I’ve been wanting to make this video for a while now.
back in June, I was given a free download code for the game Heaven’s Vault, and while
this isn’t a sponsored video, playing Heaven’s Vault got me thinking about how games can
turn the process of learning a language into a game mechanic.
the idea of turning language learning into a game isn’t that out there.
Duolingo is a rather well known example.
however, Duolingo isn’t quite what I’m talking about.
if someone wants to use Duolingo, it’s because there’s a specific language they want to
learn.
the games I’ll be talking about are all games first and foremost, and the languages
you learn by playing them are all conlangs, constructed languages, created for those games.
Heaven’s Vault is a game developed by Inkle, released in April 2019. you play as the archaeologist
Aliya Elasra, traveling between the moons of the Nebula, along with her robot companion,
Six, searching through ruins to discover the true nature of the history of her civilization.
all throughout the adventure, Aliya finds artifacts with text written on them in an
ancient language that everyone in the game just calls “Ancient”.
as a conlang enthusiast, I would describe Ancient as an “ideographic oligosynthetic
English relex”, a sequence of words which will be complete nonsense to some of you.
an “English relex” is a constructed language that’s actually just English but with different
words.
relexes are kinda boring, but to be fair there are some distinct advantages of using them
over more fully developed conlangs in the context of a video game.
most importantly, translating from English into a relex is really easy, taking as much
effort as a simple find-and-replace.
this makes it so you can create a very large amount of text in a language without taking
very much development time, which for an indie developed adventure game like Heaven’s Vault
makes sense.
an “oligosynthetic” language is one where all words are made out of a small amount of
core vocabulary.
oligosynthesis does not occur naturally, but it’s a somewhat popular idea in conlangs,
especially for engineered languages.
a language where the vocabulary is oligosynthetic and the grammar and syntax are copied from
English is in principle a language that an English speaker would have a relatively easy
time figuring out.
and, the final piece of the puzzle of how Ancient is designed, “ideographic” means
that each symbol in the writing system represents a specific idea.
since it’s both ideographic and oligosynthetic, there is a relatively small set of symbols,
forty six to be exact, each of which represents some simple idea, and all words are built
from those ideas.
so, this phrase, which is the title of the game, “Heaven’s Vault”, consists of
ten ideographic characters.
even though this is definitely the word for “heaven’s” followed by the word for
“vault”, the formation of the individual words breaks down in a more interesting way.
like, this part of the word “heaven’s” on its own is the word for “star”, so
if you encounter this word after you already know the word for “star”, you could guess
that this word probably has something to do with space, or the sky.
the way this information is presented to the player in game is that Aliya just sorta, has
an intuition for what stuff in Ancient could mean.
since Ancient is an English relex, you translate texts one word at a time, and for each word,
Aliya has a few guesses for what it could mean, and usually suggests some related words
that probably mean similar things.
one major thing preventing you from just guessing blindly from the choices Aliya gives you is
that there’s no immediate feedback for any translation.
you have to wait until you’ve used the same word translated the same way in two or three
texts before Aliya says she’s now confident that the word has that specific meaning.
I think that’s the main defining thing for the way Heaven’s Vault interprets language
learning as a game mechanic, how all feedback you get as a player is from the character
you’re playing as.
there ends up being this weird disconnect between what Aliya understands and what the
player understands.
however, that disconnect does eventually go away, or at least it stops being so noticeable.
as I played Heaven’s Vault, I started to become more familiar with the Ancient language,
and I eventually developed the same intuition that Aliya has, able to look at an unfamiliar
bit of Ancient text and come up with some guesses as to what it might mean.
it was a lot of fun once I was at that point, and in the late game, the language learning
mechanics feel like you’re actually learning a language, and learning the secrets of an
ancient civilization.
for what Heaven’s Vault does, I feel like this mechanic works fine, being asked to translate
things one word at a time, and then later being told if individual words are right.
I also like the mechanic where sometimes the text you want to translate is written without
spaces, so you have to figure out where the word boundaries are.
that’s also pretty clever.
okay, now let’s talk about Sethian.
Sethian is a game created by Grant Kuning, released in November 2016. it’s a short
game where you type in a computer terminal in the Sethianese language to figure out what
happened to the Sethianese civilization.
the interface looks extremely intimidating at first, with five whole pages of like a
hundred characters to use.
much like Ancient in Heaven’s Vault, Sethianese is written with an ideographic writing system,
and while it isn’t oligosynthetic, there is an abnormally large number of compound
words.
a key difference is that Sethianese is not just an English relex. even if its grammar
is nothing to write home about, you can’t just translate everything word for word.
I mean, granted, there are some things you can just translate word for word, but not
everything.
in a lot of ways, Sethian is a lot more explicitly hand-holdy than Heaven’s Vault.
the game starts off super linear, with the player character writing down close to exact
translations of everything the computer says, and then just writing down exactly what they
want to say to the computer next.
but the way this works is, I think, pretty interesting.
you’re playing as a linguist who already knows a little about the Sethianese language,
and they have access to the writings of linguists who described the language before them.
as a player, you don’t get to see those writings, you only get to look at this notebook.
for most of the game, you’re not really trying to figure out how the language works,
but how to read your player character’s notes.
as the game goes on, however, unlike Heaven’s Vault, the hand-hold-iness starts to ease
off.
there are some words where you’re provided no translation, and only given a loose explanation
in the language itself from the computer you’re talking to.
even later, you start needing to figure out everything by yourself, with nothing to guide
you other than a dictionary of individual words, and the notes about previous translations.
I have mixed feelings about Sethian.
the game definitely is much shorter than I would’ve liked.
most of the characters you can type on this keyboard don’t actually mean anything, like
they’re only here to provide the illusion of a fully developed language.
there’s also a lot of frustration that comes from trying to ask specific questions and
just getting “I don’t understand” and “I can’t tell you what that means” over
and over, even in cases where the question itself is grammatical in the Sethianese language.
I guess it’s somewhat realistic that this computer wouldn’t be able to answer every
single question you have, but the total set of questions it can answer is disappointingly
small.
still, there is one thing that Sethian does that I admire a lot, and that’s how it has
the player learning a language by using it.
sure, you’re using it under the very clear guidance of your notebook telling you exactly
what to say for most of the game, but in terms of getting a player to feel like they can
actually understand a language, asking them to translate into a language is a lot more
engaging than asking them to translate from it.
and the whole time I was playing, trying to get information out of this computer in a
language I was slowly starting to understand, I was thinking of my favorite example of a
game where there’s a puzzle that has the player learning a conlang in order to progress.
technically speaking, my favorite game that features translation as a game mechanic is
Rhythm Heaven Megamix for the 3DS. it doesn’t do a particularly good job interpreting translation
as a game mechanic, it just happens to be a good game in general.
anyway, that’s not what I’m going to be talking about.
telling you exactly what I’ll be talking about is a little tricky, because the fact
that this next game has a translation puzzle in it is a spoiler, since it happens close
to the end of the game.
so like, I guess here’s a general spoiler warning for just, some game, and I can’t
tell you which one it is without spoiling it!
okay, I’ll just say it.
the third and final game I’ll be discussing will be Frog Fractions 2.
it is literally impossible to talk about Frog Fractions 2 in any capacity without spoiling
it, because Frog Fractions 2 is a game made entirely out of surprises, and the puzzle
I want to talk about is close to the end of the game.
please take that into consideration before proceeding.
Frog Fractions 2 is the third entry in the popular edutainment series, Frog Fractions,
created by Jim Stormdancer.
the Frog Fractions series is known for its ability to subvert player expectations, with
deep gameplay and occasional story hiding under a mundane surface.
the game which is specifically not called Frog Fractions 2 branches out into far more
diverse topics than the original’s focus on fractions.
the sequel features segments that teach about calculus, geometry, history, ethics, classic
literature, and much more.
Frog Fractions 2 is largely a minigame collection, with a wide variety of educational vignettes
contained within the text-based ZZT-inspired overworld, called TXT World.
TXT World is full of little secrets beyond just the portals to minigames.
there are puzzles to solve, NPCs to talk to, and strange objects to collect.
since everything is made out of text, it’s unclear what any of these collectables are.
there’s eighteen hidden throughout the world, with each item hidden in two spots.
if you collect both instances of one item, you’re awarded with a piece of trivia about
the band Korn, in true Frog Fractions style.
for most of the game, it just feels like these are arbitrary collectables.
you can’t really do anything with them, until you meet the frog.
The frog notices you.
“house-infinity-delta,” it says, gesturing at the rotten fruit behind it.
the frog is talking to you, using the very symbols that you’ve been collecting as items
throughout the whole game! and this is where the genius of Frog Fractions 2 comes in.
during this entire encounter with the frog, you are at no point told directly what anything
means.
you must figure out this frog’s language entirely through context.
you need to not only figure out what the frog wants from you, but also what you want from
the frog, and how to tell it what you want.
you want to collect that almost equal to symbol in the water there, but you can’t get it
unless you can tell the frog to push over that red crate, and even if you can manage
to do that, it can’t push over the red crate because there’s a locked door in the way,
so it needs to get that key first.
you’d think that this puzzle would be impossible.
and yeah, it’s very hard, but the feedback you get from this frog as you try to learn
how to speak to it is so much more than anything that happens in Heaven’s Vault or Sethian,
and that’s partially because of what’s allowed by the restrictions at play here.
the frog language is yet another conlang with an ideographic writing system, and this one
has the smallest lexicon by far.
you don’t even have access to all eighteen words yet, because one of them is your award
for solving this puzzle. on top of that, you can only say three words at a time to the
frog. but, as a result of that restriction, everything you say, and I mean absolutely
everything that you can say to this frog, it has a reasonable response to.
granted, yes, sometimes that response is a generic “I don’t know what you mean”,
but only when that response actually makes sense.
the frog feels real, like it’s genuinely trying to help you out despite the language
barrier. and the way you learn how to speak to it is so brilliant.
like, if you say “clubs” to this frog,
The frog looks around, startled, then looks annoyed.
“gamma-clubs,” it says.
and this little interaction, if you’re clever, gives you a lot of information about both
the frog language, and the frog itself.
you’ve seen the clubs suit elsewhere in the game.
it’s the way TXT World’s text-based graphics represent a gorilla, one of the common enemy
types.
if you assume that this character that looks exactly like a gorilla means gorilla, an assumption
that doesn’t apply for all characters in the frog language that resemble physical objects
in the world, the frog’s reaction makes sense.
of course, it’s afraid that you just out of context saying “gorilla” is supposed
to be alerting it to the presence of a gorilla, and it’s annoyed when it looks around and
sees that there isn’t one!
but then, the way it responds is also a super important bit of information.
when it says “gamma-clubs”, you know that “clubs” means gorilla, so in this context,
you can make a guess for what “gamma” means.
later you might see the frog use “gamma” again in a different context, and you can
test your hypothesis again, and try to see if your translation works in both contexts.
and on top of that, the fact that this frog is worried about a gorilla is actually a setup
to a later part of the same puzzle, which is also a subtler setup to an even later part
of the same puzzle, and dang it’s all so good.
so, looking at these three translation puzzle games, what can be said about the ways their
approaches differ?
none of these translation puzzles involve deciphering particularly interesting languages.
Ancient, Sethianese, and the frog language alike are all pretty boring from a conlanging
perspective.
but, of course, that’s not the point, is it?
all three games successfully delivered on getting me to feel like I was learning a language.
that feeling, when things click and you finally understand something that at first was completely
opaque, is ubiquitous in puzzle games, and there’s something about when that thing
is a language that makes it all the more impactful.
in Heaven’s Vault, being able to understand Ancient means being able to read more inscriptions
on artifacts.
each new word you understand, or barring that, each word Aliya declares that you now understand,
gives you a bit more access to the lore and worldbuilding of the Nebula.
in Sethian, being able to understand Sethianese means being able to ask the right questions,
and being able to understand the answers.
just like in Heaven’s Vault, it’s understanding for the sake of understanding.
but the experience, the journey of how you get there, is fundamentally different.
Sethian is a conversation; each piece of information you learn directly impacts what information
you could access next.
that is, once the game stops directly telling you what to say.
in Frog Fractions 2, being able to understand the frog language means being able to talk
to the frog. you do learn things about the frog, but the understanding itself is not
the goal.
you want to understand the frog’s language because you want it to do something for you,
and the frog wants something from you in return.
I called Sethian a “conversation” a few sentences ago, but the frog language puzzle
in Frog Fractions 2 embodies that so much more, so much better.
in Frog Fractions 2, learning the language is a means to an end, but along the way you
have to make a connection with this character, you need to empathize with them.
it’s one thing to learn how to understand what something says.
it’s another thing entirely to learn how to understand how someone feels.
the former can be achieved with any type of puzzle. for the latter, you need language.
thanks for watching.
I’ve been jan Misali, and I’m still mad about community contributions.