Four of us sat down to play Dialect: A Game About Language and How it Dies by Kathryn Hymes and Hakan Seyaliouglu. It was a rich experience, and one that has great potential for teachers looking to give their students insights into how language develops in response to a changing world.
Overview
Dialect is a GM-less game “for three to five players in three to four hours.” During play, the group chooses from a prewritten set of Backdrops (though there are instructions of how to write your own). You then build the setting and characters and progress through a sequence of three rounds (which the game calls Ages). The game has custom cards to drive the play forward, and in the course of play, you write down new developments on 3x5 index cards and put those on the table. We used a module of the game on Roll20, which took a little bit of getting used to, but it did its job of facilitating online play.
The game is about an isolated community and how its language changes over time. Each player takes on a character role as prompted by an archetype card, and the group then creates new words (usually derived from preexisting words) that encapsulate the changing concerns of the community. The rules are clear and laid out logically. A group of new players (as we were) can learn the game at the table by working through the rulebook. It is clear that the game went through an extensive playtesting and development period, and there is an evident effort to base the game on a genuine understanding of linguistics.
Our Experience
A game focussed specifically on language development—that’s certainly a unique focus—and Dialect delivers on its core goal. We had a great time thinking about the card prompts and then repurposing, recombining, or otherwise creating words and then using them in the course of framed scenes. It was satisfying to see how we built up the “language tableau” and continued to weave our new words into our dialogue. There were some great dramatic moments, and many of the words were charged with emotional significance as a result of the game play.
So I’d strongly recommend the game, but there are caveats and questions in order.
The Factor of Time in Games
To begin, we fully doubled the advertised time estimate, completing the game in four 2-hour sessions—and it didn’t feel like we were being slow. I’m sure you could complete the game in four hours . . . but only IF at least one person came to the table fully versed in the game rules and IF that person was pushing the play forward.
Certainly from a marketing or a convention-play standpoint, it is nice to say you have a game that can be picked up on the spot and played in a single session—and it’s triply nice to say that the game will deliver a significant experience. After completing our 8+ hours of play, however, I don’t think any of us would opt for the one-session route if we had a choice.
Maybe it’s a result of my middle-aged brain, but if a game is asking me to build a world and create a character, I’m inclined to turn that into a “Session Zero” unto itself and then allow the players time to reflect on the setting before diving full-force into game play. In our first session, we did the “Creating the Isolation” tasks and played our first scene to introduce the basic mechanics. When we returned one week later, we were all primed and ready to enter into the scenes with richer and more thoughtful ideas. In each subsequent session we played out an Age, ending with a sense of the major change that would be ushering us into the next Age during the following week’s session.
Since we live so intimately within time, it’s often hard to think about how it's always shaping our perceptions and experiences. It would be worthwhile for game rulebooks and players to have more explicit conversations about pacing and other facets of our chronosphere (scheduling, duration of play, out-of-session conversations about the game, etc.). When I first played RPGs in high school, we usually had a long once-a-week session (usually around 5 hours on a Friday night), but since we all went to the same school, there were regular brief conversations about our characters and plans during the week. This kind of approach meant that play was ongoing in a very natural, organic manner.
By contrast, today, play sessions are shorter, and, since most of the people I play with are not even in the same state, conversations between sessions are more sparse and sporadic. While I much prefer regular weekly sessions for a game, it is often the case that I am playing a game where we have 2 or 3 week pauses between sessions. In addition, the playing of games online changes the nature of pacing in ways both explicit and subtle. All of these time factors change the way I have approached and experienced games at the table.
During our game of Dialect, we were quite aware of how our deliberate and segmented game play was giving us a different experience than the default one-shot mode assumed by the rulebook. Our conversations, deliberations, and scenes were longer, and we had more time to add details and developments to our stories. Yes, we had to spend a few minutes at the start of each session summarizing the previous week--that’s one item that you don’t have to do in a one shot. But this task was made efficient by Roll20, which saved our virtual tabletop and thus kept our new words, characters, and aspects readily available. If I were to try a one-shot of Dialect, I would need to have one eye steadily on the clock to make sure things were moving forward apace. This might actually sharpen some emotions: For example, the feeling of instability foreshadowed by the transition to the final Age in Dialect would hit me with more force and urgency. But the more rapid pace would take away from other aspects. For example, most of our scenes involved all four players in community conversations (Our characters' AI minds loved working in a network!), and a tighter schedule would have necessitated sacrificing some of those for short two-player dialogues or monologues.
A Game About How Language . . . Evolves
Dialect’s subtitle announces that this is a game “about language and how it dies.”
I’m totally on board with the first part of the subtitle: The core element of play involves inventing or refashioning words in accordance with the prompts of the custom cards. This dimension of the game is clear, engaging, and even poignant.
For example, during the first Age, I got the prompt to create a word for a “Special Occasion.” We were working with the “Sing the Earth Electric” backdrop, which specified that we were a community of robots who had been left on Earth after the humans had departed and never returned. After tapping into some data banks, we opted to organize ourselves according to the model of early agrarian communities, which meant we were planting and harvesting, except we (being robots and all) had no actual need for the food crops. We knew that agrarian communities had a special celebration to mark the harvest, so we imagined that our ceremony involved taking the ultimately unnecessary grains and fruits of the field and ritually throwing them into the wasteland. We thus came up with the word “spread” to describe this impractical ritual and then applied “spread” to any occasion or event that we saw as holding special significance.
I’m admittedly confused by the second part of the subtitle which presents the idea that this game examines how a language dies. The prewritten backdrops of Dialect clearly telegraph that, at the end of the game, the community (or “Isolation”) will be extinguished. Of course, when you arrive at a point where you say that a community has died, you could force a tautology or circular argument that says, “Since the language is, by definition, part of a community, when a community dies, its language has died with it.” That conclusion is certainly tragic, but it doesn’t make a particularly interesting or insightful point about language transformation.
In the actual game play, you are constantly inventing new words and creating new meanings for old words that you alter and refashion. Your community may experience catastrophes and it may be forced into making painful decisions. These somber changes are mirrored and recorded in your community’s language. But that is not the same as saying that the language itself is dying. If you are doing your job as players, you discover that language is becoming even more rich and nuanced because it is learning how to encapsulate deeply felt experiences of mourning and loss.
My understanding of the game is no doubt influenced by the backdrop that we chose. In “Sing the Earth Electric,” we played robots directed to terraform Earth for a human population that, it turns out, was never going to return. When we were moving to the Second Age, we chose a fork that had us invaded by a group of strange, non-organic, non-human creatures who proceeded to take over the world. We responded by abandoning our agrarian ways and turning our attention to investigating and communicating with the aliens. (I found it droll and entertaining that our core concerns of farming and terraforming were both ultimately useless from a practical standpoint.)
We considered taking an aggressive stance toward the aliens, but opted instead to seek out a mutual understanding. At the game’s close, we were outnumbered by the aliens, who then offered us a chance to leave with them, and most of us opted to venture onward. So yes, we moved away from our terraforming and farming roots, and this was impacting our language, but those aspects were in turn replaced by different ones that reinvigorated our vocabulary.
We were aware that the game seemed to want us to veer towards tragedy. But we kept playing the game in a more deadpan, stoic spirit--not because we had explicitly decided upon this, but simply because that’s where our play led us (we were robots, after all). At the end of the game, one of our company was left on Earth (due to the fact that he was essentially a giant, stationary radio tower) while the rest of us were zooming away with the aliens to an unknown future. So yes, our community was irreversibly transformed, as was its language, but we were off creating new words and meanings to define our new state of being and relationship with the aliens. We also had a dawning sense that the aliens were starting to incorporate aspects of our language into their vocabulary.
Dialectical Post Script
Lest I be misunderstood, Dialect is a valuable game to play and to study. The writing is crisp, and game procedures are streamlined. Designers and dedicated players will find much to admire and to inspire within the rulebook.
My most immediate plans are to modify components of the game for play in the English classroom. Dialect has the ability to give players an experience of how language changes in order to capture new understandings of ourselves and our world. It also provides insights into how a community’s language is an intrinsic part of its identity. Students can learn about these ideas by reading works of literature or listening to a lecture. But in Dialect, they have an opportunity briefly to live these ideas firsthand.
Expect further updates on my journey with Dialect. Needless to say, I will have to figure out how to scale the game for classes of 15-20 students and (back to the chronosphere) how to fit it into the time frame of the school schedule.
