INTERVIEW
HILOKO KATO, ANN SOPHIA KIRCHHOFER, FRANCISCO MOURA VEIGA
Ann Sophia KirchhoferWhat brought you to the intersection of games and language?
Hiloko Kato
My background is Japanese and often people ask me, if I know Karate and all the other games. It's like a cliché, but actually I wasn't allowed to play games when I was a kid, which was an issue for me because I was always interested. We didn't have any consoles, like PlayStation and Nintendo 64, so it was really something that I wasn't very familiar with. I remember one time when we were invited to a family, a Japanese family, I had to babysit the kids and they invited me to play Super Mario. It was the first time that I had this console controllers in my hands and there was this first pit. I didn't manage to jump over the pit and I remember these kids looking at me like "How can you be Japanese and not know how to play this game?“. I was so embarrassed and ashamed and this lingers a bit with me. I always had an ambivalent take on games, I really love them, but I am very bad at them.
Later on, I wanted to know what is going on in this game world and I remember that I wanted to play The Last of Us, it was the big hype in 2014. I wanted to play it, but my skills were so bad that it would take me hundert hours. But I was hooked and I really wanted to know how the narrative is, so I stumbled upon YouTube videos, Let’s plays. I watched The Last of Us in twelve hours in a non-commentary Let's play. I stumbled over other Let's plays that had commentary, I think it was PewDiePie and Vintage Beef. Suddenly I thought, it is so interesting from a linguistic perspective, since my background is from linguistics, what they tell us while playing a game. That is when I thought, there is more about games and language than what you usually look at.
ASKMost of these videos are in English, in a way the universal language. Are there languages that allow for more playfulness than others? Is there a playfulness inherent in certain languages more than in others?
HK
I am used to watch English and German Let's plays, but I started to watch Japanese ones and It is interesting, because in Let's Plays, you have an audience in mind. I was very intrigued by the Japanese Let's Players. They are often very polite. There are a lot of honorific levels of language in Japanese. They invite the audience to watch them play, but not in a vulgar or deviant art of play, but as an invitation to watch them play in a more normal environment. So this is maybe a difference.
ASK
Is play in itself an universal language?
HK
It is a nice comparison, since there are a lot of languages and a lot of games. People, or also animals, want to play. There are many scholars, like Huizinga, that all underlined that it is very important to see play as part of the culture, just as language itself.
ASK
In your research you are focusing mainly on digital games. Board games are more confined to a fixed space. Where do you see key differences or similarities between digital and board games?
HK
Interestingly, in terms of games, digital games were a lot earlier a topic of academia than board games. It is starting now or it maybe has started already, but, in my perspective, it is only going to depths at the moment. In a digital world there is more possible, maybe because it is virtual, but even though you could do anything in a virtual world, you don't. You try to imitate the real world, maybe it is fancier and it is possible to fly and use massive guns, but it remains quite similar, a real world thing that has transformed into the virtual.
In board games, there are these massive big board games where you have thousands of pieces and it gets really complicated, but then you also have the very simple ones. The main thing is, that it is more of a social thing. I often hear people saying they don't play digital games, only play board games. Maybe it is more accessible or there is more familiarity with board games that still exist in families or in other social contexts.
My students were looking at Dungeons and Dragons play sessions. Before COVID it was a social thing, where you would meet once a month with friends who were not living in the same area, but then it transferred to the virtual and a lot of people did not come back to the real world, so to say.
In the virtual world you can play anytime, so it is also about convenience. A lot of people I know got a bit into this board game culture, there are these cafés, maybe it is also a nostalgia feeling.
You can just be there with people and play. This feeling of naturalness is maybe one of the main differences, I think. A lot of digital games try to imitate the real life feeling, but it is not the same. Not yet, maybe.
JAPAN STUDIO, GENDESIGN. SONY INTERACTIVE ENTERTAINMENT, THE LAST GUARDIAN, 2016
ASK
When playing a game in real life, a board game for example, it is the players, human beings, that are interacting, that have agency in the game.
In the digital realm, next to human players, other entities have agency and there are different ways of interaction. What are your findings on this.
HK
For a long time agency was only attributed to human beings. Animals did not have an agency, although there is a long research with apes, trying to give them agency by giving them language so that they can learn human language, but this is a difficult topic.
There is also the Actor-network-theory, with Bruno Latour and a very interesting article by Johnson, who said that also a doorknob has some kind of agency because it is doing something.
In games, for a long time, people wish to give virtual beings an agency. It is difficult, because too much agency is scary. Often in these interviews with robots, Sophia for example, people ask questions like „Will you take over the world sometime?“ and she replies jokingly „Yes, someday I will rule over you.“ It is kind of a joke, but it still scares us.
In the game The Lost Guardian, the game design team created a creature named Trico. Every feather on its body is simulated, one by one. It has a wonderful material presence that you can feel. Every Let's player is tumbling into the illusion, that this is somebody or that there is some agency cooperated in Trico and they start to talk to the creature, not about it. They don't say, "I think he's hungry", but they say "Are you hungry? Do you want to eat something?“
Of course the game design is nicely done, it is empathic actions that you have to do. Trico is injured, Trico is hungry, so you get sucked into the interaction. People seek this.
The MetaHumans really look like humans. You can put every freckle on the face and when they turn their faces it looks very real. I think the next step is the interactional, the very micro details that have to be simulated. When we are talking to each other, how are we looking at each other? When somebody else is talking, how are we looking at that person? It is more than just looking real, the interaction also has to be real.
FRANCISCO MOURA VEIGA
Would you say that there is a symbolic load to these agents? They have an agency. For instance, if you talk about Trico, he is not exactly a non-player, because he actually becomes kind of a tool of the player he acts in a way, regarding certain elements of the game. It's not static.
He's reactive to whatever you do to it. Did you ever think about what is the meaning of this? Why do you need a companion to go along with you? What is the impact of this? And when talking about Trico, we can also talk about any other NPC.
HK
The game designer had this in mind because he wanted Trico to not be a tool or a pet. He wanted a creature that is having his own agency. Maybe the best way to describe him, is companion.
Sometimes he does what he wants, you push a button and tell him to come to you, but he does not come. Maybe he takes a nap. He is having his own control over himself. This interested him, because he saw that players bonded to a character, not in the way he intended to human characters. Are the NPCs like tools, are they inferior to the players or to us?
When the Unreal Engine 5 came out, people tried to tell the NPCs that they were NPCs in the game.
They tried to convince them, that they had no agency. It is really interesting to see these boundaries. On one hand, we want them to have agency, but on the other hand, it is more comforting to us if we know that they don't really have it. It is a topic in our modern world. How much agency do we allow the NPCs to have?
ASK
Ultimately, what we are looking for when playing and interacting in a game is an experience and to immerse ourselves into a different world. Do you think these worlds need to become more and more immersive to still have an impact? To what extent is that even possible? Or is it more about layering complexity, bringing together unexpected or even opposing elements to create something that still feels new?
HK
In the last twenty years, everything was about being more and more realistic, hyperreal.
But interestingly, the most successful VR games, are not the very fancy ones. Game design is much more than just the hyper realistic worlds and to imitate objects exactly how they are in real life in the virtual. There are a lot more immersive tools, when you feel the flow and when you are sucked into the game because it has a very interesting gameplay or game mechanics. It does not have to be very polished or very realistic.
FMV
This is close to what language might be understood as. When I say „dog“, I am trying to convey the idea of dogness. It is not about a specific dog. You understand what I mean, even though in our heads probably something else is being represented. There is a gap between the signifier and the signified. Maybe these games play into that. You don't have to have a hyper realistic environment in order to convey that you are within it. When you are far from reality, but within a new reality that you can appropriate, then playfulness comes into play again, and one of the characteristics of playfulness is that it should be otherwise.
HK
Playfulness is a very important aspect. In a game design courses that I sometimes organize for adults and for children, it is interesting to see how the children are into that playfulness. There is a box with different things to use to design a game. Adults start to talk and try to find a concept. The children are opening the box and everything falls out, so working intuitively with materials is still in their world of play. We loose that when we get adults. Often adults tell me they don't play games anymore. Why not?
ASK
It is interesting, how adults have this more conceptual approach, using language rather than intuition. When I begin with a project, I often search for the etymology of a word, to get inspiration from its meaning and understand how it connects. It is a brainy approach, in a way the idea to go back to the base of something.
Symbols have their meanings, but depending on the context and how you interpret them it can change. How does this tension between fixed meaning and a more fluid, changing interpretation connect to playfulness?
HK
In the history of working with texts, it was about finding the true meaning of a text, and because you couldn't ask the person anymore, you really had to uncover what, for example Aristotle or somebody thought when they wrote it. It really is this pursuit of their „true meaning“, the correct one. Thankfully this has been overcome with post-structuralism and deconstructivism. It is the more playful way of what could be meant and that everything connects.
If you take a symbol, you look at it and everybody mostly has the same picture or the same meaning in mind, but sometimes it is not the same. This is also used in games sometimes, that there is not a true, exact connection from one thing to another.
This example of the dog. I don't know if you think about the same dog, when you say dog. It is also something that is culturally different. There is a theory about the prototypes, that every culture has a prototype in the middle and the ones that are not fitting in. So for birds, the penguin is not in the middle, but in the outskirt of this circle system. I think if you want to be playful, then often you pick the examples that are not in the center.
One thing I am thinking about, regarding symbols, language and games, are games that don't use language at all, how they convey meaning, how they make you understand the game. It is a challenge for game designers. Do we really implement something like a language in it or not? Is it a fantasy language or not?
FMV
As architects, we are obviously interested in language that is not spoken.
So there is a tendency to associate certain meaning with certain forms, certain spaces. We can think of typologies as a sort of language. It might be a bit speculative, but many do.
When we design a project and we embed it with meaning, it is on the form or in the materiality of it. So either you understand the prototype, or you don't. And when you don't, you might miss out.
ASK
There should be more emphasis in the educational system on learning to read spaces, also for people that are not architects. Did you ever think about meanings of space?
HK
I do right now, because we have a project about language spaces and game spaces, and we try to connect those and think about, for example, language learning games that are using a spatial concept. It is challenging, because you don't think about space when you think about language.
Game history is very much tied to spaces. There always is the wish to overcome the two dimensional, linear space and jump into the three dimensional space.
In Unfinished Swan, the world is a white canvas and you have a paint gun. When you shoot the gun, ink comes out. Because you are colouring the space, you can suddenly see three dimensional spaces. This is an interesting concept of claiming space, or seeing space, because the space is just there.
There are a lot of games that are trying to interchange two dimensional and three dimensional space in the same game. One of my students called it inter-dimensional space. It is a concept that is a bit underrated, because many games are focussing so much on the visual, hyperrealistic.
FMV
It reminds me of a student project by Rahel Gamma, that was done in a collaborative semester of VOLUPTAS with game design students. It was exactly the same space with a split screen. On one side it would be an airport, on the other one it would be a prison. The same typology, the same spaces would have its meaning drastically altered by the prosthetics of it. There is this idea of the object that completely changes the meaning of the space just by its presence.
HK
Altering the perspective and showing you another side of a game, that is really something a virtual game can do. You can also use it in a multiplayer, these two perspectives for two different persons. To me, virtual games can invite you to think about this, to look at space in a different manner. Also in the real world.
FMV
So you see games as a way of questioning meaning?
HK
Of course, yes. A lot.
All these alternative ending games think about your actions, what consequences they have, but also in their materiality and in thinking about space in another way.
It is really something that a game can do. I am very grateful that there are still game designers who think about this and not just go into the mainstream, where there is no reflecting about what is given.
There is the interactional take that space is always made by people who are using the space or giving a space. But I think it, in general, we often think, that it is just there, we just walk and look and walk. And maybe if you build a house or for the first time something that is in the making, then you maybe think about spaces. But often it is given.
Hiloko Kato is a linguist and researcher. She is a senior researcher in Game Design at the ZHDK (Zurich University of the Arts). She is affiliated with the Chair of German Linguistics at the University of Zurich and teaches at the Universities of Zurich and Basel. Her research focuses on the intersection of language and games, with a particular interest in digital agency in human and non-human interaction.
Francisco Moura Veiga is an architect and an editor. He is a teaching and research assistant at the VOLUPTAS Chair at the ETH Zürich, where he is conducting his Doctoral Research Project on learning in architecture, as member of the Joint Doctoral Program of The Learning Sciences EPFL ETHZ. He is the principal of A Forschung, the founder of Publishing in Architecture and of CARTHA Magazine.
Ann Sophia Kirchhofer recently completed her architecture studies at ETH Zurich. She works as a student assistant at the VOLUPTAS Chair, where she began exploring publishing. In her work, she traces the poetic across cultural, natural and built landscapes.