2019-02-17 The Esperanto of games, Part I

One game to rule them all


Esperanto is a constructed human language created around 1887 by L.L. Zamenhof. It was designed as a universal second language to promote international peace and cooperation. As an educated person, you might know all this already. You might even speak Esperanto, like me. So when I ask, "What is the Esperanto of games?", you might think I'm asking whether there is a kind of glue or interlanguage that binds games together in a ludic synergy — or something like that.

Not quite. For the purposes of this post, I'm referring to the propaedeutic properties of Esperanto. Propaedeutic knowledge is introductory knowledge that makes it easier to study a skill or discipline. For example, children in music programs are often taught to play the recorder before learning another instrument such as piano because the recorder is relatively easy to learn and manipulate, yet all the same principles of music theory apply to it.

It's well known that Esperanto has a pronounced propaedeutic effect on learning other languages. For example, schoolchildren taught a year of Esperanto followed by three years of French consistently speak better French than if they have merely had four years of French instruction. Similar improvement has been shown even for non-Romance languages such as Russian.

Why would this be?

The preparatory teaching [of Esperanto] prepares students to become aware of the essential characteristics of languages, using the international language Esperanto as a model, a language with a clear and simple structure, almost completely regular and, thanks to its agglutinative character, detachable into combinable morphological elements; this model is easy to assimilate and develops aptitude for the study of other languages.[1]

So when I ask "What is the Esperanto of games?", I'm really asking, "Does there exist a simple, flexible, universal game that could have the same accelerated learning effect for other games that Esperanto does for other languages?" Is there one game you could learn that would immediately give you a strategic advantage in every other game you want to play? If not, what would it take to design one?

Next time, I'll propose a couple of candidate propaedeutic games and talk about someone I knew who used one of them to great strategic advantage. Meanwhile, there's a lot to talk about here, so if this topic interests you, please leave a comment with the Comments link below (and check back for responses).