Re: Another Glossotechnia playtesting report

On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 7:41 PM, Campbell Nilsen <cactus95@...> wrote:
> The composition sounds good.
>  But you could use more clicks, and implosives seem nonexistant.
Feel free to add implosives, retroflexes, and so forth to your
deck.

I would love to add the whole IPA; but keeping the proportion of
other cards to phoneme cards steady would mean, not just adding
a hundred or so other cards, but more like 200 (the extra phonemes
plus extra copies of everything else).  I think the way to go in the
future is to maybe _remove_ some of the existing phonemes
(many of the voiced/voiceless variants) and add more Phonemic
Contrast cards -- or Manner of Articulation Cards --
Retroflex, Imposive, Click, and more copies of basic stuff
like Voicing contrast.  And you can always make your deck
more flexible by increasing the proportion of Wildcards of various
kinds.

>  As well as special "add-on" decks. For example, suppose I invented a "cases"
>  deck, or a "moods" deck. Then, instead of building infections up bit by bit,
>  you could play a "genitive" card and, if you had singular and plural in nouns
>  and 4 declensions, you would have to make 8 affixes right there on the spot
>  for the genitive, without needing extra cards.
Hm, that might work, but it seems a bit inflexible.  Ideally you want
to constrain the way the players devise their inflection system
as little as possible.  If you add a batch of cards giving specific
cases from natural languages, without some means of letting players
get creative with variations (wildcard cases, for instance, and
probably something else, not sure what), you would constrain
the case system too much.  For instance, if you simply have a Genitive
card, what about the possibility of distinct cases for alienable
or inalienable possession, or distinguishing source from ownership,
or lumping genitive in with elative, or any number of other things
a language might do?  Maybe you would have two sets of cards,
a Cases set and a Theta Roles set, and each Case gets matched
with one or more Theta Roles in the course of play...

Your idea of allowing/requiring players to coin multiple
affixes/mutations on one turn in some circumstances, rather
than always coining  one word or affix on a single turn, is a
good one though.

Secondly, you need to take into account the nature of the languages
the game produces; they tend to be mostly isolating with a little
agglutination.  A game just doesn't last long enough, in my experience,
to produce a language with four declensions of nouns and
full inflection for number and case.  Even the best game-language
so far, created by eight players at the LCC2, only had three
inflectional affixes.  The typology cards, which have only been
used in one game so far (the second one played at the LCC2),
will potentially produce more inflectionally complex languages,
but still, the number of _morphemes_ generated in a 1.5--3 hour game
is not likely to exceed 30 or 40.

But it's possible that a group of linguistically sophisticated
players might continue a single game over the course
of many days, competing to see who ends up with the
most challenge sentences translated, and
creating a language far more complex than a
single game session could produce.

>  Ha! A card game company?
Obviously I would need to demonstrate that there's some interest
in the game beyond the tiny conlanging community.  The playtesting
games I've played with non-linguist, non-conlanger friends
and relations help a bit; it would also help if conlangers play
the game with non-conlanger linguists and linguistics students
and so forth, and write about their experiences online, etc.

As I note in the deck composition article, I envision there
eventually being two versions, a simpler version for non-linguists
and a more complex version for linguists (and conlangers,
the latter being a tiny fraction of the target market when and
if Glossotechnia becomes a commercial product).

>  Let us all face the truth: conlanging is an art which is underappreciated at
>  best and considered seriously deranged at worst.
Conlanging is an art; playing Glossotechnia is not quite the same
thing, any more than playing Nano Fictionary is the same as the art
of writing short stories or novels.  Game design is sometimes an art, but
I'll leave it up to others to decide whether Glossotechnia rises to
that level.  Maybe after a lot more playtesting and revising, it will.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry