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Comment by _hzw | Hacker News Reader

A game idea: you wake up and find yourself in a mysterious land where people speak only Toki Pona. You don’t know why you are there and how to get out of there. In order to go home you have to learn the language and discover the secret of the land through interactions with NPCs.

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A long time ago, a tribe of linguist PhDs settled on the island, because funding for the humanities dried up, and tenure track jobs vanished into myth. They were forced to settle on a remote island because it was the closest place with affordable housing.

Linguistics is in the social sciences, not the humanities.

That's dependent on the country (and even the individual university?) In my experience linguistics are definitely under humanities.

I've had nearly the exact same idea, except the NPCs are explicitly aliens, to explain why they have such different psychology that their language hasn't grown further. Or perhaps Toki Pona is their trade language, or it's a language only children speak, or something of that nature.

You could construct this game entirely through a ChatGPT prompt today

I am sure one can have fun with ChatGPT with this prompt. But making a good game out of it to help others learn Toki Pona would be a great challenge. What game engine? What type of game? How to make the story compelling? The game should progressively replace the main language with Toki Pona as the gamer acquires the language skills, at the end there will only Toki Pona, maybe even the game interface will be completely Toki Pona. It will be a fun project to work on :-)

My first assumption was that this wouldn't need to be more than a text adventure, so my first thought was Twine. But LLMs are literally language-based and (near)-infinitely flexible, and many already are capable of Toki Pona. There are some incredibly elaborate LLM games driven by a single prompt.

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