One thing I’m thinking about – a lot – in the context of tabletop game design is the way players talk about things. What you name parts of your game, and how you reference things, is important. Do you give new name to an established idea? Why? To what end?
In Magic: The Gathering your deck is officially called your library. Your opponents’ is called their library. Now, you don’t need that – the word deck is a well-established idea in games. I mean a deck of cards is a common English noun. There’s no point where Magic usually does anything to change what your library is (Sheharazad and Enter The Dungeon aside), and library is a longer word than deck.
Consider as well the word sorcery or instant. In both cases, those terms are a bit impenetrable to outsiders; players don’t use those words to refer to things to one another. When you cast an instant you rarely say ‘instanting your-‘ no, instead you tend to use the verb form of the card’s name. “I’ll Cancel that.” “I’ll Remand that.” “Hammer your Cadets.” But the words Sorcery and Instant bring with themselves a lot of meaning it implies, imposing a magical feel – even if, well, instant doesn’t mean shit. A sorcery has some abstract meaning to people but an instant only means something in mechanical terminology to the context of Magic: The Gathering. You sort of have to be in Magic for Instant to mean much.
Now, it’s a bit mean to talk about this in light of Magic: The Gathering because it’s a venerable beast of a game with a lot of grandfathered dialogue. There’s a bunch of stuff that kind of has calcified in place, like Sorcery vs Instant. That language serves its purpose, in part because, most obviously, those words can’t be confused for one another. They don’t look similar and they don’t sound similar. If you’re searching for a blank and it’s one or the other, you won’t miss that.
In Middleware I’ve been struggling around the names for the card types, the tactics. Tactics represent how your character does the thing they’re trying to do. So if your character is the kind of person who kicks down a door with a gun in her hand, elbows a sysadmin in the face and kicks a server farm of protected information out of its racks, douses it with petrol and sets it on fire, that’s very different to if they sit at home and set up sequential rigs of subroutines in other people’s computers to inundate an enemy server farm with data that slows their security measures to a crawl. These four basic techniques boil down to ‘violent crime,’ ‘social engineering,’ ‘password/code access’ and ‘denial of service attacks.’ In the game’s language we have broken this down, currently, to the titles of Assault, Manipulate, Hack, and Overload.
Problem: If you’re not playing the game and looking at the cards… how obvious are those? Does Hack stand out as strange because it’s shorter than the others? I know a number of hackers who will turn up their nose at that, because of course all of these are ‘hacks’ and I’m just contributing to ‘hackerphobia.’ But more realistically, players are going to, at one point, in each turn, be asked ‘what do you want to do?’ and they’ll say ‘I’m going to ___ the server.’
Hopefully.
If I had my druthers the four words would be roughly the same length, have distinct consonant stops at the end (which they currently do – assaulT, manipulaTE, overloaD, haCK), and all take the clear verb form that fits “I’m going to ___ the server.” But that is a challenge I don’t think I can get – so as Meatloaf says, two outta three ain’t bad.
Look at the language your game requires players to use. If talking about your game is hard, people will have a hard time talking about it.
Don’t think of this as a big proper essay, this is more just my brain rattling around as I work on a game.