Conlangs & Computer Games, part 4: What Does the Fox Say?

Most introductory courses in linguistics involve a type of exercise meant to imitate what’s known as fieldwork: A range of methods for collecting and analysing information about languages you don’t speak yourself. This isn’t because fieldwork is the automatic fate of every linguist, but because these exercises are an effective way to learn about the nature of language. When learning to collect linguistic information this way, you get a sense of what kind of information can be conveyed grammatically, and how.

But as mentioned, not everyone who studies linguistics ends up doing fieldwork. I personally haven’t yet needed to use those methods in a professional context, and since it was a large part of my introduction to the field, I can sometimes miss working with that type of data. And to someone who misses (the simulation of) linguistic fieldwork, the game Tunic is an absolutely wonderful experience. This is the fourth and final entry in my mini-serial about conlangs, i.e. invented languages, and their use in video games. If you’ve missed any the previous entries, you can find them at the following links (part 1, part 2, part 3).

Tunic was released in 2022 by the publisher Finji, and it is worth a recommendation for any code-cracking enthusiast, particularly due to its saturation with codes that don’t necessarily need to be cracked. The game recreates the experience many people my age have had with video games from when they were too young to read (or just too young to read English, as may be the case) – that is to say, a nostalgic experience in which you do not understand the text on the screen or in the game’s manual, but might be able to guess some bits here and there based on context. The game is specifically an homage to the Legend of Zelda series, but the experience it simulates is one you might have had with any game that involves text. In Tunic, you control a cute little sword-wielding fox on a fantasy adventure, but the really interesting aspects of the game are buried beneath the surface plot. I’ll be discussing the conlanging aspects of the game here, but I feel that I should quickly mention that it also does several interesting things outside of the linguistic realm.

Most of the text in the game is written in a rune-like script invented by the game’s lead designer, Andrew Shouldice, with regular English phrases thrown in here and there. However, unlike the two other games I’ve discussed, translating the text is not explicitly a part of the game’s objective. Tunic is designed so that it can be completed without understanding much of what is happening, and if you play it that way, it’s still a pretty fun time for fans of this genre of adventure game. But if you enjoy code-breaking – if, for example, you’re a linguist yearning for fieldwork exercises – the game becomes a whole different thing once you try to understand its mysterious writing.

Since it’s not strictly necessary to decode its writing system, Tunic can afford something that Chants of Sennaar and Heaven’s Vault couldn’t: Tunic can make it tough. This game has relatively little in the way of Rosetta stones, and there’s only a few texts in the game that you’re likely to guess verbatim based on context alone. My guess is that the average player finishes the game with the ability to recognize a good deal of individual words, but if you want to understand the system of the language and be able to actually read any text you want, you have to approach it methodically.

In any case, I did! I got a bunch of paper slips and wrote the individual symbols on them, matched them with my guesses for their meanings, and used them as a “database” for me to add to as I played. I developed hypotheses about the workings of the language – and the cool part is that I was often wrong! I had to adjust my guesses continuously as I collected more information. The game gave me an opportunity to use linguistic methods and information, and the result was a sequence of little “Eureka!” moments, each getting me closer to a full understanding until the whole thing finally clicked into place. It was one of the most satisfying experiences any video game has given me – and most of the time was spent with my hands on my notebooks and paper slips rather than the controller.

As with the previous two entries, we’ve now reached a point where I want to discuss the linguistic details of Tunic’s language, and so I urge anyone with any interest in playing the game for themselves to do so before reading any further. In the following, I will be revealing several details about this language that are much more fun to figure out for yourself.

Here’s the big spoiler for Tunic:

The whole game is in English.

In Chants of Sennaar and Heaven’s Vault, the languages consist of ideograms, which means that their symbols represent meaning directly. In Tunic, Shouldice has instead invented a phonetic writing system, where each individual sign represents a sound. This way, it can in theory be used to write any number of languages (although many languages might require changes in which specific sounds are represented). And the language it conveys in the game is regular, plain English! Specifically, the text is written in Shouldice’s own Canadian dialect; the system is detailed enough to make out specific dialect traits, which I also consider a sign of just how well it is adjusted to its purpose.

I assume that the trigger for this discovery is different for every player. For me, it was the realisation that the same symbol was consistently used to mean two different things: “Eye” and “I” – two things that happen to be represented by the same sound in English! This told me not only that the text was in English, but also that the writing system was phonetic – so I could expect anything that sounded the same to also look the same. Knowing those things, it became a lot easier to uncover the systematicity behind the writing.

Each sign in the system – “Trunic”, as it’s known among the game’s fans – represents one syllable, with a hexagonal ‘frame’ signifying a vowel and the inside lines signifying a consonant. There’s a special marker (a diacritic, i.e. a little “extra” bit that’s added to a symbol – like zè áccénts usêd ìn Frênch) for the syllables that begin with a vowel, and there is a systematic relationship between voiced vowels and their unvoiced equivalents. The syllables of each word are connected by an unbroken line through the middle, so that a space in the text represents a border between two words, just as in modern Latin-based writing systems. With these relatively few rules, the Trunic script is able to represent the sound of the English language with a high enough level of detail, but in spite of the simplicity, it’s still difficult to understand the language until you’ve gathered a good deal of examples of it in the game.

But what does it all mean? — But what does it all *mean*?

It could be considered a disappointment that there isn’t a completely new spoken language behind the mysterious runes. If, like me, you’re looking for something that feels convincing, it might feel like the mystery is cut off at the halfway point. After all, no fieldwork in real life would end with a Scooby Doo-style reveal that the language is secretly just English in disguise. But personally, I’m absolutely satisfied. My experience with the game was shaped by a series of hypotheses getting regularly shaken around by new discoveries, and each new discovery allowed me to look at my collection of Trunic samples through new eyes. I was being allowed to use my knowledge of linguistic analysis and phonetic transcription, and I think that, for the right kind of player, this game would be the perfect motivation to get acquainted with those methods. That’s an experience that far surpasses my already high expectations for the game.

Something interesting is that the settings allow you to play Tunic in no fewer than 28 different languages. Changing the language will translate all the text written in Latin script, but the Trunic text remains the same – which is to say that it technically remains English. I understand the decision: Translating the Trunic text would require adjusting the script for each individual language – and with 28 different languages, that quickly becomes a lot of work for a detail that relatively few players would see. But it means that translating Trunic is a different task in the non-English versions of the game. My notes were in English because I played the game in English, and that’s how I came across the “I/eye” connection. But if I’d checked the settings from the beginning and perhaps decided to play in my native Danish, it’s quite possible that I would have gone for a longer time without realising that the writing was actually English – and I can only imagine what the decoding challenge must be like for someone who doesn’t even read English! With that in mind, couldn’t you argue that the translated versions of the game are actually a bit closer to a realistic fieldwork experience than the original one?

To me, Tunic was a linguistic gaming experience drawing on the best parts of this… can we call it a genre? Like Chants of Sennaar, Tunic gives you a feeling of naturally collecting data and translating it based on context, and like Heaven’s Vault, it dedicates itself to one single script that you can spend hours trying to crack. All three games have piqued my curiosity, but I’m mostly curious about the ideas that are still left to explore.

All three games have made some compromises with linguistic realism, but in almost every instance, it has been very clear that those were intentional decisions made to improve the gaming experience. For the hardcore code-crackers, maybe you could make a conlanging game where you pick at the beginning how deep you want to delve into the grammar? Of these three, Tunic is the game that comes closest to that idea, since you don’t technically have to decode the language at all to complete the game.

All three games also focus primarily on written language. Heaven’s Vault implies a spoken language, but only expresses it in the game through writing, and even though Tunic technically does contain a well-hidden sound-based system of communication, it’s not exactly spoken as such. Even during real fieldwork, linguists transcribe speech into written form to make it easier to analyse, so I understand why video games tend to cut out the middleman and present their conlangs in writing to begin with. But that also makes me curious about where the line could be drawn: How complex a spoken language could you reasonably expect players to decode as part of a game? That’s a question I’d love to see future games explore.

Similarly, it would be fun to see games experimenting with different dialects, cultural metaphors, or so-called “untranslatable” words that don’t correspond directly to any English word. Or maybe a game where the speakers’ own perceptions of their language have to be considered in your analysis? There’s still a lot of ideas left to try, and I hope that the future will bring even more language games that can appeal to my imagination like these three have.

In reality, there already exists a whole bunch of linguistically experimental games. One relatively new term for a particular kind of game is “Metroidbrainia” – a pun on the video game genre “Metroidvania” (itself a portmanteau of the game franchises Metroid and Castlevania) and the word “brain”. The genre is characterized by locking progress behind information, so that all you really need in order to move forward is specific knowledge about the game’s world. Chants of Sennaar and Tunic are both examples of this genre, since you can progress very quickly through these games if you already know how to read their languages.

Maybe there aren’t yet enough games that do this in such a specifically language-based way that it makes sense to form a sub-sub-genre just for them. But still, if there were to emerge a whole genre that takes inspiration from the games I’ve discussed over the past four weeks (and similar games that I haven’t, such as 2016’s Sethian), we would already now be able to point to games that blur the lines between what is and isn’t a language-cracking game. Baba is You, for instance, is a game where you can affect the game world by changing the meaning of words – does that qualify or not?

Maybe it’s reasonable to say that a body of works constitutes a genre once you have not just an intuitive definition of it, but also enough examples of it that no perfectly consistent definition is possible. If that’s the case, I think it’s fair to call language-crackers a distinct genre of video games – one whose boundaries I look forward to seeing pushed.

Gustav Styrbjørn Johannessen has a Master’s degree in Linguistics from Aarhus University. He thinks it would probably be fun to make a video game.

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