Shifting Tongues

After making the tarot cards, I wanted to see how people use codes at all, specially if it is changing and evolving while being used. For this, I decided not to create a complex prototype, and instead play a simple word based communication game. I developed a coded communication game called Shifting Tongues, in which the language keeps changing, while players have to try and communicate the given message to each other, while hiding it from the authority. Here is my first version of the game.

The Code

A sample game for us to try. I created starter words for three rounds:

The Court of Kings flavour

I created an alternate version that would be more fun. This has a bit of atmosphere and fun to create context and make the game more interesting.

Playtesting

Video - Shifting Tongues (click this link if video below doesn’t work)

We played the first round online, and I decided to take part in the conversation, but while being an observer.

In the first round, Hannah decided to be the authority, and set some rules. We would be talking about pizza, and we had to say ‘bro’ before and after every sentence, making things very interesting, and difficult! Swarna received the secret message, and the game began! The rules set by the authority made it very difficult to play as everyone had to focus on them. This was perfect, and the authority was doing their thing. The dissenter tried passing out the message in a few different ways, and only a few words from the message were picked up.

It was immediately evident that the game was too complicated, so we decided to simplify it to have only two codes, the indicator and the shifter. We played a few more rounds, and had interesting authority rules, like holding the nose while speaking, and good attempts by the players.

After this session I decided to reduce the confusion and keep only the two codes from the beginning of the game for an offline playtest session. I also removed the authority’s rule setting and kept it to deciding the topic of the conversation. The playtest was in the evening when everyone got done with their work and everyone was tired, which added to the overall confusion.

Alejandra decided to be the Authority for both rounds, and did not set any fixed topic or rule, showing herself to be a very benevolent authority. The dissenters did a good job, with commoners figuring out a few words, and almost reaching the answer in one of the rounds.

Despite very good attempts by the commoners, the authority won yet again. Throughout both the online and offline playtests, no one was able to use the shifter to communicate, except blue pasta. Although it was fun, the game was too complicated, and difficult to understand. It was also such that the players were hardly able to communicate without giving away the identity of the source.

It turned out that it was still too difficult, and that my idea for the evolving encoding may not be the best one.

Later at night, we went have a few beers after the playtest, and played a game where the group decides a rule, and one person does not know and has to figure out what rule it is. It could be tapping your beer twice after drinking, or everyone drinks when anybody touches their hair, etc. It was suggested by someone else, and was great to see because it worked much more smoothly than my game. Some rules were figured out, but some were impossible to figure, like the hair one. The person guessing figured out that we were sipping our beers at the same time, but couldn’t find the cause of the pattern.

For my next test, I would like to simply give the condition of deciding a message and communicating it, without any rules as such and see what happens, possibly I will learn new tricks that could help build an evolving secret language.

With the somewhat failure of Shifting Tongues, it seems the authority has won on this day, but there were many learnings, and with this the language will evolve and transform, and one day we may use it to fight oppressive powers without them even knowing.

I would also like to thank my friends and colleagues who volunteered to playtest:

**Swarna Francesco Hannah Heba Aiman Ayal Max Alejandra Sila Armin**