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. Drawing on existing scholarship that treats created languages as tools for world-building, identity formation, and social control, the work argues that the game's linguistic systems do more than deliver puzzles: they shape how players understand the cultures they encounter. The analysis focuses on the Bardic system as its representative case, examined through a complete gameplay walkthrough and organized across micro, meso, and macro levels of interpretation.

The preliminary findings identify two complementary decoding affordances. Observation serves as the primary pathway, with designers layering visual, verbal, and spatial cues to guide players toward intended meanings, while analogy becomes the dominant strategy as linguistic complexity rises, with undeciphered inscriptions positioned to mirror decoded counterparts. Beyond lexical decoding, the study identifies two discursive mechanisms that construct cultural ideology: labeling, in which relational constructions attribute 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. The analysis notes a tension between the linguistic framing of elevation as legitimate and the spatial design, where dominance is materially encoded through setting, and where gameplay itself can expose and unsettle these hierarchies.

The authors conclude that ideology in the game operates through two distinct processes, procedural persuasion through labeling and procedural contestation through metaphor. Community discourse suggests that players first internalize these ideologies through play and later reflect on, challenge, or resist them, indicating that meaning-making extends beyond the game itself. The study is presented as a preliminary investigation based on a single representative system and one gameplay video, with its broader claims about the full set of five languages awaiting further examination.