NURA YAMAN (‘COUNTRY SPEAKS’): LANGUAGE, PEOPLE AND PLACE IN SERIOUS GAMES

Layered Horizons is a series of serious virtual reality (VR) games [1] that entice users to playfully explore linguistic information across the Asia-Pacific. This essay focuses on Barrawao, a version of the game based on the region now known as Sydney, Australia—a region consisting of complex language ecologies, in which speakers are often multilingual in a variety of traditional languages, and are connected to this traditional linguistic landscape through protocols, beliefs, and identity. This essay argues that interfaces for games generally are influenced by a ‘monolingual mindset’ [2] which leads to simplistic models of language, with each mapped to a single region. Games are localized by swapping one language for another, without regard to cultural considerations or the realities of the Country (e.g. people, place, linguistic and cultural environment) in which the languages are embedded. Translations of game content and interfaces are often generated by machine learning or other automatic processes which, disconnected from context, can reproduce frameworks of colonialization and globalization. This essay considers the interrelationships between machine, human, language and environment, and discusses the ethical and practical impacts of machines mediating between language and Country. We argue that, if co-created with people who have a deep knowledge of the physical and linguistic landscape, VR provides opportunities to mitigate a potential disconnect, through the embodied experience of the game––the literal use of the body as an interface––and the recreation of place in a virtual world to provide critical context for language. We relate the responsibilities people have to their Country in the physical world with the responsibilities we have to our machine worlds of code and data, and connect this to the concept of Data Sovereignty

Meeple Centred Design: A Heuristic Toolkit for Evaluating the Accessibility of Tabletop Games

Evaluation of accessibility within a tabletop context is much more complicated than it is within a video game environment. There is a considerable amount of variation in game systems, game mechanisms, and interaction regimes. Games may be entirely verbal, or completely non-verbal. They might be real-time or turn based, or based on simultaneous actions. They can be competitive or co-operative, or shift from one to the other during a single game session. They might involve visual pattern recognition or force players to memorise game state without visual cues. They may involve touch, or smell. They might involve social deduction or betrayal. They can encompass all sensory faculties, in differing degrees. Almost all games have accessibility considerations that should be taken into account, but there is currently no comprehensive tool by which this can be done that encompasses the rich variety of tabletop gaming interaction metaphors. In this paper, the authors discuss the heuristic lens that is used by the Meeple Centred Design tabletop accessibility project. This is a tool that has been applied to one hundred and sixteen games to date, and the full results of these have been published for analysis and consideration within the wider tabletop gaming community

Knowledge for games, games for knowledge: designing a digital roll-and-move board game for a law of torts class

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Barrawao

Barrawao seeks to bring about an understanding of the deep connection between Language and Country in an embodied and experiential manner. Barrawao can be translated as “to fly or to make haste” from the D’harawal language