused games are a bit better at this, but My Word Coach’s stated mission should perhaps be ignored in favor of just playing a decent little batch of word-focused minigames. Block Letters is an enjoyable block dropping puzzler while others like Missing Letter and Pasta Letters are good for timed recognition tests, and while some quirks like slow game unlocks and rough handwriting detection can slow it down, you can at least get some entertainment out of My Word Coach even if it won’t likely enhance your word mastery.
And so, I give My Word Coach for Nintendo DS…
An OKAY rating. Expression Potential may seem a little misguided conceptually, but it is a rather smart way of balancing out the difficulty of a fine set of word games. Once you accept that you’re not trying to learn the words being presented, it’s less condescending or inexplicable to be presented as simple word, and if a word does catch your attention, some of the games that do get the definitions involved might at least have a small chance of sticking it in your head. If we are looking at the educational angle of My Word Coach it could definitely use a more robust presentation style to help it along, pronunciation guidelines and visual examples for specific creatures and objects not feeling like a big ask if the game really wanted you to remember and use the terms to express yourself in daily life. More likely though the games would probably need to focus on cementing your understanding more than testing it with vocabulary you might not have even seen previously, but by not really sticking close to being a true learning tool you instead get some fast identification challenges and quick matching puzzles that are good for some idle noncommittal play. The system where you can only unlock new minigames by playing day after day stands a bit against that so you can’t completely disregard the underfed learning aspect until you’ve played so much everything is available, but whether you play it in small doses like intended or whenever you like, it’s still got enough to its word game concepts that it can hold your interest for a spell.
Everyone learns differently, but My Word Coach doesn’t seem to be trying too hard to teach, and that’s not necessarily a death knell for it. If you want to get a few new vocabulary terms from it, identify a few interesting ones when they come up and just repeat them to yourself, My Word Coach is perhaps better for that type of discovery than actually coaching you on how to better express yourself. When it’s just putting forward a game idea based on words though it has a few effective ideas, and while it would be nice if you could play them at your leisure and at the difficulty you desire without playing along with this supposed learning course, they’re not so bad to play in that format because Expression Potential can at least balance out the level of challenge some even if its validity as an intelligence metric feels shaky.