Update on sessions
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Daniel Demski
Apr 3, 2013, 3:47:57 PM4/3/13
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I haven't been diligent lately in writing up detailed reports on sessions, which is unfortunate since we've been messing around with the rules quite a bit. In the most recent game we basically played with scores on the sentence cards roughly determined by how many coinings or other moves would be required to translate the sentence. The group sentence would not appear until one individual sentence had been translated, and the group sentence was drawn out of a pile of sentences with higher point values (around eight instead of five I believe). But we dawdled too long deciding on rules and then it also took a long time for anyone to draw a word order, so nobody 'officially' translated any sentence. We called 'game' at the end of a round after it started to get late, and scores were based on complement cards and 1 point per successful charade guess. Two of the players hadn't gifted any complement cards and I felt overall scores were random and nobody was really invested in them. The language itself had its fun moments though of course. But there were a couple points at which a player used the 'explain meaning' segment of their turn to well, give their word a second, unrelated meaning, and other players (me) tried to object. Objecting to a player's own understanding of a word can become offensive. Apparently even trying to 'explain' how a word could have such a duplicitous meaning can be offensive, though I'd never want to discourage such explanations as that's a big part of the gameplay to me.
There were two main conclusions after the game:
1) In the course of playing the game, I feel we've somewhat inconsistently used the following "unspoken rules" which should either be adopted as official rules or officially not adopted.
a) A person is right about their own word, even if they're being contradictory or bizarre.
b) All the language structure is out there on the board. Adding distinctions isn't *discovering* parts of the language, it's *adding* them.
c) Any distinction can be introduced by coining — tense, number, size, whatever — but a card is needed in order to *require* that distinction the way English requires plural.
Rule (a) could be problematic given the amount we allow people to specify, but I figure worst case they make their own sentence less workable. Problems I expect are words which are given very unnatural constraints, most frequently 'never used metaphorically' (we've had an aweful lot of words similar to "like pick up / carry / hold, but only when done with your own hands") or maybe "only used in 1st person" (which is actually kinda interesting). This rule is also a little contrary to the collective-consensus methods encouraged by the miming part. (We emphasize the miming by writing down the 'correct' guess of the word's meaning as the first and core meaning, though it's altered pretty thoroughly by the coiner's description.) But I don't know how to come down consistently on the consensus side rather than the individual side. I'd like like to say something like, if people accept a word being used a particular way, that becomes the official use. But I've never figured out how to make that work.
Rule (b) implies a word order card should be out immediately. We'll be drawing that at random. There's also a default whatever-works grammar. I'd like to say people are free to decide how to say things via discussion, but I don't think all my players would cooperate with or accept that rule. It's possible the game can work with the opposite of rule (b) in play; that would mean nobody knows at the start whether just saying a particular word or phrase is allowed - does it require tenses? agreement? but I've never seriously pursued this interpretation of the game and I think it just makes people feel uncertain for a while and then stops mattering.
Rule (c) I'm a little hesitant about overall. I think there needs to be an explicit policy something like it in order to keep people from basically waiting for the right cards, but I enjoy obligatory stuff and this cuts down on it.
2) Scoring needs to be possible earlier; people get bored trying to build their sentence. Tonight we'll be playing with "natural semantic metalanguage" cards as the first goal cards. I actually haven't decided quite how this will work yet, but the idea is to have word, then phrase, then sentence goal cards, worth progressive point amounts. Aughh I just know I'm going to get lazy/busy and not make all those cards. At the moment I'm writing this post instead.
We're also writing funny phrases on the complement cards, like "neat-o" and "tubular" and hopefully some things in other languages.
There were two main conclusions after the game:
1) In the course of playing the game, I feel we've somewhat inconsistently used the following "unspoken rules" which should either be adopted as official rules or officially not adopted.
a) A person is right about their own word, even if they're being contradictory or bizarre.
b) All the language structure is out there on the board. Adding distinctions isn't *discovering* parts of the language, it's *adding* them.
c) Any distinction can be introduced by coining — tense, number, size, whatever — but a card is needed in order to *require* that distinction the way English requires plural.
Rule (a) could be problematic given the amount we allow people to specify, but I figure worst case they make their own sentence less workable. Problems I expect are words which are given very unnatural constraints, most frequently 'never used metaphorically' (we've had an aweful lot of words similar to "like pick up / carry / hold, but only when done with your own hands") or maybe "only used in 1st person" (which is actually kinda interesting). This rule is also a little contrary to the collective-consensus methods encouraged by the miming part. (We emphasize the miming by writing down the 'correct' guess of the word's meaning as the first and core meaning, though it's altered pretty thoroughly by the coiner's description.) But I don't know how to come down consistently on the consensus side rather than the individual side. I'd like like to say something like, if people accept a word being used a particular way, that becomes the official use. But I've never figured out how to make that work.
Rule (b) implies a word order card should be out immediately. We'll be drawing that at random. There's also a default whatever-works grammar. I'd like to say people are free to decide how to say things via discussion, but I don't think all my players would cooperate with or accept that rule. It's possible the game can work with the opposite of rule (b) in play; that would mean nobody knows at the start whether just saying a particular word or phrase is allowed - does it require tenses? agreement? but I've never seriously pursued this interpretation of the game and I think it just makes people feel uncertain for a while and then stops mattering.
Rule (c) I'm a little hesitant about overall. I think there needs to be an explicit policy something like it in order to keep people from basically waiting for the right cards, but I enjoy obligatory stuff and this cuts down on it.
2) Scoring needs to be possible earlier; people get bored trying to build their sentence. Tonight we'll be playing with "natural semantic metalanguage" cards as the first goal cards. I actually haven't decided quite how this will work yet, but the idea is to have word, then phrase, then sentence goal cards, worth progressive point amounts. Aughh I just know I'm going to get lazy/busy and not make all those cards. At the moment I'm writing this post instead.
We're also writing funny phrases on the complement cards, like "neat-o" and "tubular" and hopefully some things in other languages.
Alex Fink
Apr 25, 2013, 3:05:07 PM4/25/13
to conlang-...@googlegroups.com
On 3 April 2013 15:47, Daniel Demski <dran...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I haven't been diligent lately in writing up detailed reports on sessions,
> which is unfortunate since we've been messing around with the rules quite a
> bit. In the most recent game we basically played with scores on the sentence
> cards roughly determined by how many coinings or other moves would be
> required to translate the sentence. The group sentence would not appear
> until one individual sentence had been translated,
What was the rationale behind that?
> I haven't been diligent lately in writing up detailed reports on sessions,
> which is unfortunate since we've been messing around with the rules quite a
> bit. In the most recent game we basically played with scores on the sentence
> cards roughly determined by how many coinings or other moves would be
> required to translate the sentence. The group sentence would not appear
> until one individual sentence had been translated,
> and the group sentence
> was drawn out of a pile of sentences with higher point values (around eight
> instead of five I believe). But we dawdled too long deciding on rules and
> then it also took a long time for anyone to draw a word order, so nobody
> 'officially' translated any sentence. We called 'game' at the end of a round
> after it started to get late, and scores were based on complement cards and
> 1 point per successful charade guess. Two of the players hadn't gifted any
> complement cards and I felt overall scores were random and nobody was really
> invested in them. The language itself had its fun moments though of course.
> But there were a couple points at which a player used the 'explain meaning'
> segment of their turn to well, give their word a second, unrelated meaning,
> and other players (me) tried to object.
across https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%A4%97%E0%A5%8B#Sanskrit
recently.
This may be too academic a distinction for a context where feelings
are getting bruised, but I'd imagine the standard where these
extensions are "okay" if the extender can give a justification
relating them (and if it's a tenuous story, well, all the richer for
the cultural setting at least).
> Objecting to a player's own
> understanding of a word can become offensive. Apparently even trying to
> 'explain' how a word could have such a duplicitous meaning can be offensive,
> though I'd never want to discourage such explanations as that's a big part
> of the gameplay to me.
much more personal investment in one's own vision for the game
language than has been the case in the games I've played, a degree of
investment that's strange for a cooperative game.
> There were two main conclusions after the game:
>
> 1) In the course of playing the game, I feel we've somewhat inconsistently
> used the following "unspoken rules" which should either be adopted as
> official rules or officially not adopted.
>
> a) A person is right about their own word, even if they're being
> contradictory or bizarre.
meaning of the word, even if it's not what the proposer wanted'
convention; that seems at variance to this. It hasn't come up for me
that the guesser is so resentful at being misunderstood as to be
offended.
Bizarre is fine. Contradictory is hard to work with.
I'm also not super-keen on the idea that who coined each word should
be a formal part of the gamestate, or even a formal informal one.
Sometimes I forget who was originally responsible for certain words,
and games in which that happen I figure tend to be those in which the
language has best taken on a character of its own, as opposed to being
an uncohering patchwork.
> b) All the language structure is out there on the board. Adding distinctions
> isn't *discovering* parts of the language, it's *adding* them.
>
> c) Any distinction can be introduced by coining — tense, number, size,
> whatever — but a card is needed in order to *require* that distinction the
> way English requires plural.
lexical back door?
> Rule (a) could be problematic given the amount we allow people to specify,
> but I figure worst case they make their own sentence less workable. Problems
> I expect are words which are given very unnatural constraints, most
> frequently 'never used metaphorically' (we've had an aweful lot of words
> similar to "like pick up / carry / hold, but only when done with your own
> hands")
> or maybe "only used in 1st person" (which is actually kinda
> interesting). This rule is also a little contrary to the
> collective-consensus methods encouraged by the miming part. (We emphasize
> the miming by writing down the 'correct' guess of the word's meaning as the
> first and core meaning, though it's altered pretty thoroughly by the
> coiner's description.) But I don't know how to come down consistently on the
> consensus side rather than the individual side. I'd like like to say
> something like, if people accept a word being used a particular way, that
> becomes the official use. But I've never figured out how to make that work.
word amounts to.
> Rule (b) implies a word order card should be out immediately. We'll be
> drawing that at random. There's also a default whatever-works grammar. I'd
> like to say people are free to decide how to say things via discussion, but
> I don't think all my players would cooperate with or accept that rule. It's
> possible the game can work with the opposite of rule (b) in play; that would
> mean nobody knows at the start whether just saying a particular word or
> phrase is allowed - does it require tenses? agreement? but I've never
> seriously pursued this interpretation of the game and I think it just makes
> people feel uncertain for a while and then stops mattering.
less pure idea of stacking the deck by pulling out one card of each
essential sort, shuffling this up with maybe a few other filler cards,
and putting it on top of the main deck at game start. Would ensure a
word order comes out quickly (unless someone is so uncooperative as to
discard it).
But more broadly, on (b), as you're driving at, it's strange to
imagine the strict form ("all the rules of the language are present in
the cards played") being good bedfellows with the way the card-state
starts from zero that the current Glossotechnia rules has. This isn't
the first problem it has caused: Jim's pages already suggest a
workaround for the phonology starting from zero.
A drastic possibility: reframe the game so that playing a card is
always a change to the language, as opposed to a welded-on creation.
If this was adopted, it's conceptually purest to just have one extra
deck, or other such mechanism, to set up a bare-minimal usable initial
language (phonological inventory, set of morphological categories,
syntax, ...), though that's admittedly ungainly. Indeed, my own
aesthetic predilections would go further and make it so that all the
changes on cards are meant to be reasonable diachronic-style ones, not
the "we were SOV? now we're VOS because I say so" form. This is an
extension of the thing about phonology I've suggested before.
Given the special treatment of lexis (or more generally _forms_ of
morphemes) already, in the existence of the word-coining phase, it
could reasonably remain as a "discovery" part of the game even if the
cards weren't.
> Rule (c) I'm a little hesitant about overall. I think there needs to be an
> explicit policy something like it in order to keep people from basically
> waiting for the right cards, but I enjoy obligatory stuff and this cuts down
> on it.
>
> 2) Scoring needs to be possible earlier; people get bored trying to build
> their sentence. Tonight we'll be playing with "natural semantic
> metalanguage" cards as the first goal cards. I actually haven't decided
> quite how this will work yet, but the idea is to have word, then phrase,
> then sentence goal cards, worth progressive point amounts. Aughh I just know
> I'm going to get lazy/busy and not make all those cards. At the moment I'm
> writing this post instead.
anything to offer to the actual study of semantics in human language,
aside from to demonstrate our ability to win very strict games of
Taboo(TM).)
Except that maybe the targets for word cards should be something a
little less atomic. Words of the sort that are likely to reward
having derivational operations, as opposed to just being things you
can charade out and be done with in a turn.
How'd it go, anyway?
> We're also writing funny phrases on the complement cards, like "neat-o" and
> "tubular" and hopefully some things in other languages.
Jim Henry
Apr 25, 2013, 8:49:19 PM4/25/13
to conlang-...@googlegroups.com
On Wed, Apr 3, 2013 at 3:47 PM, Daniel Demski <dran...@gmail.com> wrote:
> But there were a couple points at which a player used the 'explain meaning'
> segment of their turn to well, give their word a second, unrelated meaning,
> and other players (me) tried to object. Objecting to a player's own
> understanding of a word can become offensive. Apparently even trying to
> 'explain' how a word could have such a duplicitous meaning can be offensive,
> though I'd never want to discourage such explanations as that's a big part
> of the gameplay to me.
I don't recall anything like that happening in the games I've played
> But there were a couple points at which a player used the 'explain meaning'
> segment of their turn to well, give their word a second, unrelated meaning,
> and other players (me) tried to object. Objecting to a player's own
> understanding of a word can become offensive. Apparently even trying to
> 'explain' how a word could have such a duplicitous meaning can be offensive,
> though I'd never want to discourage such explanations as that's a big part
> of the gameplay to me.
-- at least I don't remember anyone getting offended at someone else
objecting to their refinement of meaning, and I don't think I remember
anyone changing the charade-meaning of their word in any radical,
potentially objectionable way. I think it's probably better to run
the game so there's less ego invested in one's particular
contributions to the language, and so that (as Alex says) in the best
games, one tends to forget who contributed which specific bit. But if
your particular group of players feels differently, then I guess you
need to modify your house rules to accomodate that.
> a) A person is right about their own word, even if they're being
> contradictory or bizarre.
whose general meaning the other players have already guessed from
charades, pictures etc.? Or that their originally intended meaning
trumps whatever meaning the other players actually glean from their
charades, pictures etc.? The latter I think would be contrary to the
spirit of the game, and I'm dubious about the former; but I kind of
like Alex's idea of requiring players, if they want to extend the
meaning of a word much in the "clarification" phase (and maybe when
playing an "extend meaning" card as well), to tell some kind of
etymological story about the word acquiring one or more new senses by
metaphor, metonymy and other well-understood processes -- perhaps with
intermediate senses then getting lost, so you now have a word whose
two main senses aren't obviously related because the tertiary meaning
is derived by metonymy from a secondary metaphor based on the primary
meaning, and the secondary meaning has become archaic.
> b) All the language structure is out there on the board. Adding distinctions
> isn't *discovering* parts of the language, it's *adding* them.
Taken too strictly, I'm afraid it would limit one's ability to
construct certain features of language whose features aren't well
supported by the basic cards.
> c) Any distinction can be introduced by coining — tense, number, size,
> whatever — but a card is needed in order to *require* that distinction the
> way English requires plural.
> Rule (b) implies a word order card should be out immediately. We'll be
> drawing that at random. There's also a default whatever-works grammar. I'd
> like to say people are free to decide how to say things via discussion, but
randomly chosen word order and typology cards. Or even laying out the
first word order card of each type between the first and second
shuffle, as we typically lay out the first two consonant and the first
two vowel cards.
--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/
http://www.jimhenrymedicaltrust.org
Daniel Demski
Sep 10, 2013, 3:18:33 PM9/10/13
to conlang-...@googlegroups.com
Whoops, looks like I stopped checking back here! Sorry! I'm going to write a bit of a review of what's been going on and then see about answering things raised in the April 25th posts I apparently didn't read.
For the most part, until last week's session, we'd been playing for months without really varying the rules. It doesn't seem that anyone gets too invested in points so we haven't been attempting to score, which leaves it a game of charades and interesting twists of syntax and vocab. The major thing we did experiment with was extending languages several sessions. I definitely got the sense that people got bored with the languages, or didn't like trying to remember everything. Several times everyone voted to start a new language. Once this was clearly because we hadn't made a very interesting language.
The more surprising issue with extending play longer was that the cards started to seem less appropriate or useful. Surprisingly nobody really wants to change around the language in destructive ways, so as language structure gets built up, less and less cards are considered desirable. This can also lead to people playing syllable structures until any structure is allowed.
But on to last week's game. I decided we should start messing with the rules again, and the simplest option seemed to me to be making whole sentences on each turn. We drew an initial typology and sentence structure along with the initial two consonants and two vowels. Then on each turn the player made a complete sentence, coining as many words as necessary.
Initially we didn't even have miming. The player would pronounce their sentence and explain the words. The way we decided to do it was, every two rounds the number of mimed words required in a sentence would increase; two rounds of no miming, two rounds of 1 mimed word, etc.
As inspiration for sentences each person drew two Natural Semantic Metalanguage cards and tried to use them in the sentence.
We did keep a score. Using your NSM concepts in a sentence was worth a point each. Additionally, each word (or affix etc.) was put on a card and each word card had the coiner's initials in the corner. Using another player's word gained both the coiner and the user a point. You want to use lots of pre-existing words in your sentence, but you give other players points in doing so. Also, on your turn you cross your own initials off a previously coined word. This creates some incentive to note how useful your coinings have been. In our case one player did nominate, I think by having coined a couple of pronouns which were used in almost every subsequent sentence.
Initially, the new rules seemed boring since we simply waited for the current player to make his or her sentence. Also, creating something like two to five words per turn definitely discouraged us from really thinking about the words. We had almost no creative words. The requirement of one mimed word really helped with both these problems; it reintroduced interaction, and did a lot more than I realized for simply making us think about what the word's meaning.
As play proceeded I realized that the cards became largely irrelevant. It wasn't really a big deal to anyone, but we were all making up rules in order to get sentences to work so we didn't need the inspiration or capabilities granted by most of the cards. I think maybe this version of the game would work better with a pile of challenge cards, like the NSM but more complex; maybe we should give a point for using an in-hand card when making a sentence (except phoneme cards I suppose).
The fact that cards seemed less important is a good thing for a putative published version of the game; formerly I have only added to the stock of cards, and feared a downsized, publishable deck would be pretty bland. If other groups prove as willing to leap into coining the necessary grammar as our own, I think a game with fewer cards could be just fine.
Ultimately this version of the game seemed really fun, and we're going to play it this way again. Tonight we'll be making it harder to earn points: you must "refine" someone's word in order to score points for using it, adding a complication of some sort. And you may initial a maximum of two coined words per sentence (initial only one and you need not cross off an old one).
Now to reply, with apologies on timeliness, to the older posts!
Alex Fink:
For the most part, until last week's session, we'd been playing for months without really varying the rules. It doesn't seem that anyone gets too invested in points so we haven't been attempting to score, which leaves it a game of charades and interesting twists of syntax and vocab. The major thing we did experiment with was extending languages several sessions. I definitely got the sense that people got bored with the languages, or didn't like trying to remember everything. Several times everyone voted to start a new language. Once this was clearly because we hadn't made a very interesting language.
The more surprising issue with extending play longer was that the cards started to seem less appropriate or useful. Surprisingly nobody really wants to change around the language in destructive ways, so as language structure gets built up, less and less cards are considered desirable. This can also lead to people playing syllable structures until any structure is allowed.
But on to last week's game. I decided we should start messing with the rules again, and the simplest option seemed to me to be making whole sentences on each turn. We drew an initial typology and sentence structure along with the initial two consonants and two vowels. Then on each turn the player made a complete sentence, coining as many words as necessary.
Initially we didn't even have miming. The player would pronounce their sentence and explain the words. The way we decided to do it was, every two rounds the number of mimed words required in a sentence would increase; two rounds of no miming, two rounds of 1 mimed word, etc.
As inspiration for sentences each person drew two Natural Semantic Metalanguage cards and tried to use them in the sentence.
We did keep a score. Using your NSM concepts in a sentence was worth a point each. Additionally, each word (or affix etc.) was put on a card and each word card had the coiner's initials in the corner. Using another player's word gained both the coiner and the user a point. You want to use lots of pre-existing words in your sentence, but you give other players points in doing so. Also, on your turn you cross your own initials off a previously coined word. This creates some incentive to note how useful your coinings have been. In our case one player did nominate, I think by having coined a couple of pronouns which were used in almost every subsequent sentence.
Initially, the new rules seemed boring since we simply waited for the current player to make his or her sentence. Also, creating something like two to five words per turn definitely discouraged us from really thinking about the words. We had almost no creative words. The requirement of one mimed word really helped with both these problems; it reintroduced interaction, and did a lot more than I realized for simply making us think about what the word's meaning.
As play proceeded I realized that the cards became largely irrelevant. It wasn't really a big deal to anyone, but we were all making up rules in order to get sentences to work so we didn't need the inspiration or capabilities granted by most of the cards. I think maybe this version of the game would work better with a pile of challenge cards, like the NSM but more complex; maybe we should give a point for using an in-hand card when making a sentence (except phoneme cards I suppose).
The fact that cards seemed less important is a good thing for a putative published version of the game; formerly I have only added to the stock of cards, and feared a downsized, publishable deck would be pretty bland. If other groups prove as willing to leap into coining the necessary grammar as our own, I think a game with fewer cards could be just fine.
Ultimately this version of the game seemed really fun, and we're going to play it this way again. Tonight we'll be making it harder to earn points: you must "refine" someone's word in order to score points for using it, adding a complication of some sort. And you may initial a maximum of two coined words per sentence (initial only one and you need not cross off an old one).
Now to reply, with apologies on timeliness, to the older posts!
Alex Fink:
>>The group sentence would not appear
>> until one individual sentence had been translated,
>
>What was the rationale behind that?
I really cannot remember. We more often had problems with people not wanting to work on the group sentence than the other way around. We haven't been using goal sentences for a long time now, and the only problem is occasional lack of ideas for what to coin.
...
...
>> But there were a couple points at which a player used the 'explain meaning'
>> segment of their turn to well, give their word a second, unrelated meaning,
>> and other players (me) tried to object.
>
>Well, semantic extension càn do that. For instance, I came by chance
>across https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%A4%97%E0%A5%8B#Sanskrit
>recently.
>
>This may be too academic a distinction for a context where feelings
>are getting bruised, but I'd imagine the standard where these
>extensions are "okay" if the extender can give a justification
>relating them (and if it's a tenuous story, well, all the richer for
>the cultural setting at least).
>across https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%A4%97%E0%A5%8B#Sanskrit
>recently.
>
>This may be too academic a distinction for a context where feelings
>are getting bruised, but I'd imagine the standard where these
>extensions are "okay" if the extender can give a justification
>relating them (and if it's a tenuous story, well, all the richer for
>the cultural setting at least).
We have still been freely allowing/encouraging people to make interesting syntactic and semantic alterations after the basic meaning is guessed. This frequently requires a "GM" role to be taken on by someone, who asks "and how does the word work" type questions while trying not to encourage Enlish-esque answers. Though etymological stories are encouraged, I don't think requiring them would go over well.
>> Objecting to a player's own
>> understanding of a word can become offensive. Apparently even trying to
>> 'explain' how a word could have such a duplicitous meaning can be offensive,
>> though I'd never want to discourage such explanations as that's a big part
>> of the gameplay to me.
>
>I'm surprised that you call it _offensive_. That seems to suggest
>much more personal investment in one's own vision for the game
>language than has been the case in the games I've played, a degree of
>investment that's strange for a cooperative game.
>much more personal investment in one's own vision for the game
>language than has been the case in the games I've played, a degree of
>investment that's strange for a cooperative game.
I tend to agree. But it seems simple enough to phrase things as "That's interesting, I wonder how that arose/how that works" rather than "well maybe that could be possible if..."
>> a) A person is right about their own word, even if they're being
>> contradictory or bizarre.
>
>You'll be aware of the 'eventual consensus in charades determines the
>meaning of the word, even if it's not what the proposer wanted'
>convention; that seems at variance to this.
>meaning of the word, even if it's not what the proposer wanted'
>convention; that seems at variance to this.
I have still never gotten my players to use this rule. A failed charade is too fascinating so everyone wants to know the intended meaning, and then we stick with it anyway.
>It hasn't come up for me
>that the guesser is so resentful at being misunderstood as to be
>offended.
>
>Bizarre is fine. Contradictory is hard to work with.
This issue is purely in regard to the elaboration after the charade. Fortunately truly contradictory grammatical claims have not occurred since one of our early sessions, possibly because people have a better grasp of language. The closest we come is the still somewhat common "never used metaphorically" stipulation, which seems unworkable in practice to me but never causes much trouble. But if someone were to coin a preposition and claim it's used like a verb I think we would be able to either shoehorn it into one or get a better definition in the process of trying.
>I'm also not super-keen on the idea that who coined each word should
>be a formal part of the gamestate, or even a formal informal one.
>Sometimes I forget who was originally responsible for certain words,
>and games in which that happen I figure tend to be those in which the
>language has best taken on a character of its own, as opposed to being
>an uncohering patchwork.
I agree with your view here, but I have one player who's especially keen to assign credit and remember who coined what. Giving credit as a socially positive action is something I'm surrounded with and something very valued by academia, so I feel it wouldn't be too uncommon amongst players. Obviously the new scoring rules we're trying right now explicitly assign ownership, but we also coin more words and use and alter each others' words so I think it balances out.
...
...
>> c) Any distinction can be introduced by coining — tense, number, size,
>> whatever — but a card is needed in order to *require* that distinction the
>> way English requires plural.
>
>You have in mind, like, sneaking in inflectional processes through the
>lexical back door?
>lexical back door?
Basically, yes. People have to play a card if they want every verb to mark its number; they can't coin a number prefix and then say it's obligatory to use one. But I also mean to say, the default starting grammar is stretchy and allows things to be implied plural by context, or implied past tense.
>>I'd like like to say
>> something like, if people accept a word being used a particular way, that
>> becomes the official use. But I've never figured out how to make that work.
>
>I guess one of the things it depends on is what "accepting" a use of a
>word amounts to.
>word amounts to.
We used to have people write down sentences in game language and then pass them around to be translated. If people accept a translation then the grammar must be acceptable. This can be fun when people don't notice an error. But it took quite a while and passing around was awkward.
...
...
>A drastic possibility: reframe the game so that playing a card is
>always a change to the language, as opposed to a welded-on creation.
>If this was adopted, it's conceptually purest to just have one extra
>deck, or other such mechanism, to set up a bare-minimal usable initial
>language (phonological inventory, set of morphological categories,
>syntax, ...), though that's admittedly ungainly. Indeed, my own
>aesthetic predilections would go further and make it so that all the
>changes on cards are meant to be reasonable diachronic-style ones, not
>the "we were SOV? now we're VOS because I say so" form. This is an
>extension of the thing about phonology I've suggested before.
>
>Given the special treatment of lexis (or more generally _forms_ of
>morphemes) already, in the existence of the word-coining phase, it
>could reasonably remain as a "discovery" part of the game even if the
>cards weren't.
Yeah, not sure how a 'change only' ruleset would play out, but I think it would be easier to convince people to make actual changes if they were at least diachronic-ish. Last week we did talk about how word order cards could possibly remain useful if one is drawn right away, and opinions definitely leaned toward allowing outright change only if it is diachronically plausible, with a secondary word order becoming overwhelmingly common or other grammatical details allowing reanalysis. First time someone seemed genuinely willing to change the word order!
Jim Henry:
Jim Henry:
>> a) A person is right about their own word, even if they're being
>> contradictory or bizarre.
>
>Do you mean, when they are clarifying the precise meaning of a word
>whose general meaning the other players have already guessed from
>charades, pictures etc.? Or that their originally intended meaning
>trumps whatever meaning the other players actually glean from their
>charades, pictures etc.?
>whose general meaning the other players have already guessed from
>charades, pictures etc.? Or that their originally intended meaning
>trumps whatever meaning the other players actually glean from their
>charades, pictures etc.?
I suppose this rule applies to anything someone adds to the language by describing it, whether through coining or a card; but not the charade portion.
>The latter I think would be contrary to the
>spirit of the game, and I'm dubious about the former; but I kind of
>like Alex's idea of requiring players, if they want to extend the
>meaning of a word much in the "clarification" phase (and maybe when
>playing an "extend meaning" card as well), to tell some kind of
>etymological story about the word acquiring one or more new senses by
>metaphor, metonymy and other well-understood processes -- perhaps with
>intermediate senses then getting lost, so you now have a word whose
>two main senses aren't obviously related because the tertiary meaning
>is derived by metonymy from a secondary metaphor based on the primary
>meaning, and the secondary meaning has become archaic.
If the spirit of the game is constructing a new language without use of English (ie through charades), I think we've drifted pretty far from it actually. I do think the charades part helps us be creative, but our main activity is describing in English how the language is used (and sometimes, how it got that way).
>> b) All the language structure is out there on the board. Adding distinctions
>> isn't *discovering* parts of the language, it's *adding* them.
>
>Could you clarify some examples of how you've applied that rule?
The main place this comes in is really with number, tense, and other things people might expect to be obligatorily marked. The first couple times I played the game I hesitated to make any utterances, because I thought we should kind of feel out whether, say, topics or evidentiality are marked before we could have a complete sentence. It's much better if everyone feels comfortable using what's present.
I think that about covers it. Looks like one player cancelled but we'll still have four people tonight to try out the sentence version (only had 3 last week).
I think that about covers it. Looks like one player cancelled but we'll still have four people tonight to try out the sentence version (only had 3 last week).
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