Question Is there a platform or search tool that lets me filter games by UNSUPPORTED language?

[Nocturnia]

Hello.

My job (and one of my hobbies) involves teaching/otherwise helping people to learn English as a foreign language. As a gamer, I love to make use of my knowledge of games to make some really fun lessons. For example, just today I had my students playing Alone Together (a free asymmetrical co-op puzzle game) in pairs. They were required to speak only English. Since our topic was descriptive language, it was perfect. I'd love to find some more games like it. The tag "asymmetrical co-op" exists, so I can use that, at least.

However, beyond just asymmetrical co-op, I'm really interested in finding games that truly require English. Games that cannot be played in any other language (or at least not the students' native language). When the option for translation is there, the impact of the activity really suffers because the difficulty becomes artificial; students are playing in English because the teacher said so, not because they truly must.

Therefore, I'm looking for some method of browsing games that uses an "include/exclude" checkbox system. Steam allows filtering by language, but it does not have an exclusion mode. I can check "English", but that just shows games that include English as one of the language options. So, basically every game. I want to be able to uncheck every other language and search for English ONLY.

Does anyone know a platform that allows that?

 

[Brian Boru]

Games that cannot be played in any other language (or at least not the students' native language)

My first thought is to use something like a spreadsheet. In one column, paste/import all the games which have English. Append to that column all games with students' language.

Now run a Remove Duplicates task, and what remains should be mostly/all games which are in English but not student's language.

I haven't tried it, but I expect you can use the Steam feature you describe to get the 2 starting lists.

 

[Nocturnia]

My first thought is to use something like a spreadsheet. In one column, paste/import all the games which have English. Append to that column all games with students' language.

Now run a Remove Duplicates task, and what remains should be mostly/all games which are in English but not student's language.

I haven't tried it, but I expect you can use the Steam feature you describe to get the 2 starting lists.

As I am not at all experienced with spreadsheets, this thought never occurred to me. It sounds like it could work, although it's a pretty clunky workaround. Also, how would I paste/import all the games with English and with student language? Assuming I'm copy & pasting off of some sort of Steam search results list, I'm not sure where I'd get that list. Or would I need a program script that would rip all the names off and put it into the spreadsheet for me? Sounds like a simple piece of code, but I am not a programmer. I do know a couple, though...

 

[Brian Boru]

I did an exercise last year to get all my game libraries into a spreadsheet, since Galaxy and PlayNite weren't giving me what I needed. Took about 3 hours, details in this post. Clunky indeed, but needs must

You could do the same exercise with a text editor with Remove Duplicates feature—my ancient Editplus has it, so I imagine most do.

I'm not sure where I'd get that list

Me neither, unfortunately
I got my lists above by rooting around in the sites and apps until I saw sth I could use.

However I was dealing only with a few thousand titles in my libraries. Steam has hundreds of thousands of games, so what I'm talking about is almost definitely impractical unless you drastically pre-filter.

Sounds like a simple piece of code

Probably, but the real problem will be getting access to the starting list if it's large.

 

[Zloth]

I tried to ask CoPilot and it basically said "Nope, can't do that."

If you find good studios that are really small and based in an English speaking nation (or one where English is really popular), there's a good chance they won't have any translations. Or a smaller Eastern company, which might just have Japanese and/or Korean plus English. Though those might have... <ahem> novel translation issues of their own. ("A winner is you!")

 

[Brian Boru]

All your base are belong to us.

I tried to ask CoPilot and it basically said "Nope, can't do that."

Yeah, I did the same yesterday, no luck.