This presentation reports on a research-and-development project conducted in a Danish slaughterhouse where migrant workers constitute a substantial portion of the workforce and where language and communication difficulties are a persistent feature of everyday work practices. For many employees, formal Danish language education has not been accessible or sufficient to meet highly situated, task-specific communicative demands. To address this gap, a digital, game-based language learning application was developed based on extended ethnomethodological fieldwork. Language learning activities were embedded within a virtual slaughterhouse environment that reflects workers’ procedural and interactional realities, enabling engagement with vocabulary directly tied to daily tasks. The presentation focuses on both the ethnographic foundations of the design process and preliminary findings from implementation. Quantitative analyses of in-game interaction data and pre- and post-test vocabulary measures indicate significant vocabulary development following gameplay. Regression analyses identify pre-test proficiency, in-game performance, task difficulty, and the temporal distribution of gameplay as significant predictors of vocabulary gains, while clustering analyses suggest that learners with lower initial proficiency benefited most from more widely spaced gameplay. Overall, the findings demonstrate how ethnographically informed, performance-dependent, and temporally distributed game-based interactions can support meaningful workplace vocabulary development across proficiency levels.