'The gostak distims the doshes': deciphering gibberish-English in a text-based adventure game

Say It Like You Play It

In this episode we discuss Carl Muckenhoupt's challenging 'The Gostak'; a text-based adventure game in which the player has to decipher a gibberish version of English. Hosts Dr. Ibi and Dr. Joe cover topics including:

• How the game works
• Translation as game mechanic
• The syntax of English and what it tells us about the meaning of words
• Verb transitivity, direct objects, and indirect objects
• Thinking of nouns and verbs as building blocks of games more generally

If you would like to play 'The Gostak' youself, you can do so on the Interactive Fiction DataBase: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=w5s3sv43s3p98v45#:~:text=The%20reference%20is%20to%20the,can%20be%20distimmed%20by%20a

Contains some strong (and other type types of) language.

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📚 Resources:

Ingraham, A. (1903). Swain school lectures. Open Court Publishing Company. Available at: https://archive.org/details/swainschoollectu00ingruoft

Ogden, C. K., & Richards, I. A. (1927). The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism. Harcourt, Brace.

Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff, Tenielle. ‘Beyond the Basics: Transitive, Intransitive, Ditransitive and Ambitransitive Verbs’. The Advocate, Feb. 2015, p. 54-55. Available at: https://digitalcommons.csp.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1015&context=lawfaculty

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