"Vanishing Voices" transforms the abstract concept of language loss into tangible experiences through a narrative-driven legacy card game. Players become the last guardians of their language, making choices and experiencing losses that mirror real-world language extinction.
Motivated by my finding that my mother tongue, Manipuri, is a potentially vulnerable language according to UNESCO and inspired by Thorny Games' “Dialect”, I designed this game to engage players emotionally through carefully crafted game mechanics.
"Vanishing Voices" transforms the abstract concept of language loss into tangible experiences through a narrative-driven legacy card game. Players become the last guardians of their language, making choices and experiencing losses that mirror real-world language extinction.
Motivated by my finding that my mother tongue, Manipuri, is a potentially vulnerable language according to UNESCO and inspired by Thorny Games' “Dialect”, I designed this game to engage players emotionally through carefully crafted game mechanics.
According to UNESCO’s World Atlas of Languages (WAL), an interactive online tool that documents different statuses of languages around the world, there are ~8324 documented languages, out of which ~7000 are still in use. Of the ones that
are still in use, only 65 languages (0.9%) fall under the “safe languages” category.
Key Challenges and Design Decisons
How do you make language loss feel real and immediate?
The mechanic of physically tearing up a card creates a tangible, irreversible moment that mirrors real language loss.
How do you create personal investment in language preservation?
Players create their own language cards at the start, investing them personally in the preservation of these elements.
How do you use permanent destruction as a feature when it directly conflicts with traditional game replayability?
What began as workshop data analysis revealed a broader usability issue, reinforcing the importance of staying open to unexpected insights. This experience has transformed how I approach user research: