Typing game

The typing game is a genre of video games that involves typing. Early typing games were a subgenre of educational games and used to familiarize players with keyboard use, but they later progressed to become their own category of games as players became more acclimated to the use of a keyboard and the games became more difficult and complex. Usually, a typing game will require the player to quickly or precisely type in words - or individual letters, numbers, or other keys - that display on the screen to proceed in the game, functioning as both a challenge and a means to improve one's skill at touch typing.
Some online typing games offer a competitive way of testing a player’s typing speed and making it [typing] more addictive. [1]

Video games
Platforms
Genres
Lists
Development

While most early players encountered the genre via minigames, such as car racing, within the software Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, the genre branched out to entire games based on typing, both parodic and serious in nature. Due to the limited commercial viability of such games in the AAA market, they are typically created by indie developers, and largely released for PC due to the lack of keyboards on most video game consoles.

History

In 2000, The Typing of the Dead became known as the "ultimate typing game parody", adapting The House of the Dead 2 to replace the gun with a computer keyboard so that the player must type to defeat zombies.[2]

A resurgence in typing games among indie titles saw the releases of parodies of typing tutor games, including David Lynch Teaches Typing, Cooldog Teaches Typing, and Icarus Proudbottom Teaches Typing. Non-parodic games were also developed, such as Keyboard Sports, Epistory - Typing Chronicles, The Textorcist, and Nanotale, which largely dropped the educational context of the genre and featured similar gameplay and storytelling as a traditional video game.[2][3] The video game series Cook, Serve, Delicious! was noted as being an "accidental" typing game, as despite the fact that it was a fan remake of an initially controller-based series, the move to PC necessitated the addition of keyboard controls.[2]

As typing games branched out and crossed over into other genres, their developers faced challenges advertising the games, due to the fact that most people still assume them to be edutainment. Diego Sacchetti, designer of The Textorcist, stated that when the game released in 2019, 90% of the coverage from critics compared the game to Mavis Beacon, causing him frustration, as he would classify it as a "type 'em up".[3]

Typing games are said to be having a "moment" due to the familiarity of most players with keyboards, allowing players to think of the device in "new, more interesting ways". However, the future of typing games is unclear, with Tim Garbos, director of Triband, the studio that developed Keyboard Sports, stating that the keyboard may "die" due to increasing use of controllers and speech recognition, rendering the typing game irrelevant, hence the subtitle "Saving QWERTY".[3]

See also

References
  1. Shah, Bhakti (2020-02-28). "Type Rush: Design for Educational Games". Medium. Retrieved 2020-10-10.
  2. Macgregor, Jody (2019-08-23). "Typing games sure did get strange". PC Gamer. Retrieved 2020-10-06.
  3. Carpenter, Nicole (2019-04-18). "Typing games are having a moment". The Verge. Retrieved 2020-10-06.
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