Games and language share several characteristics. Games can create and portray narratives, for instance; and linguistics scholars have used games as stand-ins for language, at least since Saussure compared le jeu de la langue to playing Chess.
Both languages and games are complex systems. Actually, there is a growing body of research in which language is treated as a complex adaptive system (CAS). Beckner et al. presented several characteristics of language which are typical of CASs (Beckner et al., 2009); the following ennumeration is an adaptation of their findings, substituting games for language:
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The game system includes several agents (players) interacting with one another.
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The system is adaptive; that is, players’ behavior is based on their past interactions, and current and past interactions together feed forward into future behavior.
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A player’s behavior is the consequence of competing factors ranging from perceptual mechanics to social motivations.
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The playing structures emerge from interrelated patterns of experience, social interaction, and cognitive processes.
The enumerated characteristics are just a subset of CAS characteristics.^[A (non-exclusive) list of further CAS characteristics, also present in games: irreversibility; equilibria and stabilities (both static and dynamic); sensitivity to initial conditions; finite deterministic unpredictability; self-organisation; emergence; intrinsic global coherence; order; organisation; modularity; hierarchy; historicity; super-system formation (Hooker, 2011).] However, our interest here is to go further in tracing common features between language and games. Specifically: is it possible to use theoretical frameworks from linguistics in game studies?
The following ennumeration presents a preliminary proposal of how this could be done.
- Morphology comprehends the physical components of a game. Just as in language, any given component may have different values or functions, depending on situation with respect to other components.
- Syntax comprehends the rules which define the relationships between the game components, and which define well-formed moves.
- Semantics allows the evaluation of the truth-value of well-formed values with respect to the game goals. Just as in language, ambiguity offers important effects in the semantics of games.
- Pragmatics goes beyond the formal rules of a game to the social context in which the game is played, thus allowing for evaluation of player expectations. Furthermore, just as speech acts create or modify something by their utterance, game acts create and modify the game.
This proposal allows for a consistent and integrated framework, which can encompass from formal analyses of game components and rules (morphology, syntax) to analyses which include the human element in the game system (semantics, pragmatics).
Conceivably, this proposal may even help to develop a games grammar — possibly a usage-based grammar: not an abstract set of rules or structures, but a network built up from categorized instances of play (Beckner et al., 2009).
Keywords: game studies, linguistics, theoretical framework, complex adaptive systems
Rejection
Paper rejected on 2020-01-31.
Dear authors,
We regret to inform that your submission “The Linguistics of Games” could not be accepted for presentation at the DiGRA 2020 conference. We received many excellent contributions this year, and we are unable to accommodate them all. In total, DiGRA 2020 received about 450 submissions. Thank you for your valuable contribution!
Below you will find the reviews for your submission. We hope that they provide you with helpful feedback and guidance for future revisions of your work.
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DiGRA 2020 Program Chairs
TITLE: The Linguistics of Games
METAREVIEW
There is no metareview for this paper
REVIEW 1
SUBMISSION: 240
TITLE: The Linguistics of Games
AUTHORS: Luiz Cláudio Silveira Duarte and André Luiz Battaiola
----------- Overall evaluation -----------
SCORE: -2 (reject)
TEXT:
The abstract proposes to apply linguistic theory for analysis of games as complex adaptive systems. While the general idea seems valid and constitutes an interesting attempt at interdisciplinary research, the abstract does a poor job of describing how this task would be carried out and what the talk would actually consist of. Based on the rather short and overly general abstract, it is arguably hard to judge whether the proposed framework has any tangible analytical merit. Author(s) could have, for example, highlighted the strenghts and weaknesses of this approach to better flesh out the contribution of their piece to game research. As it is, the abstract reads like an early draft of an intriguing, but underdeveloped framework. While there is certainly some potential in this line of inquiry, in its current form I cannot recommend this abstract to be presented at DiGRA 2020.
REVIEW 2
SUBMISSION: 240
TITLE: The Linguistics of Games
AUTHORS: Luiz Cláudio Silveira Duarte and André Luiz Battaiola
----------- Overall evaluation -----------
SCORE: -2 (reject)
TEXT:
This paper proposes a systemic-linguistic approach to games using a concept of language as a complex adaptive system. Whilst this approach is valid in itself (despite CAS being less innovative than the authors seem to suggest - 2009 was more than a decade ago), the proposal itself falls short of embedding itself in existing ludolinguistic and ludoliteracy research, of which there is a growing amount (see, for example, works by Ensslin, Balteiro, Hawreliak, Kiourti, Stamenković, Heritage, Gee etc.) and which ultimately dates as far back as to Wittgenstein. I would encourage the authors to rethink their proposal in the light of existing research and, in the next iteration of this paper, offer a response/contribution to relevant systemic ludolinguistics.
REVIEW 3
SUBMISSION: 240
TITLE: The Linguistics of Games
AUTHORS: Luiz Cláudio Silveira Duarte and André Luiz Battaiola
----------- Overall evaluation -----------
SCORE: -2 (reject)
TEXT:
The idea of describing games using linguistic concepts is interesting, but the abstract fails short when it comes to fleshing it out. The authors use space to describe the notions of morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics but they do not offer the answer as to how these concepts are to be deployed in game studies (which is the whole point of the paper). In this sense the abstract works more like a teaser or an elevator pitch – it can pick our interest, but its value is impossible to evaluate. This cannot be excused by the space requirements as the authors could have easily present a longer abstract.