Listen to this episode and find out more about the topics therein at theallusionist.org/wordplay2
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, am checkmated by language.
This episode and the next couple are about word games; fun! Today we’ll hear from game-makers who have come up with very different approaches to making games about language. In a way, this is a sequel to the episode featuring Leslie Scott, who invented Jenga when she was a teen and has since made dozens of other games, including the word games Ex Libris, Anagram and Flummoxed. That was episode sixteen of the show, so we’re operating on a Before Sunset sequel speed.
By the way! If you’re in the UK, you can listen to this show on BBC Sounds! And you know who else is on there? The Infinite Monkey Cage, the show hosted by Brian Cox - the celebrity physicist one not the Succession and Manhunter one - and comedian Robin Ince, and guess what? My first ever professional radio recording was with none other than Robin Ince, nineteen years ago wow. And just look at him now! OK listen to him now, on the Infinite Monkey Cage, the show wherein scientists and comedians look at science in a comedic way, and consider matters dark and non-dark, like the creatures that live in the deepest depths of the oceans and how illusions work on our credulous human minds and whether fish can count and how big is big data exactly and why do we laugh and what so astronauts really get up to in space. Episodes will be released on Wednesdays, wherever you get your podcasts. But if you’re in the UK, you can listen to the latest episodes, a week early, first on BBC Sounds.
Speaking of astronauts, on 18th April 2024 there’s a special Allusionist live show happening in the planetarium at the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre in Vancouver BC! It’ll be packed full of edutainment about language of the cosmos, while galaxies swirl over your head, and your ticket also includes all the space centre’s exhibits AND a talk by the very cool astronomer Marley Leacock. What a delightful evening! I’ve linked to tickets at theallusionist.org/events.
On with the show.
HZ: People assume to my face that a podcast about language won't be fun, and they're like, “Why would you do something that sounds so boring and dry and like a punishment?” What kind of reactions do you get when people learn that you make games about language?
KATHRYN HYMES: It's so interesting - for some people there's a similar reaction, but for a set of people, it's like you have given them the thing that they have most wanted in the world and maybe didn't realise or articulate or hope that such a thing could be made. And it's somewhat shocking that there's enough of those people and that the internet is able to connect it, you know, connect us to them that we end up finding each other.
JOSHUA BLACKBURN: The simplest way to describe League of the Lexicons, and I'm not very happy with it as a description, is that it is Trivial Pursuit for word lovers. But I'm not over the moon with that description because it sounds a little bit flat.
HZ: Really? People love Trivial Pursuit!
JOSHUA BLACKBURN: I hated Trivial Pursuit.
HZ: I think we only played once in my family, and my dad refused to play but then sat in the corner of the room shouting out all the answers.
JOSHUA BLACKBURN: I am Joshua Blackburn. I am the founder of Two Brothers Games and the creator of League of the Lexicon, a game about words and language. League of the Lexicon is a quiz game about words and language. It almost has quite an encyclopaedic scope in terms of what words mean, where they come from, interesting bits of trivia about the evolution of language and how we use language.
HZ: Joshua didn't set out to be a maker of word games. He was a designer and artist and photographer - he made a book of photos of every laundrette in London, all 462 of them. But this latest iteration of his career as word game maker came about as a result of homeschooling his two sons during the covid lockdowns.
JOSHUA BLACKBURN: And they were getting their homework sent to them from school, and it was just really depressing. I was seeing the English that they were being sent, and it was uninspiring. It sucked all of the love, all of the fun, all of the passion out of language. And was also really boring to do with them. And so I started inventing word games and language games to get them to think about language differently - and hopefully to inspire more curiosity about where words came from, how we used words, why we used words. And that was my lockdown distraction.
HZ: League of the Lexicon was not the first word game Joshua invented for his sons.
JOSHUA BLACKBURN: I was test driving a few different ideas. There was a game called Word War. Dojo. Word Splat -
HZ: Word Splat!
JOSHUA BLACKBURN: Word Splat, yes. I actually can't remember what that was…
HZ: Hit words with a hammer?
JOSHUA BLACKBURN: Yeah, I think that the name was more fun than the game. But when I was doing League of the Lexicon, it felt like, ooh, there's something quite interesting here. And I was enjoying playing it with them, and I was starting to test it with other people, and when the lockdowns came to an end, I carried on working on it. I started accumulating a library and just reading and reading, coming across an interesting fact and thinking, “Oh! I could turn that into a question!” We wanted not just the answer, but some explanation, some background, some context.
HZ: The League of the Lexicon’s question cards are about twice the size of a playing card, or the size of a dollshouse mattress, or, in American measurements, approximately one 500,000th of a football field. Point being, each card needs to hold five questions and five answers, with the extra background, which is quite a lot of information to fit into an economical amount of text.
JOSHUA BLACKBURN: We knew that our question length was about ten words a line, our answer length was a maximum of fifty words, and then we were playing around with it from there.
HZ: It’s very fun to shuffle through the questions from League of the Lexicon, here’s an example:
“What is the opposite of ‘tenebrosity’?
A. Fluidity.
B. Illumination.
C. Warmth.
D. Irritation.”
Or: “Spell ‘suppurating’, as in, ‘She saw the nurse with a most painful suppurating blister.’”
JOSHUA BLACKBURN: It has got to be the kind of question that, even if you don't know the answer, you find it out and you're just like, “Oh! Huh! That's interesting.”
HZ: Example answer - to a different question, so I didn’t spoiler either of the other ones: “Other slang terms for these include: the ‘admiration mark’, ‘dembanger’, ‘gasper’, ‘screamer’ and ‘startler’.”
Another answer: “When first used as a legal term, ‘alibi’ meant simply ‘elsewhere’.”
OK I’ve got to stop playing this game with myself, I’m supposed to be working. Carry on, Joshua.
JOSHUA BLACKBURN: One of the biggest challenges about this game was working out what level to pitch it at. And I actually had like a a percentage in my mind of how many questions I hoped somebody would get right over the course of a game. Because if they keep on pulling out questions and cannot answer them, very soon it starts not to become fun. People need to find the level that is is right for them and that they enjoy playing with. It was a really big deal for me.
HZ: As was making it as factually correct as he could.
JOSHUA BLACKBURN: Having written literally thousands of questions, I actually ended up having to ditch probably a good few hundred, because when I did further research on them, there were different answers available. For instance, with grammar, with usage, you'll look in one style manual and it will say the rule for doing this is this, and you're just like, great, I'll write a question about that. And then you'll compare it with another style manual, kind of Chicago versus Fowler's, and you're just like, “Oh. They've said the complete opposite, so there goes that question.” And similarly with etymology: I had to can a lot of etymology. It's so easy to find a nice, pithy, “The origin of this is this.” And you're just like, “Ah, that sounds lovely.” And then, it sounds way too tidy - in fact, the tidier it is, the more alarm bells should be going off, I think.
HZ: Can confirm. False etymologies have one job, which is to be an attractive narrative.
Another priority for Joshua was making sure the game didn’t contain mistakes. Multiple proofreaders proofread it all multiple times.
JOSHUA BLACKBURN: And they'd come back with like 300 corrections. And I'd be like, oh, fantastic. Okay, and I'd make all of those changes. And then I'd give it to another proofreader, and they would come back with another 300 corrections. And each time, when I was expecting not to get any corrections to come back, I would get way more than I ever expected. And even now, I have corrections coming in, from players saying, “Hmm. We spotted this.”
HZ: Curse you, Titivillus!
JOSHUA BLACKBURN: But people do it in a good natured way, and in fact we invite people to tell us if they spot a mistake, because I hate seeing mistakes in the game. When you make a game that is going to be played by people of a pedantic disposition, you'd better make sure you don't make silly mistakes.
HZ: And then after all that, there’s the challenge of getting the game to people who would enjoy playing it.
JOSHUA BLACKBURN: We work with a game distributor. And they had sent me this email that showed me how they were pitching the game to shops. And they were promoting it as perfect for English majors and professors. And I just put my head into my hands because it was so wide of the mark.
This is a game for people who love words and language, for people who are interested in words and language. And that is such a broad audience.
KATHRYN HYMES: So in some ways, it's this sort of self selection that happens among a set of just language lovers who desperately, want to play to tinker and to, to do interesting things with language. But what we also find too, is that we end up trying to make things that aren't meant for specialists in any way. Like our games, for the most part, aren't meant for education, university, those are side effects. We want to do things rigorously, but they're really meant to build shared experiences with friends who want to co-create stories.
HAKAN SEYALIOĞLU: Yeah, for every person who says it sounds like a punishment, I think we get a number of people who say this is exactly the thing I've been looking for. So that's how we, how we always keep going through any notions of that.
KATHRYN HYMES: I'm Kathryn Hymes; I am a game designer, trained as a linguist, and do a few other things out in the world in terms of making, but here I'm really excited to talk to you about games and a game design studio called Thorny Games that I run with Hakan.
HAKAN SEYALIOĞLU: Yep, and hi, I'm Hakan Seyalıoğlu. I co-run Thorny Games with Kate. And previous to this, I was a recovering mathematician and cryptographer before going down the path of games.
KATHRYN HYMES: Yeah, one thing that you find, is you can start off being a linguist and cryptographer making games, but then there's all of the components of getting to work with other people who are artists, and the details of physically manufacturing games and getting them shipped out to people, is an expansive process that that we learn in bits and pieces.
HAKAN SEYALIOĞLU: You just have to learn a lot about just exactly what happens when ink hits paper or cardboard way more than you thought you would have to when you started the process.
HZ: And they hadn’t even expected to think so much about language.
HAKAN SEYALIOĞLU: When we started making games, we didn't envision that we would hone in on language as one of the primary mechanics that we'd explore as a studio through so many of our games. It was really after we made our first couple of games and the linguistic and language bits in it struck such a chord with folks and facilitated types of play that we were so interested in that we just kept going back to it and kept finding new ways in which to use language as part of game design.
KATHRYN HYMES: I always loved games that tinkered with communication in some way, maybe some kind of hidden communication - even just the game of Telephone was really fun for me, back in the day. You could see how this message can be garbled at the end of it, and then it's just hilarious to see the chain of kids that have repeated one thing again and again and it comes out like gobbledygook. But I think that it really comes from just that level of playground games, rather than big passion around crosswords, word puzzles, things like that.
HAKAN SEYALIOĞLU: One genre of game that I think both of us were really interested in was games around building stories. So there is a big community around people building new gameplay experiences that were all about telling collaborative stories together. In addition to being about language, all of our games are about creating stories together.
KATHRYN HYMES: There's just been a golden age of games that are about story, and the game that gets the most coverage in this space is Dungeons and Dragons. But there are so many more stories one can tell. And there's so many more games and design systems that are trying to help people have these collaborative experiences that feel really true to different subjects. And so that is the community and basis that we try and approach these really different kinds of topics in.
And we feel like there's huge depth in stories about communication, community, language, language change. And there's also just so many other games that are out there in this tradition. So it's an exciting time to be part of what feels like a movement.
HZ: One of Thorny Games’s games is Dialect, a game about an isolated community, their language, and what it means for that language to be lost.
KATHRYN HYMES: Dialect is a game about language change and it's tied to community and how language can be this living artifact of a community and what ties you to a group people. Dialect is a story game for three to five people. The game as you play it is really defining characters, defining a setting. And the idea is that you are telling the story of a group of people that are isolated in some way. Maybe it's because they're physically isolated; maybe you are the first people to go to Mars; maybe you are isolated because you are a clique in an English boarding school; maybe they're socially isolated, they're thieves that need their own secret lingo in order to communicate and to do their secret deeds.
But you have some thing that is binding you to a group of people that you're talking to, communicating with, and over time you tell their story, what happens to them, and then that change shows up in this language that you co-create together. You co-create this language and imbue meaning in it over time.
The core mechanic of the game is to tell stories behind new terms, why they're meaningful to this group of people, that are prompted by cards, and then to use those new words together as you interact as characters and then see what happens.
HAKAN SEYALIOĞLU: The way Dialect works is every turn of the game, you define a new word, according to the cards, that's related to one of the fundamental aspects of the community. And then after that you have a conversation with the characters around the table that uses at least that new word, but hopefully it uses more of the words you've defined together for the community, as that language has been built out too, so you're actually using more than what you've just defined.
KATHRYN HYMES: The idea is that the isolation itself comes to an end, and with it, you end up building up a story of these people as told through bits of dialect that you end up making. And so really the idea germinated from inspiration from other games in this space, but really the question of: can you make a map of of people and their relationships and how they change over time, but have that map really be like a language that is their own dialect, their own lingo? And that in creating it, you're also telling a little bit of the story of these people, about what mattered to them, what happened to them, and how they changed over time.
HAKAN SEYALIOĞLU: And in the first time we play tested it, we were like, “Okay, well, as game designers, how can we incentivize people to use more words, not just the one they just defined?” And kind of the obvious thing that we had thought of was: we'll give people tokens when they use other words of the language. And then when something bad happens to community, they can use those tokens to make it go away, or resolve the problem or something.
This was the worst trash garbage idea that I think I've ever had in game design, because it just incentivised people to like word salad together things without actually telling a story. Over the course of seeing how players reacted to mechanics, we understood what we should enforce in the rules, and then just what we should hope the players do because it's fun, right? The reasons why players keep using the different words they've come up with over the course of a game of dialect is because it's fun to use the language that you've built together, not because they're required to do so.
JOSHUA BLACKBURN: One the things that's been interesting hearing from players is that while you can play the game according to the rules, you can actually play the game however you want - so pulling question cards out of the box and asking each other quiz questions. You can be competitive with other people, or you can be collaborative and trying to answer questions with them. There are game rules, and it is great if you play it according to those rules. But if you want to play it any other way, then that's absolutely fine as well. It's all about the questions and, and having fun with those questions, and learning new stuff from those questions and whether you're competing or collaborating, that's entirely up to you.
KATHRYN HYMES: Every game that's played is different. You can play the game multiple times, it will come out different. The thing that's made by people is not only the unique story, but it is this glue of words, lexicon, lingo, of this dialect, this proto-dialect that they've made, that ends up becoming an artifact of this game session at the same time. And because language is so sticky, people really remember it, respond to it. It has an emotional attachment: you know, you remember when you made that word, and then you remember when your friend across the table used it and what that led to in the story. And I think it's that moment of connection between story and language creation that is the real spark of the game.
HAKAN SEYALIOĞLU: The thing about language growth, change and death in Dialect, that it’s the story of the community that you're telling together, also mimics the story of the three to five people around the table together. This language that they're building together is also something new that's being born at that table, changing as they play, just as it does for the community. And then when they get up and, you know, potentially if they're at a convention, those four people never see each other again, that experience is lost. And that chance to kind of blur the line between what the players are experiencing and what the game is about is just really a recipe for having meaningful game experiences. And that's another reason why language death is a particularly interesting concept that we tried to explore in Dialect.
KATHRYN HYMES: We also make games in the same way that other media is made to talk about and point to real things that are happening in the world. Some of them are real pressing, and I think that goes back to this idea of language death: it's this monumental loss for humanity. To really reflect on the inequity that is tied with what languages receive power, or show up on the internet, or are reinforced by the culture and the fact that that language is lost and that that is happening at scale is a way that games, other media, I think can help spread awareness and get people thinking.
HZ: Another Thorny Game is Sign, about the emergence of Nicaraguan Sign Language.
HAKAN SEYALIOĞLU: Nicaraguan Sign Language is is a very young language no more than 50 or so years old, and the story with it in a slightly simplified version is, you know, prior to the 1970s, Nicaragua had no form of unified sign language, then a group of deaf children were brought together in Managua at a school, to presumably learn how to read and write Spanish and how to lip read. But in reality they ended up, over the course of recess and playing with each other and passing the language down from cohort to cohort, really create a new language that for the most part was unmoored from other types of sign language. Sign explores the feeling of not being understood and the emotional journey of going from not being able to communicate to be able to communicate in a way that follows bits of that story.
KATHRYN HYMES: This is a game that is also co-creating language. Every play of this game is about people negotiating things that are meaningful between them and building up this shared understanding over time.
HAKAN SEYALIOĞLU: We worked a lot with an organization called the Nicaraguan Sign Language Projects. With their help, we had the opportunity to develop connections with a lot of native speakers of the language to make sure the game is accurate and helpful.
What's particularly special about this relationship is what starts as research, when it's done through relationships and engagement, can often lead into something much deeper. In this instance, what started as research for a game has become a partnership that's been ongoing for years now. We've been continuing to support sign language education financially in Nicaragua for years with the proceeds of the game. But I've also traveled to Nicaragua multiple times with the organization to help various efforts they have to expand access to sign language education across the country, particularly in the rural and eastern regions.
HZ: Kathryn and Hakan have also been working as part of the Aphasia Games for Health collaboration, building a gaming community and designing games and adapting existing games for people with aphasia.
KATHRYN HYMES: Sometimes we work directly with universities, or community groups to make games for the purpose of research, or in this case, it was games that were trying to promote health. And this is a collaboration with aphasia community members, so people who experience aphasia, as well as run aphasia support groups, and universities where there are speech language pathology departments, and games researchers, and then us and other professional game designers. We're all trying to make games together that are meant to be tools helpful in the process of rehabilitation. And three games were produced this way, three prototypes; they're freely available now, and they're used and iterated on in aphasia support groups in the US and some abroad, some with translation.
It's a great testament to just this world of play with a purpose, the idea of making games, which are so fundamentally - and can be - interactive, social, but also designed to incentivize certain behaviours based on principles that can be tied back to a therapeutic foundation, based on real science. And there's a burgeoning world of, let's say, playable medicine that is out there, and that is actively being pursued by different groups of people.
HZ: Learn more at aphasiagamesforhealth.com. And listen to the Eclipse episode of this show which is about the experience of aphasia.
Thorny Games are just releasing a whole new language game.
KATHRYN HYMES: This one's been a long journey and it's a little different, but once you start actually delving into language, there's so much to say in stories - as I know you know!
HZ: Keeps us busy.
KATHRYN HYMES: Keeps us busy, you know? But this game that is imminently shipping is a game called Xenolanguage, and the tagline is “A game about alien language and human memory.”
HAKAN SEYALIOĞLU: The way the game works is as you're telling the story of first contact, the mission crew, the people who are on this expedition to make contact, begin learning new words in this alien language that's represented by symbols. These give meaning to concepts that they didn't have before, that they define over the course of the game, and they start seeing in their relationships together that helps drive the story forward.
KATHRYN HYMES: It's been sort of our like love letter to these soulful sci scifi stories: a movie like Arrival, Contact, Interstellar, or Stories of your Life, the amazing story collection. Big stories about what it is to confront our place in the cosmos, but really think about it from a human scale. The language itself limits us and expands us. And the idea that that is the tool that we go back to, and understanding these limits and the idea of, like, where words fail: I think everyone has that that feeling, where they can't say the thing and they can't fully encompass what is the ultimate meaning they're going for.
HAKAN SEYALIOĞLU: And then when it comes time to actually communicate with the aliens, you have this modular channeling board, where you channel together to get the communications with the aliens using these new symbols that ascribe the alien meaning to over the course of the game. And channeling is just a really fun mechanic that we've enjoyed experimenting with in that game too - channeling is if you've ever used a Ouija board, where everyone collectively is touching a central planchette, and then you're moving from symbol to symbol, under the almost subconscious motor movements of everyone kind of agglomerated together. That's how the game handles communication. And we've just had a lot of fun exploring that as a shared storytelling mechanism too, along with the modular language creation in the game.
HZ: That’s very cool, a kind of physically communal experience.
HAKAN SEYALIOĞLU: Games are always more fun when you can touch something. KATHRYN HYMES: Exactly. Yeah. It's shared, shared storytelling. Exactly. Because it is co-created in that way. And when it sings, it feels like that there is a message that you've received, that then people are picking out signal from noise. And I think you go through that process and that feeling of desperately trying to communicate, to find meaning, not knowing exactly “is this the meaning you're projecting or is that the meaning that's there?” And then building off of your shared collective understanding of what comes from it and having to end up somewhere at the end and seeing where that takes you.
JOSHUA BLACKBURN: What ultimately makes it all worthwhile is hearing from people who are playing the game, and who evidently appreciate the the effort, and the love, and the detail that has gone into it. And when I get emails from people saying how much they're having fun playing it with family and friends, it really makes me so happy because that is the point of the game. I sometimes find myself looking at what I've done and cannot work out how laundrettes led to word games. And I just think that actually probably the thread that connects everything is being of a curious disposition. The game appeals to anyone who feels curious about the world around them. And that actually was all I was trying to do with my boys, was to make them curious.
HAKAN SEYALIOĞLU: The most exciting thing is always people taking what you made and doing something that you never thought they would with it. And that's something that we really very consciously try to give a lot of space for our players to do within our games. Every so often we'll hear that, like, the players in the game of Dialect have figured out a way to use like musical tones as part of their language, or other little bits like that, that we never thought they would. And hearing about ways in which folks have found to break and bend your system in a way that's worked for them, I think is all you can really ask for. That's really when you feel like you've made something that is more than just a story you told that got expanded out to more people, but instead really gave people a medium with which to create their own stories.
KATHRYN HYMES: And I feel like that's the opportunity with play, and with a podcast like this, and with other kinds of just language-related stories. It's that this thing that we do, that we interact with the world, it's this momentous thing to actually acquire when you're a child, it is how we interconnect with each other, and it's also, for the most part, unexamined, except at these strange sort of superficial levels, or, you know, maybe we're fighting about like where a comma ought to go. But really it's just such a basic way that we convey ourselves as people. And I think that once you start shining a light a bit on those parts that are more latent, that people can get really excited by it. And what we find too is that when we start having people tinker and play and create language, that it can really awaken something that's very elemental, accessible, because it is something that we are also excellent at in many ways, that we have a predilection for. And I think that that is super cool, to discover your own superpower.
HZ: You heard from Kathryn Hymes and Hakan Seyalıoğlu of Thorny Games, and Joshua Blackburn of Three Brothers Games. Kathryn and Hakan’s games include Dialect, Sign and Xenolanguage; find more info and links to buy them at thornygames.com. And visit aphasiagamesforhealth.com to find out more about Aphasia Games for Health.
And Joshua is the maker of The League of the Lexicon, which is very pretty - after all, he was a designer in one of his previous lives. And there are expansion packs, including a junior edition, a global edition made in collaboration with Gaston Dorren and the slang edition by the foremost slang lexicographer Jonathon Green, with more expansions to come. Head to twobrothersgames.co.uk to obtain the games and to sign up to Joshua’s Word Sauce mailout. He’s also made a little word quiz for you Allusionauts, which you can play via theallusionist.org/wordplay2. It’s very good, I scored an adequate 5/9 - and one of the topics I got wrong I’d made a whole episode about, so well done me!
The Allusionist is an independent podcast and if you’re wondering what that means exactly, it means there is a staff of one - hello! - and there’s not a nest egg from Big Daddy Business; the show keeps afloat thanks to the sponsors and you benevolent listeners. By listening yourself, and recommending the show to other people, you’re already helping A LOT, so thanks so much for doing those things, and please keep doing them. And even more thanks if you’re a member of the Allusioverse, which you can join at theallusionist.org/donate!
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Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
lunula, noun, 1. the white area at the base of a fingernail; 2. a crescent shaped Bronze Age ornament. Origin 16th century from Latin, diminutive of luna 'moon'.
Try using ‘lunula’ in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, and Martin Austwick, on the unceded ancestral and traditional territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
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