文字游戏 - Word Game
2026, Game (Demo), Creative Coding using html, css
Created for Tech Core: Useless Machine Taught by Professor Blair Simmons
In Progress
Growing up in China, I spent years learning to orient myself toward English through school, through studying abroad, and eventually through the work I make. Somewhere along the way, I internalized the assumption that my work should be legible to English-speaking audiences. 文字游戏 was a way of questioning that. What if, for once, I made something for Chinese speakers instead?
The project grew out of research into esoteric programming languages, systems built to be intentionally strange, expressive, or culturally specific. An article featuring artist Jon Corbett made me think differently about who gets to access a system, and why. That question became the foundation: what happens when the gatekeeping mechanism isn't a password or a skill check, but a language?
The game is only fully playable if you can read Chinese. That's not an oversight, it's the point. Rather than translating or accommodating, I wanted to build something that treats linguistic familiarity as a condition for entry. The experience you have depends entirely on what you bring to it.
Structurally, the game borrows the logic of programming. Text behaves like code: there are conditional branches, semantic progressions, and if/else relationships embedded directly into the language. Transformations like 人 → 从 → 众 (one person, two people, a crowd) work as both wordplay and logical steps.
The narrative itself resists a single stable version. Small changes in wording, tone, or structure send the story in different directions: rain arrives or it doesn't, rest becomes alertness, a scene shifts in feeling based on a single character. It reads like a system of possibilities rather than a fixed sequence.
What started as a midterm project turned into something more obsessive. Building the game felt like playing it: iterative, demanding, and weirdly satisfying. I described the process at the time as "enjoyable torture," which still feels accurate.
At its core, 文字游戏 is about what's preserved when translation is withheld, and what that reveals about who we assume our work is for.
Mar 04 2026 In Progress