Towards Assigning Meaning to Language

A while ago on a private discord I spent some time articulating one of the central concepts of intuitive game design: that you enter into a dialog with the game you are creating, and this conversation guides and shapes the design. While I believed at the time, that the dialog was essential with a mental construct of the game that you held in your mind and therefore just an example of self-talk, it occurred to me today that the game design process met the conditions needed for a game design to be a language and therefore had more external agency than I had previously thought.

What do I mean by "conditions needed to be a language". Gödel aside, many game systems may appear language-like, but are ultimately just symbol processing: a language requires self-referentiality. Human communication has existed for some 2 million years, but it was only the evolution of recursive elements some 70,000 years ago that enabled what we recognise today as languages (see The Romulus and Remes hypothesis). A designer's ability to alter the game design is similarly self-referential, the addition and change of game rules are the kind of metaphoric extensions that we see occurring in natural languages.

My realisation today is that by considering a game design to be a natural languaage, the design in turn influences the designer's perception (the weak Sapir-Worf hypothesis) in ways that are not under the control of the designer.

Why are games so good at assigning meaning to symbols -- a 4 kilobyte roguelike can give layers of meaning to a single ASCII symbol ----, while much more complex and process intensive systems like LLMs fail so miserably at this? I now suspect that it's this linguistic design layer that the game grows itself from that gives games much of this power.