The SCC’s conpidgin roleplaying game, Pidgin Island Quest, ran from July 14 to September 25 of 2024. It was the longest in a series of four conpidgin experiments by the SCC since 2021 and featured a unique ruleset designed to encourage activity with mixed success. What can we learn from Pidgin Island Quest, and how is it being used to design the SCC’s next pidgin game, PidginCraft?
Background: Basic description of PIQ
Pidgin Island Quest (PIQ) was a conpidgin RPG played using a Discord text channel with hybrid async- and synchronous play. Players randomly chose real-world languages from which they pulled a set of 15 words of their choice related to various survival skills, such as hunting, gathering, and fishing, which were then used during the course of the game to form a pidgin language. If players needed to introduce more words other than these 15, they either pulled from the language’s dictionary or made one up with similar phonotactics. Players were not required to learn the grammar of the starter language.
During the normal, asynchronous play, players would type text and post clarifying pictures or drawings to communicate. The synchronous sessions were predefined hours of the week when available players would play together which, other than happening at a faster pace, was mechanically identical to asynchronous play. Most of the SCC’s Pidgin Games only involved a handful of players, and PIQ was no exception: 9 players signed up for PIQ initially, but only 6 players actually played. By the final week only 2 players were active, and the decision was made to stop the experiment.
Providing goals through roleplaying
One big problem that conpidgins face is that people need something to talk about, otherwise there’s not much reason to converse, let alone in a pidgin nobody understands very well. To solve this problem, PIQ introduced a loosely structured tabletop roleplay system, inspired by Dungeons & Dragons, which gave players in-game challenges requiring cooperation to complete.
In PIQ, players took on the role of primitive mountainfolk who were kidnapped for unknown reasons by a secretive band of linguists and left to fend for themselves on a remote tropical island. Each IRL week, the game rotated between Dungeon Masters (DMs) who control the world of Pidgin Island, creating survival scenarios like attacks by wild animals and severe storms, which encourages players to communicate to hunt together or build shelters.
Though English was not allowed to be spoken by player characters, it was necessary for the DM to be unambiguously notified of actions players wished to take so they could craft appropriate responses. For simple actions that would be evident to anyone watching, such as running, the player simply announces a simple action phrase in English (e.g. “running away”). More complicated actions, such as crafting a bow or building a hut, would be related privately to the DM, who would then announce the result of the action to all players.
Effects of the roleplay setting and mechanics on vocabulary
In the first few IRL days, players created an expansive, though volatile, vocabulary to describe the world around them. Since the setting was especially primitive, the structure of words in the early vocabulary contained few compounds and nearly always described concrete objects or actions, such as aiwan “boar”, xag “food”, and bizkotte “attack”. As PIQ developed, many of these early words were later found in compounds like hafidxag “seafood”.
This contrasts with the SCC’s first Pidgin Game (2021), where players just conversed about their real lives. There, it was often necessary from day 1 to make up words for complex things that are seldom used in compounds, such as woz “airplane”. Also seen with much greater frequency than in PIQ was that players would introduce many root words for the express purpose of making compounds to describe something complex or abstract (e.g. van-chteme “lexicon,” literally “word list”). Due to the specificity of these words, many were created to describe a single situation or anecdote and never used again.
As for the effects of PIQ’s logistics, in order to prevent conflicts of interest between the DM and the character they play when they are not DM, their player is temporarily removed from the game and explained in-game as a mysterious disappearance. During asynchronous play, some players were simply unavailable while others conversed. When the player character who coined a word was unavailable, the word’s meaning could shift dramatically in their absence. For instance, xoo, originally meaning “rock or stone”, shifted to mean “wood” because of this circumstance.
Attachment issues to starting languages
In the conpidgin experiment that preceded PIQ, Pidgin Game v3, players were split into two groups, Mili wu and Sampinko, where each group made its own simple conlang with Minecraft-related vocabulary. The goal was to pidginize the two languages while playing Minecraft. When players of different groups met each other in-game, a massive problem arose: the players had spent so much time making a conlang they liked that they resisted mixing it with the other group’s language.
A common occurrence was for Player A from one group to teach their conlang’s word for an object to Player B from the other group, followed by Player B responding with the word from their own group’s conlang, then both players continuing to use their own group’s word without compromise.
Additionally, since Minecraft requires no cooperation (and could easily be played as a single player game, even on a multiplayer server), each group essentially self-segregated because they found it hard to communicate with the other group.
To avoid this problem, PIQ players were instructed to pull only a small starting vocabulary from an existing language they did not know or have any attachment to. Players were also told not to dive too deep into its grammar, except to select one language feature from it they wanted to introduce into the pidgin. With significantly less attachment to their starting languages, PIQ players were much more willing to adopt each others’ words and grammar than in Pidgin Game v3.
Problems for new and returning players
In order to best simulate a real-world pidgin creation scenario, most of the SCC’s conpidgins disallowed players from talking about or documenting the pidgin in English. PIQ also began with this restriction, but as time went on, players who returned after an extended absence found it difficult to adjust to a language that developed without them.
New players who joined during the middle of the game also had a hard time introducing words, as they would propose a word for something the pidgin already had a word for and be corrected each time, which made the game feel less welcome.
In the middle of the game, PIQ tried to fix this problem initially by gathering everyone at the end of each synchronous play session to identify words people more-or-less agreed on the meanings of and document them in English. In the following weeks, even a reference grammar was compiled. This came too late, however; poor dissemination of the documentation to players combined with the inertia of rejoining the game after already failing to do so caused activity to dwindle and the decision to end PIQ.
Designing the next pidgin game
In order to solve the problems we encountered in previous pidgin experiments, we devised a fairly lean set of rules to apply to our next Pidgin Game, PidginCraft, which is played in Minecraft with a different set of rules than Pidgin Game v3.
Synchronous sessions only
Players failing to keep up with the pidgin’s development during their absence was a major pain point for new and returning players. Restricting it to synchronous sessions that are scheduled ahead of time makes it easier for players to be present throughout the development of the pidgin, at the cost of slowing it down.
Unusual goals as talking points
Since providing in-game goals was very helpful for providing conversation topics, the person in charge of running PidginCraft (currently Dejvid), creates a new list of goals for each player to accomplish for each session. These goals are intentionally obtuse to prevent people from accomplishing them by accident, such as “Bury a barrel in a hole at least 2 blocks deep and not visible.”
To prevent the single-player effect of Pidgin Game v3, players are told about the goals of other players but not their own, requiring players to communicate to determine which advancement they need to complete.
Enforcing in-world boundaries
To keep players together, the initial world spawn is set to an island large enough for people to gather resources but small enough that players are forced to be together and create a town together.
For the first few sessions only, a hard world border is in place, planned to be dropped after the player town has been settled so that activities that require exploration (such as finding an in-game End Portal) can be done.
No starter languages
Since the actual function of the starting languages in PIQ was marginal, other than providing a modicum of lexicon and some phonological material to work with, we decided to try foregoing starter languages altogether to simplify things.
Although the lack of starting languages to mix makes it more of a language genesis game rather than a pidgin game, the spirit of wanting to spontaneously create a new language remains intact while significantly reducing prep time for new players. As a bonus, it makes the bar of entry literally zero for new players in the first session.