There's an amusing comic novel by Andrew Drummond called "A Handbook of Volapuk" (itself a reference to a 19th century textbook of that name). It's about the 19th century Volapuk movement. Volapuk was an early attempt at an artificial language, like Esperanto, but earlier. The novel includes scenes of Volapuk lessons and they are actually accurate, although of dubious practical use.
There is also a set of 3 books by I. A. Richards titled "English Through Pictures.I think it's a useful idea, but the pictures in these books are fairly primitive stick figure drawings.
Are there computer/video games that work on this level, didactic and narrative, as well as having substantial gameplay? I expect there are some with a lot of e.g. military history, but I haven’t played those myself. Of course most games will teach you how to play the game itself, but can they do more while still succeeding as games?
Hack ‘n’ Slash is my best example, it gets across some basic ideas about data structures, gameplay scripting, and cheat methods. But I don’t know how much of that can be picked up purely from the game, since it’s all through stuff the player has to figure out how to do (even with some prompting). You don’t get to learn from watching a character figure it out. Not that one or the other is better, I’m just curious about other examples.
Heaven's Vault is a good one. It's a very indie point-and-click type adventure game with really nice storybook-style visuals and music. You play as an interstellar archaeologist exploring ruins and piece-by-piece deciphering an ancient pictographic language for clues and lore, so as you progress through the game you basically learn this constructed language. I'd recommend it to anyone interested in linguistics/writing systems/Unicode nerds.
Great example! I'd tried playing this but got nervous about making the wrong deductions; my background in reverse engineering (but not linguistics) wanted to keep all options open until I had more data. Definitely need to give it a retry, there probably isn't another game that does as much to involve the player in a story about decipherment.
The Zachtronics game "Exapunks" is amazing. Its plot is a standard cyberpunk story with body modifications and underground networks of outlaws working against corrupt corporations.
Its gameplay is that you write (an extremely simple) assembly bytecode for virtual machines called the "Exa"s, those virtual machines then infiltrate computer systems across the network and perform your program there. The whole thing is visualised as tiny little robotic virus-like creatures, representing the malicious scripts you write, hopping around in an arena representing the network they haunt.
Aside from the amazing and nostalgic story and the obviously educational value of teaching a player the bare basics of assembly programming, there are more subtle educational content being sneaked into the experience. Off the top of my head:
1) The Exa is extremely primitive, it has a single general purpose 4-digit-wide register that can hold decimal numbers from -9999 to 9999 (and occasionally strings), and another one mostly like it but test-and-jump instructions additionally treat it as an implicit second operand, that's it. No stack, no procedures, no nothing. Just 2 registers, and a very simple set of 2 dozen or so instructions. Oh and there's also a limit on the code size, it varies on each level but it's about 100-150 instructions.
2) But the Exa is Turing-complete, because it has a special instruction MAKE that creates a file, files are infinite length comma-seperated list of values, you can only write to it by writing to a special register on the Exa. Juggling values between files and registers is thrilling mental gymnastics.
3) Exas can fork, this is the primary mechanism that gets around code size limitations. Forking works just like OS processes, a new copy of the Exa with the same code is created and the child jumps to a label while the parent falls through the code. I learned and internalised all of this before I knew what 'Process' in the OS sense even means, that's how beautiful this game is. There are even a mechanism for communication between Exas (i.e. IPC), complete with rules about what happens if an Exa writes to the network register and nobody reads it or vice versa.
4) Sometimes you manipulate external devices (neurones, ATM machines, satellite dishes, Etc...) by writing to special registers, just like you manipulate files by writing to a special register, this is yet another sneaky educational bit: the Everything-is-a-file of Linux and Unix OSes, the interface for hardware mimics the interface for files and networks.
Also checkout other Zachtronics games like kohctpyktop, TIS-100, and shenzenIO. Every one of them has something awesome to teach you, but it's Exapunks that burned itself deep inside my brain and heart.
I do love the Zachtronics games. But, to me, they're this new, weird, completely self-contained system to learn, where boring "responsibly engineered" solutions very quickly become infeasible (due to space, limited primitives, and the difficulty of organization). KOHCTPYKTOP is probably the strongest attempt to resemble a real system, but it essentially requires digital logic design knowledge from elsewhere (and if I knew more about chip design I'd probably find it just as unrealistic). The games tend to take themes from real engineering, but few actual mechanics besides testing and debugging (which the player has to get good at on their own). Which is fine, Zach makes excellent puzzle games.
These games also tend to have a very little pre-scripted narrative, which is why I also didn't mention Kerbal Space Program or sims generally. Opus Magnum and Exapunks have more, but it's still just a way of introducing self-contained puzzles, nearly completely disconnected from what the player does. Hack 'n' Slash isn't a great champion at this, either, but it's a little better integrated.
I bounced off Exapunks pretty early, haven't opened the second zine. I'll give it another try, your points about forking and IPC are interesting.
What an edifying article. I love this idea of a fully didactic novel from a genre fiction perspective. Romance novels are strictly formulaic, and borrowing the structure of those to freight with didactism could make this didactic novel thing a huge genre for absorbing facts. One could use the romance novel frame and plug in foundations as plot points.
Practically none. Tolkien went out of his way to avoid using constructed languages in his books, even going so far as to translate character names (‘Frodo’ is really Maura). When he does provide sentences, there is no effort to make them comprehensible to us; even today, there is no complete reference grammar of even his best attested languages. There is certainly no systematic attempt to teach another language, as seen in Shōgun
