Say It Like You Play It

In this episode, we talk about social simulation in games, taking as our starting point Mitu Khandaker's talk ‘Thinking about people: Designing games for social simulation’. Hosts Dr. Ibi and Dr. Joe discuss:What’s a social sim?Autonomous behaviour versus authored branching storiesSocial simulation in tabletop gamesWhat are NPCs for?The multiple functions of communication and interaction in real life and gamesGames such as The Sims, Baldur's Gate 3, Skyrim, Dragon Age, Redshirts, and Ctrl.Alt.DELList of resources:Jakobson, Roman. 1960. ‘Linguistics and poetics’. In T. Seboek (ed.) Style in Language, MIT Press, 350-377.Available at: https://www.academia.edu/download/33061075/Jakobson_Eks_15_F12.pdfKhandaker, Mitu. 2015 ‘Thinking about people: Designing games for social simulation’, Game Developers Conference, San Francisco.Video available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haNy1kSHMt8&t=2591s Mathiot, Madeleine & Garvin, Paul L. 1975. ‘The functions of language: A sociocultural view’, Anthropological Quarterly, 48(3). 148–156. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/3316921Searle, John R. 1975. ‘A taxonomy of illocutionary acts.’ In K. Gunderson (ed.) Language, Mind, and Knowledge, University of Minnesota Press, 344–369.Contains some strong (and other type types of) language.If you would like more Say It Like You Play It content, you can find our BLOG here.If you would like to support us, you can buy us a coffee here.

In this episode we try to wrap our heads around the concept of 'ludemes'. Hosts Dr. Ibi and Dr. Joe discuss:The origins of the term 'ludeme'Different games scholars' and game designers' definitions of ludemesComparisons between ludemes, memes, genes, and linguistic concepts such as phonemes and morphemesUnderlying metaphors used to describe games as systems, such as ‘game as language’ and ‘game as organism’The ‘language as organism’ metaphor in historical linguisticsThe economy of metaphors in academiaList of sources we read for this episode:Bojin, Nis. 2010. ‘Ludemes and the Linguistic Turn’. Futureplay '10: Proceedings of the International Academic Conference on the Future of Game Design andTechnology, Vancouver, 25–32. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/1920778.1920783 Browne, Cameron. 2021. ‘Everything’s a Ludeme. Well, Almost Everything’. Proceedings of the XIIIrd Board Game Studies Colloquium (BGS 2021), Paris. Available at: https://sorbonne-paris-nord.hal.science/hal-03737317/documentDepaulis, Thierry. 2019. ‘On the Origins of the Word ‘Ludeme’ (French Ludème)’. In Browne et al.,Foundations of Digital Archaeoludology. Report on Dagstuhl Research Meeting, Saarbrucken, 23–26. DOI: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1905.13516Available at: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.13516Koster, Raph. 2005. Conference notes for ‘A Grammar of Gameplay (Game Atoms: Can Games be Dia- grammed?)’. Game Developers Conference (GDC ’05), San Francisco. https://www.theoryoffun.com/grammar/gdc2005.htm Koster, Raph. 2006. 'A bit on how I think games work' https://www.raphkoster.com/2006/03/05/a-bit-on-how-i-think-games-work/Koster, Raph. 2006. Comment made March 7, 2006 at 2:44 pmhttps://www.raphkoster.com/2006/03/05/a-bit-on-how-i-think-games-work/#comment-3827Koster, Raph. 2006. Comment made March 7, 2006 at 4:26 pmhttps://www.raphkoster.com/2006/03/05/a-bit-on-how-i-think-games-work/#comment-3836Parlett, David. 2006. ‘What’s a ludeme?’ https://www.parlettgames.uk/gamester/whatsaludeme.htmlContains some strong (and other type types of) language.If you would like more Say It Like You Play It content, you can find our BLOG here.If you would like to support us, you can buy us a coffee here.

In this episode we discuss the brilliant Heaven's Vault; a narrative adventure videogame about decyphering a constructed language in order to learn the history of a fantastical world. Hosts Dr. Ibi and Dr. Joe cover topics including:How the game worksIdeographic vs Alphabetic writing systemsSemantics and Morphology in languageScience fiction, media representation, and attempts at avoiding orientalismTranslation and archaeology as game mechanicsTo hear Jon Ingold of Inkle talk about Bladerunner and writing game dialogue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vRfNtvFVRoFor an excellent GDC talk on the making of the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o02uJ-ktCukContains some strong (and other type types of) language.If you would like more Say It Like You Play It content, you can find our BLOG here.If you would like to support us, you can buy us a coffee here.

In this episode we discuss the languages used in Baldur's Gate 3, and in Dungeons & Dragons more broadly. Hosts Dr. Ibi and Dr. Joe cover topics including:What is a lingua franca?What is a constructed language?Fantasy races (species) and the signs and sounds they make.How the needs of tabletop roleplay leave D&D's designers to "leave something to the imagination".Contains some strong and other types of language.If you would like more Say It Like You Play It content, you can find our BLOG here.If you would like to support us, you can buy us a coffee here.