Posts tagged game

Can you use a string of black and white symbols to communicate colour? This is the premise behind the Color Game app, in which users create and solve puzzles matching colours to non-coloured symbols.

I’ve been enjoying coming up with ways to represent different colours for other players to decode, and also playing through puzzles created by others. Because humans are wonderfully clever and good at communicating, players often do better than chance at the puzzles.

Other than being entertaining, this app is also helping researchers better understand how language evolves. It was designed by Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, who will use the anonymous data gathered from the game to understand how the players create an ever-changing symbolic vocabulary.

From the app’s press release:

Difficult as this may sound, players are able to reach the correct result more often than would occur by chance. Players also get better at it, as once-neutral symbols acquire meanings that they lacked at the start of the game. Players are creating a language together, in the very act of using it.

The Color Game Website, including links to download the app for Android and iOS: www.colorgame.net

see also:

• Lingthusiasm Episode 5: Colour words around the world and inside your brain
• Smells can have colours
  

A game that blends elements of storytelling, roleplay and conlanging is currently kicking butt on its kickstarter campaign. From the website:

Dialect is a tabletop roleplaying game about an isolated community, their language, and what it means for that language to be lost. It’s a GM-less game for 3-5 people that runs in 3-4 hours. The game’s core spark comes from gradually build­ing up elements of language among players, who gain fluency in their own dialect over the course of play. Words are built off of the fundamental traits of the community, the pivotal events that have defined their lives, and how they respond to a changing world. Players use the language and explore both their characters and the world by asking what this new language really means to them. A new word is made, the language grows, and the community is tightened.

From age to age, the Isolation changes and we see those changes reflected in the language. In the end, you’ll define how the language dies and what happens to the Isolation. Players take away both the story they’ve told together and this new language.

The mechanics look interesting, and they’ve got conlang rockstar David J. Peterson (@dedalvs) on board, so that’s encouraging. I’ll admit I’ve been sitting back on this one a bit. I’ve found the promo for the game a little to heavy on the language death theme (see the Twitter thread that starts here). It was nice of co-creator Kathryn Hymes to drop by in my feed and let me know that it is *possible* for the language you create to be maintained - just like many minority languages have been and continue to be - although I still find focusing on the metaphor of language death reasserts it as the dominant narrative or inevitable outcome (both in game and in real life). (also, remember folks, although language and culture loss are deeply interlinked, it is possible to maintain one even if both aren’t transmitted). 

There’s an interview with the creators on the Talk the Talk podcast. As of writing this they have smashed their funding goal, with a couple of weeks still to go. I’ve chipped in for a PDF set, and look forward to finding a few hours and a few people to play this with.