XENOLANGUAGE

We talk to Thorny Games’ Hakan Seyalıog˘lu and Kathryn Hymes on ‘Language Gaming’ and their new ‘chatting to aliens’ game, Xenolanguage

Words by Pearse Anderson

The two halves of Thorny Games, Hakan Seyalıog˘lu and Kathryn Hymes, love the world tabletop miniatures and goblins, but you’d be hard pressed to find any games of theirs that fit in that world. Instead they have been designing and releasing awardwinning games that tap into something even more primordial and essential to gaming – language itself. Their past tabletop roleplaying games include Dialect, where players create a new language amongst themselves, and Sign, where players embody deaf Nicaraguan students attending school and slowly building their own sign language. These games have bridged both the ENnie and Indie RPG circuit, where they won awards, but also spaces where tabletop games aren’t as prevalent, like South by Southwest, or university linguistics programs.

Now, Thorny Games is nearing the end of their Kickstarter campaign for their newest release, Xenolanguage, a game inspired by empathetic first-contact films like Arrival and Contact. In Xenolanguage, players roleplay as the biologists, linguists, and government officials tasked with meeting an alien species and trying to understand their communications (which appear on the board through a Ouija-like channelling board and series of glyphs.) Xenolanguage was fully funded within 20 minutes of the Kickstarter going live, and if past games are any sign (no pun intended), Xenolanguage is about to make a splash in the tabletop world. Thorny Games was able to sit down this fall to discuss game design, why science-based gaming matters, and how players interact with their games in different languages.