Diegetically Grounded Evolution of Gameworld Languages

©2016 Authors. Personal and educational classroom use of this paper is allowed, commercial use requires specific permission from the author. ABSTRACT We present perhaps the first exploration of the procedural generation of gameworld languages, meaning fictional languages spoken by characters in a game’s diegesis. This preliminary work takes a simulation-based approach in which languages are represented abstractly, using a vectorial scheme, and evolve over simulated game time as the emergent byproduct of diegetic agent interactions. While this method does not produce concrete languages with surface representations and rules, the abstract vectors that it does produce still provide interesting authorial affordances, which we discuss. Moreover, as an operationalization of linguistic theories, particularly Labov’s incrementation model, we position our work as a potential contribution to the computational modeling of linguistic phenomena.