Dungeon Theory

  When I was a kid, we used to travel from our home in northern Ohio to family reunions in Kentucky. Once we got there, it never took very long for my Michigan-born mother to start speaking with a marked Southern drawl. “Why?”, I thought. Had I known then what I know, I would have answered, “Well, because of communication accommodation , of course!” Just like your charismatic bard can adopt the parlance of the nobles she’s performing for, or dumb it down with bawdy and ribald jokes when at the dive bar, so too can we change our communication to match others. This theory is all about how and why our speech changes, how that relates to our social groups, and what we think are the potential social consequences of sounding more (or less) like those around us.  According to this theory’s founder (a bit of a scholarly bard himself), Howard Giles, when we adjust our speech for others, we are accommodating in an effort to reduce the perceived social distance between ourselves and ot...

  Think of the awesome power of naming a thing. To name is, in a way, to create the thing. “What’s going on with you and that cutie from the tavern?”  “He’s my boyfriend !”  To name is to make something come into existence (in this case, a boyfriend. Mazel Tov.) In this theory, the focus is on who gets to do the naming. For Kramarae , the scholar behind Muted Group Theory , the “who” is almost always men. Language is an especially man-made invention. In your game, who has the power to name others and which groups suffer under the biased naming of others?  These are the questions we’ll try to answer by thinking about those who mute others and those who end up muted. The idea brings to mind the Dalit , a word used for those occupying the lowest castes of Indian society. These people were formerly known as “untouchable”, a name they no-doubt didn’t coin for themselves. Just as members of the dominant castes in India were able to name (and therefore define) a populatio...