pieartsy

illustrator, poet, ifiction writer


pieartsy
@pieartsy

The Gostak is a bizarre and wonderful linguistic interactive fiction game that I enjoy inflicting on people. Everyone I've recommended it to, both normal friends and linguists alike, has run away screaming from the opening page. It placed 21st in IFComp 2001 out of 51 entries, won Best Individual Puzzle & Best Use of Medium in that year's XYZZY Awards along with a Golden Banana of Discord, and may be ever so slightly infuriating to play. I love it.

The Gostak has some normal logic puzzles of the type you might expect from IF, but its real puzzle is centered around figuring out what in the fresh hell the game is saying. Like, who is the protagonist?

You are the gostak.

What is a gostak?

The gostak distims the doshes.

Very helpful.


This is actually a sentence, coined in 1903 by Andrew Ingraham, which describes a linguistic phenomenon -- 'Gostak' on Wikipedia. Basically, even if a sentence is made up of words that refer to nothing on their own, we can derive some meaning from the sentence syntax. We can then create grammatically proper variations on that sentence, like so:

The gostak distims the doshes. Ergo, distimming is what gostaks do to doshes. Doshes get distimmed by gostaks.

You can also see this in things like Jabberwocky -- that wabe is chock-full of slithy toves, and by god are those toves gimbling and gyring! I can figure that out despite having no idea what toves or wabes are.

Carl Muckenhoupt doesn't stop at just a nonsense sentence or a few stanzas, though, oh no. He decided to write an entire Interofgan Halpock where you basically get a language immersion experience into this very, very strange world of being the gostak what distims the dosh whatevers -- until they begin to take on meaning in your mind.1 Here's the opening:

Finally, here you are. At the delcot of tondam, where doshes deave. But the doshery lutt is crenned with glauds.
Glauds! How rorm it would be to pell back to the bewl and distunk them, distunk the whole delcot, let the drokes discren them.
But you are the gostak. The gostak distims the doshes. And no glaud will vorl them from you.
The Gostak
An Interofgan Halpock
Copyright 2001 by Carl Muckenhoupt
(For a jallon, louk JALLON.)
Release 2 / Serial number 020305 / Inform v6.21 Library 6/10
Delcot
This is the delcot of tondam, where gitches frike and duscats glake. Across from a tophthed curple, a gomway deaves to kiloff and kirf, gombing a samilen to its hoff.
Crenned in the loff lutt are five glauds.

Woah, this is like...32 new words??? Slow your roll, The Gostak! No no, I lied, keep going, you're fantastic.


  1. This fits into the part of my brain that likes linguistic puzzles and decoding vocabulary via immersion, a la Tork and A Clockwork Orange.


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @voidmoth's post: