Gata Guressi: Even the Universal Language of Mathematics Can be Lost in Translation

Gata Guressi by @elliotgmann.bsky.social is a game demo whose story is setup simply. You need to search for your sibling who went AWOL in a multicultural interplanetary trade port, but you only know one of the several fictional languages in the solar system, so you receive a translator device to help. You (the player) are translating the dialogue in the conlangs. Cue Act 1.

Yet I find myself Beholden to it in a way I haven't felt in a very long time. The fact that I encountered it, therefore, is a sign. An implicit as-SIGN-ment to use everything at my disposal as a Secondary to ensure it resonates with as many people in this world as it can despite the odds.

⚠️ SPOILERS
From this point I am going to assume you played this thing. BECAUSE YOU NEED TO PLAY IT.
I will now proceed to GUSH about why this demo MUST enter the Cultural Lexicon or so help me.

Here Comes the boyyy~🎵 Hello boy 🌼

The main character himself is genuinely a joy to see in action and the single most compelling part of the story. I'm just going to list some of the things that made me fall in love with him, because I can count his army of simps on one hand and that needs to change.

NOTE: Some of these character traits are found via inspecting small objects on the spaceship. While I appreciate that they're optional, they probably should have been less missable; especially on a first playthrough.

Dude's envious of a foreign mattress

I adore Quuvol discovering creature comforts for the first time. Like he sees the bed on the ship and immediately think of the comfy mattress Satol brought with him. I hope you got to sleep on your sibling's bed in that week he was away; you deserve it.

Me Recognize My People

Most people's names in our world tend to "sound like" they come from a particular culture. In a science fiction universe where everyone speaks a conlang, this is not readily apparent. But your home planet's culture has a very simple convention where masculine names end in -ol and feminine names in -il. So the player can recognize someone from our planet just as readily as Quuvol can. Him saying "You are Guressi too!" carries ludonarrative resonance corresponding with our recognition.

I WILL NEVER LET ANYTHING BAD HAPPEN TO YOU EVER.

A major part of the Lore™ in the demo is that the rulers of Guressen were doing slavery until two years (uh, whose years?) ago, and then the ruler's son killed their father, took power, and put a stop to it. Quuvol and his family were living in hiding in an underground lake for basically their whole life, and being able to come out means they clearly revere the new leader as a savior. As he's thinking about his past, we get this line:

"I don't want to think about the lake."

and I just want to reach through the translator's holo-screen and give this man a hug, dammit.

Well done, this lad lives in my head rent-free now. Absolute total sweetheart.
I have only had User::Quuvol for two months but if anything happened to him I would kill everyone in this room and then myself.

You Get to BE the translator device!

Now as a computer scientist and mathematician, another thing that stood out is that the core mechanic is basically the player LARP'ing as a machine translation AI0. We have a list of words and a set of grammar rules for putting them together (aka an algorithm), and the gameplay involves applying those rules. YOU are the AI acting as Space Google Translate, and Quuvol is our user typing in his earpiece.

Not a true Chinese Room, but...

It calls to mind the Chinese Room Problem0. But the core premise of that thought experiment is that the agent in the room cannot understand the foreign language because they only have "syntax", which is the set of rules... but not "semantics", which is a lived experience interacting with the outside world to correlate those rules to.

But that's not quite this game, because we are also Quuvol. They are the semantics, it is the syntax. Gata Guressi has two player... entities. The translator may not be a "character", but it is somewhat autonomous. Presumably the device has a camera and mic since it can parse speech and writing; and we're mounted on our user's eyebrow seeing and hearing everything he does. And when the player starts to take that experience into account when choosing how to translate things...

(Yes, the full game will have story branches based on how something was translated! I'm excited! GIVE ME that gameplay-story integration!)

And somehow this was a total accident!

Apparently the developer didn't intend to depict machine translation. HOW?? Like actually HOW did you do this by accident?

On an intuitive human scale, the gameplay is a very, VERY, elegant metaphor for it. The grammar rules and words are written in an intermediate "English" layer that doesn't exist in the setting. If someone in Hierre opened the hood and saw us operating in "English", they'd see a made-up language that only the player computer understands. The "English" words might as well be a stand-in for the huge vectors that real-world translators represent the sentence fragments as0. But to everyone else... it might as well be a hidden layer.

Modern AI is a fuck-ton of applied Math. The Linear Algebra, statistics, programming, however, are flattened away in the game, how? Likely because the developer didn't recognize the equations for what they were and transcribed a bunch of colorful metaphors in its place. Seeing this, I realized a lesson that took me an embarrassingly long time to learn...

...and yet the point still gets across just fine. The game doesn't need to have that sentence verbatim, for it Speaks it at its core more clearly than any words can convey.

Critiques

No game is perfect, 'specially those in their rough draft demo phase. But these are flaws that I believe will be ironed out come release time when (yes, when) it must captivate a giant fandom

Unfortunately it's still 50 percent Star Trek

Since the main character's native language is a conlang, the game magic-subtitles Guressca into "English" when Quuvol is talking with another person speaking the same language, or in his internal monologue. But it also magic-subtitles it when the player is doing the translating. We translate to and from "English", which is then presumably magic-ed to and from Guressca offscreen by the same science fiction bullshit engine that powers Star Trek. You see the problem here, right?

The game's core mechanic about Not Having a Science Fiction Magic Translator is half science fiction magic translator. So by the end of the demo, you realize Guressca was the only language you never translated and Quuvol was the character you understood the least the whole time.

Oh heellllll no. I went in, did a second playthrough, and attempted to output Guressca directly to him instead of letting the offscreen Star Trek logic do it. And we can't do that; we have to use the intermediate "English" layer. The Star Trek translator is fine during conversations the MC has with other Guressca speakers, but it HAS to at least allow you to translate to and from Guressca directly when we're doing the gameplay.

Character art needs a Lot of work

Also it's in dire need of an experienced character artist. Characters don't emote and their animation in cutscenes is very stilted. Since everyone speaks a conlang the art and animation should rely more on expressive faces and body language. But that might not be feasible for a solo dev, I get it. Fortunately as a Muse Hunter my Charge is to assist in securing resources like this. And this I shall do.

ALL of this is meaningless without our User

This specific type of worldbuilding has a name — conlanging. The art of building whole grammars and vocabularies for a fictional universe, largely the domain of those who disappear deep down the special interest rabbithole of theoretical linguistics. Sometimes there's no fictional universe involved at all, they really just wanted to make up a language that badly.

Conlanging on thin air does not appeal to me at all. It's a bunch of meaningless tokens with a bunch of pattern matching applied to it; and I'd rather just watch foreign media with subtitles on. Yet I found myself going in, doing a second playthrough, and parsing the Guressca rules anyway. Because Quuvol was real to me at that point. I cared about him. I wanted to understand him. And in order to do that, well...

Meta-Narrative: Heart of Cobalt

This is kind of fanfic-y, but I needed to write it. I'll go on a minor tangent. In the game Cobalt Core (spoilers btw), the roguelike loops were revealed to inadvertently be caused by a spacetime crystal alien about to emerge from its science fiction "egg". They're otherworldly and powerful. Yet they delay their own "hatching" to save the crew trapped in its spacetime crystal because they... pretty much imprinted on them.

The translator may (or may not) be an AI, but it's not the fake science fiction version of AI. It's just a bunch of complex programming, and that's all it is. It only gets to truly see the world after being turned on for the very first time. And then...?

Joute iego last wegoest jouloul kil dlou-laugo. Kil bugo joute.0