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Some of us are gamers.

Some of us are RPG gamers.

Some of us are OLD-school RPG gamers (emphasis on the 'old'). Old enough to remember when games were still played in DOS and nothing at all worked with Apple.

There were text-based adventures, games with a lot of dialogue, where a few words could set an entire scene. And there were games like Baldur's Gate and Elder Scrolls, with hundreds of NPC's to talk to and thousands of lines of dialogue.

It's interesting, then, to see how the standards for professional writing have declined over the last twenty years. It started subtly, the quality of the writing in, for instance, in Skyrim was inferior to that of Oblivion. Silly mistakes were made. (For example saying, 'with medicinal precision,' instead of 'with surgical precision.'

Over time, this trend has become much worse, as even triple A softare firms choose to outsource their writing to poorly educated areas versus paying more for in-house staff writers.

As many fans of the Sims have observed, the quality of writing for each Sims sequel decreases dramatically. Not only in grammar and ability to express an idea, but also in a basic lack of understanding.

For example: 'Tell Chicken Butt Joke'

This is an actual interaction in the Sims 4. After staring at this bizarre phrase and wondering if this was some sort of internet meme that I had gone viral, I believe I deduced the answer. The 'butt' of the joke is of course the target of the joke. However, this is an unusual use for the word 'butt' which in most other ways means your rear end (see French 'derriere'). The writer, obviously too poorly educated in English to understand, instead of making the chicken the butt of the joke--made a chicken butt joke.

This is only one single isolated example, but this example and a hundred like it are seen and learned by millions, making an educator's job just that much harder when we try to 'un-teach' these mistakes.