Kynaz miner

The Kynaz Miner Game was designed by Gareth Roberts and Betsy Sneller, in collaboration with game developer and assets artist Hanyu Liu, who—as well as making substantial contributions to game design—put in the practical work to make the game a reality. The project was primarily funded by MindCORE, an interdisciplinary effort at the University of Pennsylvania to understand human intelligence and behavior, with a contribution from SCEW, the Social and Cultural Evolution Working Group at the University of Pennsylvania.

The game was inspired by an experimental study conducted by Betsy and Gareth (available for download here) investigating how language changes. In particular we were interested in how meetings and interactions between people affect how they use language. Do you have friends or family members who changed their language in some way? Maybe when they made new friends, or went to college, or got a new job? Maybe you did yourself! When we use language, we use it to communicate with other people, to tell them news or ask them for things, and so on. But we also communicate social information about ourselves in how we use our words, such as where we're from, or how we identify. Maybe you've noticed that some people pronounce both as if it's spelled bofe, or they don't always pronounce the -r on the end of words like car. This kind of variation is affected by where people grew up, or where they are now, who they hang out with, and who they see themselves as being. And the way people make choices (conscious or unconscious) about all these things can affect how language changes. Our experiment was designed to figure out more precisely how this works, by studying language change in a carefully controlled environment.

In the experiment, we had small groups of four people play a game where they met each other and sent each other messages in an alien language. This was a controlled experiment, but we wondered: What would happen if we let some of the control go! What if, instead of little groups like this, interacting for only as long as we want and with only the people we want, what if we opened up the alien world to larger groups of people? What if we just let anyone drop by and use the alien language to chat with each other as often as they liked? And so, Kynaz Miner was born! As you may know, the game works by having you collect, win, give away, or lose resources in a short series of encounters with other players, conducted using an alien language. The encounters may be with any other player in the game. Every time you start an encounter, the game tries to find someone else to pair you with. If no human players are available at the time you choose, AI players fill in the gap.

We hope you enjoy the game!