Category: game design

Over at io9, there’s an article about languages in science fiction, using as an example how much ours has changed since Shakespeare’s time. It’s neat, and timely, as I’m working on the language section of Shock:Human Contact next. If I do another Preview Edition, it’ll be about language and war.

I’m also drawing on The Language Construction Kit, an indie publication by Mark Rosenfelder. The website is good, but the book is more comprehensive. It really twiddles my linguistic fun center and I’m looking forward to reading the book really thoroughly when I’m done laying out Human Contact. It covers syntax (how words are assembled with each other), lexicon (words and what they mean), morphology (how spoken words are formed), and alphabet construction. I’m also wrestling with the nonfiction Writing Systems of the World and the (comically dense) World’s Major Languages.

If you’ve played Human Contact, you know the placeholder rule: you come up with a handful of syllables, then make names for people and places out of them, adding to the syllabary as needed. The primary function, though, is not just to make proper nouns (and certainly not to replace words we already have with alienish ones), but make words that really represent the way a people thinks. When a society has a concept that we, as players, have a word for, we use that word.

In our game right now, there’s a clan structure in the colony. Clans have made up names (Jun and Bri, for instance, which are added to one’s name, and changed when one changes clan, which happens rather a lot), but the word we use for clans is “clans”. On the other hand, those who serve in a clan military are by definition men, whether or not they’re male. It is scandalously impolite to point out that a marine or spacecraft crewman is female. But one’s biological mother might very well be in the military. The society can’t abide homosexuality, though, so they have a word for one’s female father: drokun. It sounds close enough to the word for “father”, drokung, that you can get the idea across without having to be explicit about it. Everyone can make believe that they heard “drokung” when you said “drokun”, but you’ve conveyed the requisite information. Likewise, I’ve got some stuff about the Academic language, Kepho-Rn, in the wiki, covering a few useful Academic concepts and their pronunciations.

My intention is to have a system that floats at a LeGuin level of language construction, where there are words or phrases to describe particular culturally unique phenomena. I also want to give optional rules for broad language construction for those who, like me, get excited about the linguistic-anthropological  aspects of the game.

There are several parts of Academy law that will be broadly applicable to the interstellar expeditions that will be the core of play in Human Contact. I’m interested to see how these are interpreted (and ignored) in the course of play — after all, it’ll be years, or maybe decades (or maybe never!) before contact is made with the rest of the Academy again.

Those things listed as crimes are subject to investigation and are dealt with by subjecting the perpetrator to psychological treatment.

For legal purposes, a “meme” is “a unit of information expressed through symbols”, e.g. writing, speech, body language, or pictures. It is to distinguish direct manipulation of another nervous system without passing through the ethical, cognitive, and self-aware aspects of an individual’s mind, thereby removing their choice in the matter.

Note that Academics keep a record of their experiences. When on trial, specific parts of that record can be subpoenaed, but there is no law preventing one from deleting parts of the record. An accused individual is assumed innocent unless proven guilty. However, even a not-guilty result in a trial can damage one’s reputation.

• Professional ethics
  • All Academics are expected to keep an objective mindset in their scientific careers with regard to their fellow explorers.
    • Preferential or detrimental treatment of individuals (and particularly their work) according to one’s relationship, rather than the value of the work, is a crime subject to censure (the reduction of one’s formal reputation, including the likelihood of publishing again
• Hominin rights
  • Torture is a crime. This includes rape and coercion.
  • Killing another person is legal (but subject to investigation) in the following circumstances, and illegal in all others:
    • Defense of an individual from torture or murder
    • At that person’s memetically expressed request
  • Deprivation of an available necessity (water, food, air, choice, medicine) is a crime.
  • Prevention of the dissemination of memes (i.e. censorship) of an individual’s voice is a crime.
  • Directly affecting the nervous system of another (that is, outside of memetic modes, such as by drugging or tampering with their network wetware) without their consent is a crime
• Interactions with colonies
  • If the colony is deemed dangerous by current standards for contact by a starship crew, a low-impact envoy mission must go first, with the starship taking a stealth route.
    • Envoys must make every effort to preserve the nature of the colony for study
    • Envoys must make the colony ready for the approaching starship in a way that will:
      • reduce the risk to the starship
      • reduce the risk to the colony
      • enhance the understanding of the society to the Academy at large
  • Interactions with other hominins are judged by the same standards as interactions within the Academy.

Things that are legal, but differ from many of our laws:

• Any consensual activity between individuals. Consent must be transferred memetically.
• Recreational drug use
• Suicide (though depression is treated medically)
• Any harm, experimentation, and modification of one’s self
• Abortion (very rarely applied within the Academy, since conception is consciously controlled)

I’d love to hear some opinions on these matters. Some of these elements directly contradict each other, as they represent different schools of thought in Academic culture, such as the rules for envoy missions as regarding colonial culture.