Crafting Fictional Languages for Immersive Game Worlds

The Rationale Behind Fictional Tongues

Narrative designers, level designers, visual artists, and animators meticulously craft beautiful, immersive, and believable game worlds. The soundscape and the original language complement this effort, enhancing the player’s sense of immersion. In Planet Coaster, the adorable language spoken by the theme park visitors perfectly aligns with the charming character design to create a sense of endearment in the player toward the characters in the game.

One of the primary motivations for creating a unique language is to transport players into a fully realized alternate universe, distinct from our own. A well-crafted fictional language disassociates the game world from any existing culture, allowing the narrative to feel universally resonant. In removing recognizable dialogue, as with Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, the emotional content of the narrative becomes more accessible. Regardless of a player’s background, they can experience the profoundly human content of the game world in the same way as any other player.

Fictional languages also give unique insights into the in-world culture that created them. In the dystopian novel 1984, for example, George Orwell introduces Newspeak, a controlled language with simplified grammar and limited vocabulary based on English. Newspeak was created to limit critical thinking and convey the ideology of the novel’s totalitarian superstate, serving as an imaginary linguistic and sociological experiment.

Beyond world-building, these languages can also foster communities, gathering enthusiasts to decipher, document, learn, teach, and use them beyond the screen or book pages. Fans of the adventure puzzle games Myst and Riven can refer to resources by the D’ni Linguistic Fellowship to learn the D’ni language used in-game, primarily in written form. The Thuum community, created by Skyrim players, launched a pen pal program for speakers of the Dohvazul to practice the language. The community formed around the Na’vi language of Avatar has started a podcast, with full episodes recorded in this constructed language.

If world-building or the creation of community is not enough motivation, fictional languages can also be utilized to help maintain player engagement. Studies on the effects of repetitive audio stimuli on cognitive fatigue and attention (e.g., Boksem et al., 2005; Gomes et al., 2000) show that repetitive dialogue lines can eventually lead to audio fatigue, disengaging players and diminishing their focus. The introduction of unfamiliar speech patterns can counteract this effect, sustaining player immersion and attention during gameplay.

Approaches to Language Construction

When embarking on the creation of a video game language, developers must determine the appropriate level of complexity based on the game’s needs. Some games may warrant the development of a fully fledged constructed language, complete with its own grammar, syntax, and writing system, such as Dovahzul in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. This path demands significantly more effort but can yield a richer, more authentic feeling language, which is deeply rooted in the game world and its speakers.

Alternatively, a substitution language, in which invented words replace their real-world counterparts while maintaining the original language’s grammar and structure, can be an efficient solution. This latter approach was employed for Planet Coaster, allowing for a streamlined creation process without the added intricacy of devising new grammar rules. Although the pronunciation rules do not strictly match those of English, the language uses the basic Latin alphabet. This approach also made it possible for the translation to be initially achieved by using a simple lookup macro.

Even though the actual words would be incomprehensible, video game developer Frontier Developments’ sound design team still wanted to convey useful information to the players of Planet Coaster, so considerable thought went into creating the vocabulary. Cheerful words like wippi (happy), gelle (good), and pluu (great) convey positivity through the use of sprightly vowels and syllabic dexterity, allowing players to sense their guests’ enjoyment and approval of the park. Conversely, negative sentiment is expressed through the use of fluidity-disrupting glottal stops and velar plosives in words such as grerk (sick), tecras (terrible), and henxa (fear). The team carefully considered frequently occurring key words, such as allyooma (roller coaster), ensuring they are easily recognizable in relevant contexts.

Several approaches were used when creating new words, including the following:

• Onomatopoeia: The Planco word reflects the sound it makes, such as wuuf (dog), vroo (car), gloop (drink), beff (bash), brunk (crash), bozampa (explode), plohm (boom), and donc (wood).
• Word association: This creative process derives the Planco equivalent of an English word from an adjacent concept or a related idea, such as lukma (credits — Look ma, I am in the credits!), ooja (cactus — Oh ya, it pricked me!), tentifu (octopus — it has tentacles), mubbu (depend — maybe yes, maybe no), dazet (rumour — it sounds like ‘does it’), shup (mute — a contraction of “shut up”), and flif (tuft — it can be fluffy).
• Similarity to an existing language: This approach derives the Planco word by taking the word in English, or maybe in a Romance language or Welsh, and modifying it, for example, deyo (day), linoa (lion), suutha (south), krakka (kraken), Afirac (Africa), and mumino (mom).
• Personal stories: Some words were inspired by team members’ personal experiences, such as modolodo (dungaree — an affectionate nod to fellow game developer Alexandre Modolo’s fashion), drewst (train — for James’s train-loving father, Andrew Stant), biigu (cow — James called cows “big cows” as a toddler), and gathordis (dangerous — an anagram of thargoids, the formidable alien race in Elite Dangerous, the epic space simulation game also developed by Frontier Developments).