I’m in the middle of Guy Deutscher’s “The Unfolding of Language: An evolutionary tour of mankind’s greatest invention” and I’m loving it. It’s about how language evolved incredibly complex grammatical structures (such as Latin’s). One of the core theories of the book is built on is the idea that language, and abstract thought itself, is nothing more nor less than the result of metaphor and its incorporation into everyday language.

A phrase as simple as “I’m going to be here later.” is rife with metaphor. “Going to” as a phrase used to mean that one was literally going somewhere. Over time, due to metaphor, it has transformed into the idea that one will do something as opposed to physically go somewhere. Or, consider this example from the book:

“At the cabinet meeting, ground-breaking plans were put forward by the minister for tough new legislation to curb the power of the unions.”

Every italicized word in that sentence is a metaphor that has been so incorporated into language that we no longer even think of it as metaphor. It’s got independent meaning now and is essentially a ‘dead metaphor’. I’m not going to trace out how that happens, but suffice to say it does.What’s applicable about the idea of metaphor as the driver of language development (and thus structured thought) is that certain metaphors are inherently more palatable to humans than others. For instance, there is, fundamentally, no reason to construct graphs where higher values are shown as being higher on the graph. The opposite works just as well, but because of the power of metaphor, we’ve decided that ‘up’ = larger values. In fact, this metaphor is so strong that I find it fairly difficult to imagine a world in which larger values are graphed or represented as ‘down.’ He explains, convincingly, why he believes this is, but what’s relevant here is the idea that certain types of metaphor are, as a result of simply being human, inherently strong. For example, the idea that ‘backwards’ represents negative progress (as in “He’s so backwards in his beliefs.”) is strong because of the fact that our backs simply have less perceptual organs focused on them. You can’t see what’s behind you (without the aid of external devices like mirrors of course). Similarly, the more core to the human experience something is, typically the more metaphors (and then dead metaphors/new expressions) will be derived from there. The body (of both humans and animals) and food are both popular sources for long-dead metaphors like ‘front’ (which used to mean forehead), and anger simmers, new information is digested, etc.

What does this have to say about UI design? To me, it says that a good user interface is fundamentally built on the same metaphor structure that the language uses. Some cases are obvious. Say you have a 2d nodal map to navigate with possible directions being north, east, south, and west, and that you’re mapping the keypad to those directions (8/north, 4/west, 6/east, 2/south). Why does everyone map 8 to north? There is no good reason for it aside from what is basically a metaphor of a metaphor. We assume that ‘north’ is ‘up’ and even though on a level keyboard the 8 key is no more ‘up’ than the 2 key(or at least northern hemisphere humans…I don’t know how those in the southern hemisphere treat the north-as-up idea), we find that that kind of structure is immediately identifiable to most users. Try rotating that keyboard mapping by 90 degrees, so that north becomes east, east becomes south, etc, and you’ll find some seriously baffled users, and for good reason. We’ve come to accept that ‘up’ can be a metaphor for ‘north.’

That’s a pretty trivial example and yeah, the implications seem laughably obvious in the “don’t break the user’s expectations” department, but I think that, in the big picture, the consideration of UI design as metaphor goes a little beyond worrying about whether the user is expecting the W key to equate to ‘forward’ or not. It means that the designer should be worrying about how his/her UI design meshes with the expectations that the user has vis a vis his/her language. Language frames our thought to a large degree, and if we don’t work to effectively mesh our UIs (and entire game design) with the language patterns/thought patterns of the end user, we’re hamstringing ourselves. Perhaps great gains could be had in porting Western games to the East and vice versa by understanding more of the core metaphors that the new target audience uses.

Unfortunately, I have no real advice on how best to accomplish this in a systematic way. I’m not an academic, and I’m certainly not a linguist. I also run games with user interfaces that are …. somewhat less than user-friendly and probably break all sorts of metaphor-derived conventions. This book has exposed me to enough, however, that as I feel like there is this huge body of practical knowledge to be gained about how to mesh a UI (or perhaps game design generally) to a particular culture/country/region, but that knowledge seems out of my reach.

–matt