Video Game Controls as Standard Language

Anyone watching me play through the first few hours of BioShock Infinite would have had a painful experience. When I tried to swing the Sky-Hook, I would inevitably find myself staring up an enemy’s nostrils, having forgotten that zoom, not melee, is mapped to R3 in the game. I’m sure you’ve had similar experiences when a game didn’t control how you expected it to. I think my failure to grasp Infinite’s perfectly simple controls results in part from me expecting the game to adhere to the established ‘standard’ shooter control scheme.

Performative Utterances (Or Not) in Chris Hecker's 'Fair Use'

Fair Use, Chris Hecker’s hilarious Game Developer’s Conference (GDC) 2013 rant, is essential viewing for anyone sick of video game developers making unsubstantiated claims. Hecker’s rant skewered the worst tendencies of spokespeople in the gaming business, just by giving a few of them enough rope to hang themselves with.  If you haven’t seen it already, you can check it out at Chris Hecker's personal website.

Let’s have a closer look at the clips in Fair Use.

Metaphors We Game By - Part II

If you haven't already, be sure to read part one of this article first. It sets up the concepts I refer to here in part two.

Lets go back to ‘systematicity’, and the entailments of the GAMES ARE COMPETITION metaphor. These are, I’ve claimed:

GAMES CAN BE WON OR LOST

GAMES ARE ENTERTAINMENT

GAMES HAVE RULES

I would argue that how closely a game adheres to these entailments influences its reception within the video game community. For example, Mortal Kombat (2011) was criticised because its final boss, Shao Khan, suffers from ‘SNK Boss Syndrome’. This is when an enemy character is difficult to beat because they are able to do things (such as unblockable attacks) that other characters are not. Shao Khan is therefore difficult because he breaks the rules of the game, and players reacted poorly because this deviated from the entailments of GAMES ARE COMPETITION, which is key to their concept of what a game is. Compare this with a game such as Ninja Gaiden. Universally seen as extremely difficult, Ninja Gaiden is nevertheless warmly received because its challenge is fair. Gamers don’t mind the game’s difficulty because it sticks to its own rules, and is therefore in line with the metaphor.

Metaphors We Game By - Part I

This will be a two-part article. In part one, I’ll introduce the concept of metaphor as it’s understood in cognitive linguistics. The second part will consist of a more critical look at the metaphors below, including a discussion of how the concepts they entail inform debates that are currently raging in the world of video game criticism. You may need to read this a couple of times to fully get the concept - I certainly did!

One of my all time favourite books on linguistics is “Metaphors We Live By”, in which Professors George Lakoff and Mark Johnson examine the links between metaphors, language and thought. This article on metaphor in gaming follows the template set out in the first three chapters of their book.

Welcome

Welcome to the Ludolinguist blog! Ludolinguist basically means 'linguist that talks about games'. Linguistics is the study of languages, and ludo is Latin for 'game' (Ludology is what people who take themselves just a little too seriously call 'game studies'). I studied linguistics at university, and have been playing video games since I was five. 

Don't worry; this blog won't be filled with overly technical analyses of the dialogue in games. I don't want to be a bore for people who don't have a background in linguistics, and I won't use specialist terminology without explaining clearly what it means. Instead, what I will aim for is fun, succinct essays about language and gaming. I may occasionally post things that are only about gaming, with no link to language, but I won't ever go off in the other direction. In addition to regular articles on language and games, I will also post reviews.

Some of my articles will take an idea or observation from linguistics and apply it to a particular game or group of games. For example, I may write an article on 'code switching' (the term linguists use for people who speak multiple languages switching between them), and how games such as Assassin's Creed II use this phenomena to give a sense of authenticity. I also plan to shine a harsh light on some of the sillier video game PR out there. All too often, an obsession with empty jargon obscures the substance of announcements in the video games industry. With this in mind, look out for regular posts examining the meaning (or lack thereof) of 'Bullshit Gaming Buzzwords', as well as eviscerations of stupid press releases whenever they happen.

The plan is to post reviews on Tuesdays and mainline articles on Fridays. As well as reading the blog, you can also follow me on Twitter: @ludolinguist.

Enjoy!

-Sam


P.S. My website was put together by Kate Walker. If you like great writing, photography and art, you should really check out her website, Marquee Lights.