Load Bearing Words and the Impact of Language in Games

There are three types of words to watch out for when you're creating cards: Keywords, Terminology and Load Bearing Words. I really want to talk about Load Bearing Words, but let’s go over all three quickly to make sure we’re all on the same page.

Keywords

If you’ve played a CCG you’re probably very familiar with these.

 Keywords are words that have specialized rules associated with them that exist outside the core rules of the game. So in Magic the Gathering these are things like Flying, Vigilance, Prowess.

As a designer, turning something into a keyword allows you to put complicated rules into a small amount of space, but it comes with a cost. Either you have to fill your cards with reminder text or the player has to memorize what all your keywords mean, which makes your game more difficult for anyone trying to pick up it up for the first time and puts a bit more of a mental burden on the players (how many times have you gone to play a game you haven’t played in a while and had to look up a keyword?).

In Cyberpunk Legends we’ve tried to avoid Keywords in the first set as we can do a lot with the core rules without having to make you memorize what a bunch of keywords mean. That doesn’t mean we won’t eventually start to use them. They’re incredibly powerful tools that open up a huge amount of design space simply by removing limits on how much you can fit on a card and giving players something to latch onto so they can easily see mechanical themes across multiple cards.

Just look at the humble Iguana Parrot. This card would be completely impossible to create if they had to write out all the rules for Flying, Vigilance and Prowess on the card. Even if they could fit it all, it would look like a wall of text. By using simple Keyword mnemonics they allow players to instantly understand the card…if they’ve done the work to learn the keywords.

 

Terminology

When making almost any game you will, in your rules, define some words in ways that are specific to your game. A normal word will now become Terminology because you’ve rewritten its definition to include things relevant only when playing your particular game.

In Cyberpunk Legends, the word “put” is a good example. “Put” is opposed to “Play” in this game. When something says to “put” a card into the plan it ignores all of its normal “play” requirements. That means, if a card required that you had Stealth in the plan before you could play it, you could still sneak it in there with a card that let you “put” it into the plan even if you didn’t have any other Stealth cards in play.

So the word “Put” is being used in sentences in the standard way it would be used in English (unlike say Vigilance in the above example) but it has an extra layer of meaning that is only relevant in our game. This meaning is defined in the rule book and just extends the regular definition of the word.

Terminology is great at allowing you to deliver broad mechanical concepts economically on a card and really helps create cards that have embedded rules but are still easy to read because the Terms just inhere in sentences naturally. 

Of course the big problem with Terminology is that it has a lot of the mental load issue of Keywords and it’s even harder to put reminder text around because of the way terms fit into the sentence structure of your cards. Plus, since Terms aren’t as clearly a “special thing” in the way Keywords are, they really depend on people reading the rules…which is always a danger.

 

Load Bearing Words

And finally we get to the thing that got me writing this article in the first: Load Bearing Words.

Load Bearing Words are simply natural language words which have mechanical implications because of the way they’re defined in whatever language you happen to be operating in.

Take, for example, the words “A” and “Another”. If I make a card that says “Add one damage to a card in the plan” it can add that damage to any card, including itself. If I make a card that says “Add one damage to another card in the plan” that card can’t target itself. This isn’t because we made up any special rules or defined “a” and “another” in any special way, but rather because of the inherent way the language works.

And these load bearing words tend to be the ones that trip up designers the most. They’re easy to just miss and it’s also easy to create ambiguous cards with them. 

If I tell you to remove “the biggest” card from the plan, what does that even mean? Biggest what?

So let’s say I get more specific and tell you to remove the one with the highest numerical value on it? Great…except what happens in the case of a tie? “Highest” here is a Load Bearing Word but, because of that, we have to watch it extra closely and make sure that we’re filling in the surrounding sentence with the rigor our card needs.

This becomes even more important when you start thinking about localizing a game. It’s so easy for a translator to swap out Load Bearing Words with similar but not identical verbiage.

Here’s one that’s probably happened to most of you:

In spatial games, I see designers refer to “adjacent” cards all the time when they mean "orthogonal" or “adjoining”. I’m sure you’ve at least once looked at a rule and had to go “wait, does that mean I can move to a diagonal space or not?”  

There’s so many words like that: words that have mechanical implications without the rigorous definition of a Term or a Keyword. We need these. You literally couldn’t build games without the logic embedded in our natural language. But we almost never talk about them when talking about information design.

So this is just an attempt to raise a flag and get people thinking about it. I don’t really have much methodological advice beyond simply going through each card and trying to identify the Load Bearing Words, then asking yourself if they’re the right words, and if they need anything else to add rigor and avoid confusion amongst players.

I hope bringing it up has value, or at least gives you something interesting to think about.

Quick Reference: Game Language and Impacts

I’ll end with a summary of the three categories so there’s a quick reference for people.

 

Blog feature image: Extra Muscle, by POISONP1NK for Cyberpunk Legends /Night Crew Games.