Rundisc

Constructing Civilizations: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of Fictional Languages in Chants of Sennaar

This study applies Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis to the five fictional languages of Chants of Sennaar, a 2023 language-puzzle game, asking how the languages convey meaning through cross-modal cues and how they construct and naturalize ideological positions and power relations within the game's civilizations.

• The study applies Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis to the five fictional languages of Chants of Sennaar, a 2023 language-puzzle game, arguing that its linguistic systems shape how players understand the cultures they encounter rather than serving only as puzzles.
• Using the Bardic system as its representative case, the analysis finds that observation is the primary decoding pathway, with designers layering visual, verbal, and spatial cues, while analogy becomes dominant as linguistic complexity rises, with undeciphered inscriptions mirroring decoded counterparts.
• Two discursive mechanisms construct cultural ideology in the game: labeling, which attributes fixed characteristics to groups (linking Bards with beauty, Warriors with violence, and slaves with intellectual inferiority), and orientational metaphors, in which verticality maps onto social value.