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Gibberish

October 21st, 2008

Some improvisational scene games require that the perpetrators speak entirely in gibberish. This typically happens during guessing games, when a team of people are trying to get a guesser to repeat clues given by the audience using only gibberish and mime. The role of the gibberish is twofold. First it carries information to the guesser through the inflection and emotional content the actors add to it. Second, it keeps the scene from being completely fucking boring. Seriously, when we don’t gibber, it looks like a mime convention. Disgraceful.

I am not good at gibberish. Whenever I try to come up with language-like babble on the fly, it sounds like a baby having a vowel-movement with some spanish for flavor. It sounds bad, and is hard to impart emotional drive to. This is embarrasing (to me).

So, naturally, I’ve been looking at the problem from a computer science perspective.

Two approaches suggest themselves[1]: real time gibber generation, and pre-cached gibberish.

Real time gibberish generation was my first approach. While coming up with custom tailored gibberish to suit the scene sounds flexible, and appropriate, it doesn’t work for me. I wind up thinking too hard about what gibberish I’m going to use instead of focusing on the scene, objectwork, and what everyone else on stage is doing. Badness.

The other option is to pre-cache your gibberish; to have a pool of pre-prepared gibberish words to call on without having to think too hard. From a CompSci perspective, it’s a great way to meet timing deadlines in a computationally intensive real time application. Yes, I actually think like this.

Fortunately for me, and maybe others, computer scientists have already addressed this problem. For EA’s The Sims, they wanted to make their little sim-people sound like they were talking, without having to worry about it getting repetitive, or boring. So they made something now known as SIMLISH. Simlish is designed to be untranslatable; the words spoken do not really correlate to english words. After ten years of development, this seems to be the world’s premier gibberish.

Wait. I just realised that you might not be on board with me yet. Let me convince you in the traditional internet manner: a youtube video.

I actually like the simlish version of this song a LOT better than the original, and I’ve managed to use some of the language in it to good effect on stage.

So, assuming that you’re convinced, you must be asking yourself, “Self, how can I learn to babble in simlish?”[2] Well, I borrowed a list of Simlish phrases from the internets, and stripped most translation material from it.
Simlish

My thinking is that by learning about three minutes of simlish dialog, I’ll be set for whatever medium length scenes come along. Your results may vary.

[1] This sounds far more erudite than[3], “I’ve thought of two methods.”
[2] Nobody is asking themselves this question.
[3] Although it can’t match the phrase, “The text deconstructs itself,” for sheer wankery

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