A conlang game is a game that asks the player to learn a fictional constructed language. Recently there have been a few well-known examples, namely Heaven’s Vault (2019) and Chants of Sennaar (2023). And so we may speculate about the emergence of a new “genre” of conlang games. Of course, two games does not a genre make. So I am here to tell you that I have played no fewer than six conlang games, and I’m going to briefly review each one.
I made a video game. I have not published, but I’m currently looking for playtesters. In fact, I’m trying to get playtesters right here and now, please let me know if you’re interested!
It’s a small puzzle strategy game titled “Moon Garden Optimizer”. I’m sure say more about the specifics of the game design at a later time. Today I’m sharing my development process up to this point.
A screenshot of my game
Gather round, it’s anecdote time.
Unpacking is a critically acclaimed indie game from 2021 that asks the player to unpack items from boxes, as if they had just moved. From this basic idea, a low key narrative emerges, following an off-screen character as they move from place to place at different stages of their life. And you can track their interests and circmstances by the various tchotchkes they bring with them.
Perhaps it’s a bit hyperbolic to say Unpacking triggered me. However, I did find it so unpleasant that I DNF’d it, despite its short run time.
Kittens Game is a clicker game that you can play in your browser. It makes a strong first impression, as it tempts you into choices that will kill off your kittens within twelve minutes. But I’m not here to review the game, I’m here to talk about spreadsheets!
Clicker games often support passive gameplay (e.g. leave it running overnight), active gameplay, or any combination of the above. On the very active end, you could try to optimize it, setting up spreadsheets to run calculations. So, I spent a thousand years tinkering with spreadsheets, and I liked it. There’s a story there, a mathematical story.
In the past year I’ve gotten into reading mystery novels, and this has reinforced one of my strongly held opinions about the genre. There is a mistaken preconception about mystery novels, that the reader ought to be able to solve the mystery. This simply is not true. There are some mystery stories that are meant be solvable, but it’s a minority of mystery stories that I’ve seen. Solvability is not the primary appeal of the genre, or at least it’s not the appeal to me.
The reason I know this, is because when I was young, we had a “complete works of Sherlock Holmes” book, which had all the short stories. I didn’t read them all, but I read enough to know that Sherlock Holmes stories were not solvable. Usually, Sherlock Holmes would pull some clue out of thin air, that hadn’t been mentioned before; or else there would be an event that led to the mystery being solved. It was unambiguous that most stories were not even trying to be solvable. The mysteries were trying, first and foremost, to be stories. There’s something the reader doesn’t know (rising tension), and then Sherlock Holmes explains it (releasing tension), and that’s a simple but effective narrative arc.
A question that keeps me up at night is “What is the theoretical best you can do in Mysterium?” I’m exaggerating a bit, but it is a pointless question about a silly board game that I nonetheless spent too long thinking about. I went so far as to watch a series of lectures about information theory–listening to it in the background while in dance class, as one does. I never solved the problem, but let me at least explain what the problem is.
Mysterium
Mysterium is a cooperative board game where the players are trying to solve a murder mystery via psychic communication with the victim. One player takes the role of the ghost, and the rest take the role of psychic mediums. The ghost is not allowed to speak, and may only communicate through cryptic visions. The visions are represented by cards with surreal artwork. For example, one card has two people climbing into a giant fish mouth, another has a tarantula-like thing over a chandelier. After the mediums receive their visions, they discuss what they mean and make their guesses; and the whole time the ghost giggles about how wrong they are.
Examples of vision cards. Source: Mysterium rulebook.
In video games, there is the concept of a “backlog”—a list of games that you want to play, but haven’t gotten around to playing. This is commonly discussed as a source of anxiety, as people accumulate hundreds of games in a list that they have no hope of ever completing. There are lots of videos and articles giving tips on how to clear your backlog, or else chronicling a journey to clear a backlog.
Talk of backlogs is so ubiquitous that people seem to think every gamer has one. This isn’t true. There are myriad ways to approach the consumption of entertainment media, and the backlog is just one. I’d wager that many people would even consider the backlog to be counterintuitive. Would you have a backlog for books, movies, or TV shows? You could, but I think most people just check what movies are available in the moment, and then pick one out.
I recently watched a Transparency video in opposition to the idea of a backlog, from the perspective of someone who doesn’t have one. Now, I also don’t have a backlog, but it struck me that Alicia’s approach is still different from mine. I think Alicia assumes that any list is a backlog, but I actually have a list that I don’t consider to be a backlog.