As As players explore the New Horizons world, they’re noticing all sorts of fascinating little details, including some that have very practical explanations.
All Animal Crossing games involve traveling to a new place and setting up shop in a broad life simulation where you interact does change some things, like a new crafting system and the ability to terraform, the popular Animalese remains the same…depending what country you’re in.
As players have noticed how different Animalese sounds in Japanese, Polygon consulted linguist Melissa Baese-Berk to find out why this is the case. The answer lies in exactly how these “gibberish” languages are created for video games. From the beginning, developers have used randomized sounds to create languages (this was a boon back when recording real human voices for video games was largely unheard of), basically creating their own fill-in nonsense language – something Baese-Berk calls “Beep Speech.” It was affordable and largely effective.
But this audio version of Ipsum lorem continued to evolve: in the versions of Beep Speech that appeared in the later 1990s and in the early 2000s first release of Animal Crossing, synthetic noises were mashed up to better replicate a normal-sounding type of speech. This was especially common on Nintendo consoles, where game cartridges limited the use of voice acting. In Animal Crossing, Animalese was created using samples of real language that were chopped up and sped up. When New Horizons came along, the game chose to localize this process – because the rhythm, tone, and sounds used in language can differ greatly. The synthetic language Japanese developers create sounds different because the way they understand the rhythm and speed of language is fundamentally different. That’s something gamers can pick up on, even when it’s gibberish. Apparently aware of this psychological effect, Nintendo decided this type of localization was worth it.
It may seem a small effect for so much work, but players do seem to appreciate it as they spawn infinite spiders and explore the game’s other possibilities. After all, a lot of the fun in Animal Crossing is pretending the player is really a part of a growing community with economies and goals all its own. A language that feels “right” to the player helps a lot with that.
Source: Polygon/YouTube
