From gesture to word - roleplaying games about language

Managua, the late seventies. At a new school, deaf children from across the country are brought together. They have no shared language. At home, each of them used a handful of signs that only their family understood. In the classroom, teachers try to teach them lip-reading and Spanish. It barely works.

But on the playground and on the school bus, something else happens. The children throw their signs together, borrow each other's gestures, sharpen them. Within a few years, a full language has emerged that nobody taught them: Nicaraguan Sign Language. Linguists travel there to witness something they had never seen before: a language being born.

A game in silence

Almost forty years later, Kathryn Hymes and Hakan Seyalioglu turned that story into a game. Hymes is a linguist, Seyalioglu a cryptographer, and together they are Thorny Games, a studio that makes games about language and codes and nothing else.

Sign: A Game about Being Understood is played without saying a single word. One player is the teacher, the others are students. The game alternates between classroom and recess, and over those rounds the players build up their own signs from nothing. In 2015 it won the Indie RPG Award for Best Free Game. Proceeds from the printed edition go to sign language education in Nicaragua and have raised more than fifteen thousand dollars so far. There is even a free Dutch translation, made by Willeke Kort.

A language that dies

Then they turned the question around. In late 2015 they arrived at a new idea: can you tell the story of a people by building their language? The answer became Dialect, subtitled a game about language and how it dies.

In Dialect you play an isolated community: a colony on Mars, a band of outsiders after the collapse, a forgotten island. Each turn you play a card, invent a word for something your community needs, and explain why they in particular have a word of their own for it. Across three ages a language grows, and with it a history. At the end the isolation ends, and often the language goes with it.

The 2016 Kickstarter asked for three thousand dollars and raised more than ten times that within a few weeks. Contributors included David J. Peterson, the language creator behind Dothraki in Game of Thrones, and Elizabeth LaPensée, who wrote a setting inspired by her own Anishinaabe heritage. In 2019 Dialect took silver for Best Game at the ENnies, right behind Mothership. That same year it appeared at E3, the big video game expo, as one of very few tabletop games there.

From side note to center stage

That language could be the heart of a game was new. Language had of course always been a source of fantasy. Tolkien wrote that he invented his languages first, and that his stories were really meant to give those languages a world, a history we followed in From Middle-earth to the table.

But at the gaming table, language stayed a line on your character sheet for decades. You spoke Common and Elvish, and that was that. Thorny Games turned it around: not language as a skill, but language as the playing field. The word you invent is your move.

In 2020, Xenolanguage raised over a hundred thousand dollars from more than thirteen hundred backers. This time the language is alien: you play researchers who use a board of thirty strange symbols and a planchette-like lens to work out what is being said to them. How that game brings the film Arrival to the table is something we describe in our piece on Arrival and Xenolanguage. Together these games form the heart of our First Contact & Language corner.

Where it grinds

Fair is fair: this is not an easy genre. Inventing a word while a group looks on feels awkward at first, sometimes downright embarrassing. A table that laughs everything off will never get into the game.

There is a harder question in it too. In Sign, hearing people play deaf children, and that calls for care. Thorny Games developed the game with the organization behind the Nicaraguan Sign Language Projects and gives the proceeds to them; Dialect had settings about real communities written by people from those communities. That does not make the question go away, but it is an honest answer.

And the original story is messier than the pretty version. The idea that older students simply passed the language down to younger ones is something the makers themselves call a persistent myth. How exactly Nicaraguan Sign Language emerged is still debated among linguists.

What was said

Back to that playground in Managua. Somewhere there, a child made a sign that only a few other children understood, and they understood it. That is all a language needs to begin.

A game becomes real through one concrete detail and one desire. In these games the detail is a single word, or a single gesture, and the desire is the oldest one there is: to be understood. It is right there in Sign's subtitle. If you want to feel how that works at a table, you do not have to wait for alien visitors. A few people and a stack of cards are enough. And if you would rather write than sign, you will find the same desire in From pen pal to player.