The Soul of Simlish
This gibberish is making sense...
I don’t play many video games. Recently, though, I finished a book about video games and a show based on one.
I like games in theory, and I loved them as a kid. Few things were more enjoyable than jumping into their imaginative worlds and completing the next puzzle/achievement/challenge. Today, I have less free time (don’t we all), and after a long day of accomplishing tasks, I am not at all enticed to pick up a controller and complete virtual tasks.
I’ll say it: gaming feels like work. Some find escape in the prospect of entering new lives in virtual worlds. To me, my physical life comes with enough responsibility; I don’t want the pressure of another one.
Perhaps no game felt like work more than (ironically) one of my childhood favorites: the Sims. In the Sims series, players create virtual characters and direct them through the motions of everyday life. Sims eat, drink, play, go to work, and even clean. My favorite aspects of the games were not the conventional tasks. I never sent my Sims to work. I enjoyed building their outlandish houses and having them play guitar. My players would shred, singing along in Simlish, the games’ gibberish language.
Simlish is a language spoken by voice actors who recorded the original audio samples in grunts and groans modeled on a list of emotions. Fear, excitement, humor—they all come through in Simlish.
“Oh feebee lay!” = I’m hungry!1
“Hoobah noobie?” = What’s up?
“Ya gotta wob’ere! Ya gotta wob’ere!” = Don’t give up! Keep trying!
“Deesh, deesh, deesh!” = Think, think, think!
The language is thoughtful in its origins, if not its vocabulary.
It came from a constraint in the game’s development; in such an open-ended world, there was no way to use English for the dialogue. There would be too many scenarios, too much talk to fit on the storage space of a disk. Some “filler” form of communication was required.
For a period, the game’s creators used real (but unfamiliar) languages—like Estonian. The dialogue was repetitive, but it didn’t matter. If players didn’t know these languages, who would notice?
Meeting the neighbor: “How are you?”
Walking the dog: “How are you?”
Eating a pizza: “How are you?”
As it turned out, early testers noticed.
Players didn’t know the foreign phrases, but the repetition bothered their ears. They sensed an ingenuine quality, even through a language barrier. The Sims’ communication wasn’t believable.
You’d think an unfamiliar language is as good as gibberish. When they realized otherwise, developers turned to real gibberish.
But Simlish did not come yet.
At this stage, developers tried computer-generated gibberish to fill in the game’s dialogue. Still, something didn’t click. The gibberish was equally unintelligible, but players found it more jarring. This computer-speak was more tedious—not less. It lacked human warmth.
Finally, the team pulled voice actors into a studio. They handed the actors a list of emotions and asked them to improvise into the mic.
Thus, Simlish was born.
The sounds that make up Simlish follow no technical patterns. Can you define blursh? Za wonka genava?
But they do communicate something. As you play the game, you follow the emotion of the characters. Their messages are undeniably clear, if not exhaustive.
In my limited study of linguistics (how language works), there’s a basic admission that language is arbitrary. Why does a word like “refrigerator” mean something that “sul sul” doesn’t? Every human language started somewhere, with meaning assigned to various sets of sounds in order to convey a message. But the sounds themselves are not intrinsically communicative. Even when we share grammar and a vocabulary, perfect communication doesn’t exist. We’ve all experienced a message that was heard differently than it was spoken.
At first, this realization can be a slippery slope. If communication is not airtight, we see it as meaningless.
In reality, the intricacy of language speaks to its depth. We humans hold deep and complex thoughts—so much so that they are only imperfectly conveyed. You personally can share a message with your loved ones through a combination of sounds. Through a series of characters, you are reading this message on a screen and hear it in your mind. Pretty wild.
Since I was young, we’ve been told the dangers of communicating in text. “Tone is lost when you can’t hear their inflection,” grownups lectured.
Simlish is a unique case study in the inverse: all tone and no text. And it works. The messages are nonsense, but they’re not meaningless. Filler languages couldn’t fly. Computer-generated gibberish didn’t make sense. But Simlish speaks to the soul.
In the beginning was the word.2 Language is tied to the soul. With a diminished value of it, we diminish ourselves as humans.
Increasingly, computers are writing like people—and people are writing like computers. We seek the straightest path to the clearest meaning, and we wonder why our minds are tired. We hear (and speak) repetitive messages that aren’t our own expression.
Perhaps my purpose in writing is that we’d appreciate the wonder of language—its layers and its oddities—when it’s imperfect and when it means nothing at all.
Some days, this newsletter is gibberish. Where else do you read musings on a fictional language? But it’s our gibberish. I could repeat the same Instagram inspiration or ask ChatGPT to cook something for me. But it wouldn’t sound right.
I’d rather have Simlish with soul.
Simlish is an unwritten language, but fans set out to create their own repositories. Here I cite one such Simlish Dictionary.
Jadosi, shpansa!