Full Episode Transcript:

Charlie Melcher:

Hi. I'm Charlie Melcher, founder and director of the Future of StoryTelling. Welcome back to the FoST podcast.

The best stories make you see the world in a new way. Today, I'd like to introduce you to a pair of storytellers who are changing their audiences' worldviews through brilliant innovation in an unlikely form. Tabletop games.

Their studio is called Thorny Games. Kathryn Hymes, one half of the studio, holds a masters in linguistics from Stanford. Her partner, Hakan Seyalioglu has a PhD in mathematics from UCLA with a focus on cryptography. Between the two of them, they create mind bending games that force players to use language in new ways and confront head-on how language shapes our reality.

In a sense, Kathryn and Hakan are more systems designers than storytellers, creating the rules and backdrops for powerful group storytelling experiences that probe the roots of human psychology and communication.

For their groundbreaking work in game design, Thorny Games has received awards and recognition from IndieCade, the Indie Game Awards, and the ENNIE awards to name just a few.

And as you'll learn later in this episode, they're now taking their storytelling and game design prowess outside the realm of entertainment, collaborating with major universities to build gamified experience in is that promote recovery from debilitating psychological conditions such as aphasia. It's my great pleasure to welcome Kathryn and Hakan to the FoST podcast.

Kathryn, Hakan. Welcome to the FoST podcast. I'm so delighted to have you here with me today.

Kathryn Hymes:

Oh, we're so excited to be here. Thank you for having us.

Hakan Seyalıoğlu:

Yeah. Thank you so much for having us.

Charlie Melcher:

So you are indie game designers. I want to start by asking you about games you played as children. Was there a special game that you developed just with your parents or your family? Did you start making games as little kids with your folks?

Kathryn Hymes:

I know that I did. There's a game. It was called Puppy. It was a LARP. I was the puppy and there was an elaborate birthday present opening ceremony that I would have my mother walk through in order to get me to take a bath. And we would do it again and again. I would be the puppy, she would have her birthday. She would open the box routinely, this would be me and a hamper. And then eventually, I would woof like a little dog and end up in the bath.

Hakan Seyalıoğlu:

To violate the canonical "yes, and" rule, mine was a little different. Even though I played a lot of games as a, as a child, I didn't get to really making any until I was an adult. And I think most of the time when you have creator stories, they've been doing these things since they were like little inklings in their parents' eyes, but I didn't start until much later. And yeah, it was just a different experience for me.

Charlie Melcher:

I asked because when I was thinking about this and thinking about how important games are in our lives as we develop as children, I thought of a game that my family developed, which I loved it was called... Kathryn, it was very similar to yours. It was called Lump in the Bed.

On weekend mornings, my sister and I would lie as flat as we could underneath the covers in my parents' bed, and my mom would pretend that she was making the bed and trying to flatten out the blanket. And of course, there'd be some lumps in the blanket that she would then have to push and tickle and we would do our best to lay flat and not giggle to give away that we were there. And then at some point, there'd be a big reveal also, like yours.

Okay. So from these home, early influences, jump forward. What made you all decide to start Thorny Games?

Kathryn Hymes:

It started first as players. We found ourselves just being game players. And I think we both have kind of long history as players. We are life partners outside of being game designers and on our very first date, we played a board game called Battlestar Galactica, which is a big one. Big, meaty game. So that kind of started a shared connection between us, from the beginning of our own connection.

And I'd say what really was the instigating point, the impetus, was finding a community. We went to one of the biggest, or maybe the biggest, game convention for tabletop games called Gen Con in Indianapolis. Gen Con is sort of a strange convention in that it's like a music convention of all different kinds of musics or games. And within that broad, broad sphere, we found an amazing little corner called Indie Games On Demand, where there was this movement of storytellers that were really about the indie story gaming community. We fell in love very quickly. And that then became the impetus to start playing games like this and slowly making them.

Hakan Seyalıoğlu:

We had played stuff like Dungeons and Dragons where it was a role-playing type game, but that was following a very set formula and one that you kind of dealt with because you got to tell a story. But I'm not that excited about going into a dungeon and killing a bunch of stuff. Given the option, that's not how I'm going to spend my weekend. We always wanted to create something. And then we found that by bringing a lot of our own history and voices into the process, we're able to make something that resonated with some amount of folks.

Charlie Melcher:

Well, I'm seeing a little bit of a pattern here of games being connected to emotions and love and family and maybe also just some learning about life together. Do you think about that? Are those important parts of why we play games and what influences your game design?

Kathryn Hymes:

Absolutely. Even going back to our basic examples that we just spoke about of games in childhood, people play. It's one of the very first instincts they have as living, alive things, as beings. Animals do it, people do it. And it certainly has been a part of our shared history in building a relationship and really leading bigger lives. By playing games, we're getting richer experiences together and with other people. That's pretty cool. It's pretty powerful.

Charlie Melcher:

Right. Tell me about one of your first games. I think it was Sign. Tell us about that game.

Kathryn Hymes:

Yeah. Sign is a game that is in line with our viewpoint as a studio, which is, in a lot of what we make, we're exploring some question about the world or people through language. How we communicate, how it's a reflection of who we are, what we care about, and just the real stories of people and culture, identity, all of that. And Sign is a live-action game, it's a LARP, inspired by a true story. And that is the story of the emergence of Nicaraguan sign language. That is an amazing story because it's about the birth of a language in modern times from the hands of children.

Hakan Seyalıoğlu:

Yeah. And the broad outlines of what happens is that prior to the 1970s, Nicaragua had no formal established form of sign language. If you were deaf, you likely had some signs that you negotiated with your family or folks that you were very close with.

And then there were two schools that were started Managua. And at these schools, a lot of deaf folks from across the country were brought together to try to learn how to lip read and read and write Spanish because the instructors had no training in any form of sign language. They were just trying to teach them according to methods that had worked for other students. What happened was those students, by interacting with each other at recess, finding just through that innate human need to communicate, eventually the teachers couldn't understand what they were saying.

And so they got some linguists down to try to categorize and study what was going on. They had found that what they had was a whole language developed. That was later documented and formalized and that was the official language. We just thought that was a really important story to highlight in the world. And so, we went about making sign, which takes you through a very abstracted kind of journey from going from not being understood because you're not sharing any tools of communications with the other player, to actually being able to have fairly in-depth conversations with each other are just based on these gestures and little signs that you develop over the course of the game together.

Charlie Melcher:

I love that it's also such an embodied form of play that you're talking about. Embodied play and embodied language, sort of an intersection between the two. I take it that you learn a number of signs in the game, and that's what you use to start to communicate and play together?

Kathryn Hymes:

Yeah. What's interesting about the game is that one of the core mechanics is improvised signs. You aren't actually learning any language, you are creating an improvised sort of shared gesture, proto-language, I guess, with the other players. So it is entirely specific to the set of people that are playing in that moment in time. But yeah, so fundamentally, Sign is not a tool to teach any one particular sign language, it's meant to support people in having an experience about what an emerging proto-language could be like.

Hakan Seyalıoğlu:

It's also something they get to share after the game's over. A lot of players will report having these signs that they've developed and they've gained some level of fluency with over the course of the game, just being like their inside language with the other players. After that, it's something they get to share and take with them, even though we kind of leave the story that we told in that session. We leave that behind, but we keep the language that we made.

Charlie Melcher:

Why do you take language as a topic for your games? That's not what I think of when I start to think about the games I've played and loved over the years. And sometimes, they're quite frivolous, sometimes they're adventure or action, but I really haven't come across games that were about language. Why is that such an important topic for you?

Kathryn Hymes:

It's kind of a worldview that maybe we both have based on our backgrounds and lives outside of being game designers. I'm a linguist by training, which is, of course, why we know some of these stories and it helps in kind of dealing with the inner mechanics of gamifying language. Hakan is a cryptographer as well in terms of his background and training. And there's a really amazing overlap in looking at communication language between both of those subjects. And I think that it's always been just a part of how we see the world and kind of an interesting way of getting at very deep, innate things about people, nature, culture, identity that are a little bit around the bend. So you can end up saying interesting things about these basic stories, how we interact, by talking about language that, I think, hits harder or also feels different than if you were to just talk about them directly.

Hakan Seyalıoğlu:

And one thing, just to add to that, fundamentally, when we think of collaborative storytelling together, we're talking about creating something together and making connections with the other people at the table. And language is one of the things that, I think, has been hardwired in us from a very early age as humans, to be one of the ways in which you recognize who you share a common bond with. Like people who you share a common language with people who you share common idioms, ways of speaking, all that's a very real thing that taps right into your brain as to who's your people and who isn't, in some ways. And that was one of the ways that we found that we could really help players develop those relationships and connections with each other at the table very, very quickly.

Charlie Melcher:

You used a word or a term here, Hakan. "Collaborative storytelling". Not everyone thinks of games in the context of storytelling or collaborative storytelling. Can you unpack that for us?

Hakan Seyalıoğlu:

Well, I think one of the main things that people would say about games in terms of how they distinguish themselves from other mediums is that fundamentally, they need to be interactive in some way. And so, you can think of any game as being some collaboration between the player and the creator if it's a single person game or the players in the session as together, making some narrative together, some session of the game. Now that can be either something that's just like the story of how this Monopoly game came to be, like who got Baltic and who got Boardwalk. But it could also be something much more intricate and nuanced and emotional. And so, while all games might be on some spectrum of collaborative narratives, the games that we try to make, and really the games within this indie RPG or sometimes called story gaming spheres, are really about telling those more intense human experiences through the meme of gaming.

Charlie Melcher:

When you say telling, do you mean enabling people to create?

Hakan Seyalıoğlu:

Yes.

Kathryn Hymes:

Yeah.

Hakan Seyalıoğlu:

A hundred percent.

Kathryn Hymes:

Yeah, exactly. Discovering the story together.

Hakan Seyalıoğlu:

Yeah. You give the rules, but every group of player is going to realize those rules into a completely different narrative that is special and unique just to people who are at the table at that given moment in time.

Charlie Melcher:

I love that idea, that they not only have a shared history, but a shared language that they literally... That's the takeaway, is that they now have not just the story of the game, but some bond through language or through sign or... Yeah. It's really a beautiful thing to take away from a game.

Hakan Seyalıoğlu:

Yeah. Sometimes people will call that artifacts of play. A side effect of the game that's manifest itself somewhere else, that then you get to take on with you afterwards.

Kathryn Hymes:

It's always really neat to see how players react to the things that speak to them. And I've seen some great actual physical artifacts that people will make as sort of remnants of the games that they've played of our game. There's a mug that has all of the traces of different bits of language and words that kind of came up organically within their sessions that they share with other people. Or maybe some dictionary that they've put together. But it becomes a treasure and a little trinket as a part of the game lasting beyond the session.

Hakan Seyalıoğlu:

Something that blurs the line between the reality that exists and this shared experience together and the actual reality that you're living in. And that's what those artifacts do.

Kathryn Hymes:

It's a game within a game within life within... Oh! Where does it stop?

Hakan Seyalıoğlu:

I know. It's games all the way down.

Charlie Melcher:

When you think about designing a game, what is that really?

Hakan Seyalıoğlu:

If you find out one day, please be sure to tell us because we're still figuring it out too. Really, fundamentally, I think that there's either a mechanic or a story or something that you want the players to experience, but it can be wildly different things in terms of what actually gives rise to it.

Kathryn Hymes:

I think that the main thing that... Though it is a very rocky path, a thorny path, I guess I would say, to plug our game studio, in the end, somehow you've delivered a rule system that enables people to have an experience that is curated by us in some way, but also co-authored by them. And that is an experience that would be difficult or impossible to have outside of the context of this game.

Charlie Melcher:

It's fascinating to me, because so much of what I think is happening in the world of storytelling today is giving a role to the people formerly known as the audience. And really, that's another way of saying letting them be players. Welcoming them in to co-create, to have a role to play.

In fact, I've even had a lot of debates with friends about what do we call the people formerly known as the audience in an age of embodied and participatory and interactive storytelling. And some people like Janet Murray, in her book, Hamlet on the Holodeck wrote this term called "the interactor", is how she defined this. And I've heard many other attempts at it, but I've always preferred "player" because I think it both suggests the interaction of a gamer and Shakespeare's reference of players as actors on a stage. All the world's stage and all the people merely players upon it.

I really am fascinated by this interaction of play and narrative. And I think game designers are, in a way, the new authors. You are the storytellers of this embodied, three-dimensional, interactive world. Do you think. when you design a game, of yourself as kind of authoring experience?

Kathryn Hymes:

I definitely do. And in fact, co-authoring it as a very basic part too, where you define the areas of definition that the rules are providing and also constrained to find, or at least think about the areas of freedom that you're asking of the player. And a great game will provide the tools that enable you, then, to intuitively have these experiences through the rule system. That's a great game that provides the right degrees of freedom and prompting to enable you to then co-author another experience with either other players or within the game itself.

Hakan Seyalıoğlu:

Yeah. A hundred percent. It's always very interesting though, in terms of, what is the thing that you're actually trying to do? Is it actually having the story that has the most twists and turns that's the most satisfying narrative? Probably not, because a lot of times, that's not going to be a fun thing to play at eight o'clock with a bunch of your friends after you've had a beer or two. There's always other things around the experience that have to go into the equation too, which I always think is a very... One of the most difficult parts about being a game designer is trying to figure out the experience people are actually trying to have, rather than the one that you think they might want to have.

Kathryn Hymes:

I think it has such interesting residue too, for how you interact with other kinds of media. Now, I'm thinking of looking at a book or a movie and thinking of myself as a player. And I'm wondering, do you actually interact differently with the book now, I guess, in this day and age, than maybe you did in the past, given that games are this very basic way that we structure storytelling?

Charlie Melcher:

Yeah. Since starting the Future of StoryTelling, and my background is in books, as you know, and since starting the Future of StoryTelling and thinking about all of these ideas and getting to meet so many fascinating people working in interactive and embodied and immersive and participatory storytelling, we have definitely designed books to be immersive and participatory experiences.

I think traditionally, you think of it as a fixed linear experience written by the author and the role of the reader is simply to read from start to finish. And we've made them now physically very interactive. We did a book a few years ago with JJ Abrams called S and once you take it out of the slip case, it's a book from 1949 and inside, it's filled with postcards and a napkin from the school cafeteria with a hand-drawn map, and a page from the school newspaper and a dial and letters. And there's a whole three-dimensional, tactile experience of reading the novel. There's also handwriting. Two people have written in the book, because they've been commenting on a mystery unfold. Anyway, it is literally a game. It's a participatory journey. And and we think a lot about that now in the books that you to try to make them come alive and provide a different kind of tactile agency for the reader.

I'm also really interested in just how you decide, in effect, what board you're going to play this on when you make a game. And I realize that boards might not be part of it at all. It could be digital. It could be deck of cards. I have a book here that's one of your games. Where do you start in terms of the medium?

Hakan Seyalıoğlu:

I think that it's one of the thing where all the mediums afford a different experience that you're starting off with in some way. The two main mediums I think we work in mostly is the around the table tabletop type play, which is much more like a bunch of players around the table, how you would envision a group of folks who are coming together to play a role playing game after work or something, all getting together to play. Or a LARP, embodied play, where you actually have a space, you're one-to-one in the player or in the character.

Charlie Melcher:

Just to interrupt for a second. In case our listeners don't know, LARP stands for live action role playing game.

Hakan Seyalıoğlu:

A lot of times, the distinction for us ends up being between the two in terms of what board to pick. And I'll say they both do give you much, much different experiences. And I think a lot of it ends up being around the type of experience that we think the players want to have in that moment. So in a lot of ways, the type of story you're telling, the emotional closeness that you want the player to have to the fiction, and other considerations like that really determine for us what the better medium is a lot of times.

Charlie Melcher:

Well, let's talk about dialect. I love that this game, which both comes as a book and a deck of cards, I have the tangible version, starts with this beautiful quote and I'm just going to read it. We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives. And that's a Toni Morrison quote. Why'd you choose that to start this game?

Kathryn Hymes:

Oh, well, I mean, just listen to the quote. Toni Morrison. Fundamentally, this game is exploring a story of people that you define and that helps you define what happens to them, what they care about, how they change. And you do that through language. And the language becomes a way to understand, to reflect, to influence even what happens to them. And it becomes a really intimate record and almost organism that is a part of a community that you're defining.

Hakan Seyalıoğlu:

And in a lot of ways and how the language is the core of the gameplay in the game itself and dialect, I think the way that the quote also ties language to being the core of what it means to be human was a connection that may be perhaps too grandiose, we saw within ourselves and the quote itself in some humble way.

Charlie Melcher:

Well, you can be humble, but this has won a lot of awards, this game. So I think it's been really acknowledged for its beauty and innovativeness. But I am really touched by the fact that even the subtitle of the game, "A game about language and how it dies," that really, this is about the loss of language. This is inspired by the fact that we lose indigenous languages at some incredible rate, just like species now. Did you do this game in order to draw attention to that cause, to that problem?

Kathryn Hymes:

I think one outcome of that was to draw attention. There's two things, I think, that come to mind. One is there's the experience of language change that we all have as people. And that a lot of play in the game is really rooted in what it means to have an in-group little slang with other students at school or what it means to be someone who was born in a particular place and time, and so, you are... I have the dated speech of the '90s that will leak through what I say and will continue with me. And so, we all have those kinds of personal stories of either language identity and change that we've experienced.

But in a much broader scale, like you were saying, there's this a growing lack of diversity and a move to monoculture that has happened at a massive scale and continues to happen through the forces of globalization, of the internet, of the powers seated in very specific immovable places. And one effect of that is a sameness and a loss of language diversity in the world. And so, this game, through maybe shining a light at some of the experiences that many individuals may have just through language change or through their own experiences as speakers, even if they aren't speakers of an endangered language, is meant to help provide some degree of light or context on what is a broader and real phenomenon.

Charlie Melcher:

And you touched on something that's fundamental to storytelling in general, which is it's kind of a safe way to try on a lot of different hats. To experience the world from other people's viewpoints. I'm never going to be a knight and shining armor, but I might enjoy those stories. And it makes me think of one of the guests that we've had on the podcast, Brian McDonald, who wrote a book called Invisible Ink. And he has, as his thesis, that stories have evolved and we have evolved as story animals, people who respond so well to stories because they have survival information in them. Do you think that games play a similar role? Do you think games have survival information? Or what is the role of games?

Kathryn Hymes:

Yeah, I think games, as we talked about even at the very beginning, are innate to us. To play is innate to us and I think it helps us learn and it helps us explore. It helps us try things and it helps us become something. And to play is to feel alive. What is the opposite of play? To be really static and sad. Even a conversation is a little bit of a back and forth. And I approach this, think we all approach this, with a playfulness in it to see where it goes.

Hakan Seyalıoğlu:

Yeah. It's all about having a space where you can experiment and tell stories and experience these different things and functions in a way that's safe, in a way that's contained to the session itself. Where the consequences are limited, hopefully, to that one moment or session in time. And that's incredibly important, I think, historically and evolutionarily, for how people developed.

Charlie Melcher:

Yeah. Literally, I think about that ancient image of our ancestors sitting around the fire and telling a story of the day's adventures and having that common experience and language and having it be embodied. You are recreating that when you gather a group of friends after work around a table, around a game to create a story together, to create an experience together. That type of game-making co-authorship is about connection and finding a common language and bringing people together over things that are meaningful and shared. And really, might be just what we need in the world today is a lot more people playing Thorny games.

Kathryn Hymes:

Hear, hear!

Charlie Melcher:

Great to be with you both. Play on.

Kathryn Hymes:

Yeah.

Charlie Melcher:

Look forward to seeing you soon and can't wait to be around a table and getting to experience some games together at some point.

Hakan Seyalıoğlu:

Looking forward to it.

Kathryn Hymes:

Yeah, same.

Charlie Melcher:

My sincere thanks to Kathryn and Hakan for joining me on today's show. You can learn more about their work and purchase any of the games discussed in this episode by visiting the link in the episode's description.

Thank you for listening to the FoST podcast. I hope you enjoyed it. And if you did, I'd really appreciate if you give us a review. FoST also produces a monthly newsletter filled with valuable information for storytellers of all kinds, as well as our recommendations for cool, immersive stories you can experience in person and online.

You can subscribe for free by visiting the link in this episode's description or on our website at fost.org. The FoST podcast is produced by Melcher Media, in collaboration with our talented production partner, Charts and Leisure. I hope we'll see you soon for another deep dive into the world of storytelling. Until then, please be safe, stay strong, and story on.