A video game developed by the University of Malta’s Institute of Digital Games has attracted considerable attention in the video game industry, culminating in a feature in Kotaku, one of the most globally prominent video game websites.

The game, called Something Something Soup Something, was designed by Stefano Gualeni with the support of two of the Institute’s master students – Isabelle Kniestedt and Johnathan Harrington.

The media attention has centred around the innovative approach of “game as interactive thought experiment”, addressing the unreliability and relativity of language and methods of communication. The game is meant to demonstrate that despite one’s best efforts to be precise in communication, one is still faced with ultimately indefinite, shifting concepts.

In the science-fiction-themed video game, the gamer’s job is to serve soup.

This, however, turns out to be no simple task: the aliens making the soup and teleporting the dishes back to Terra often misinterpret what they are supposed to produce. What the player decides to serve determines their definition of soup.

The game draws attention to the fact that what the gamer has chosen to serve as soup is different from what other players have chosen, showing that the meaning of words is contextual and subjective, despite using the same language and the same word.

Besides Kotaku, the game has also been covered by Vice Brazil, PC Canard, a French print magazine, and several other venues across an array of different languages.

The game is the first project funded under a two-year agreement with Maltco Lotteries which will increase the opportunities of students in the field of digital games and help prepare them with experience on specific projects.

The Institute of Digital Games was ranked among the top 25 postgraduate game design programmes by the Princeton Review in 2017. The game is available online at the link below.

http://soup.gua-le-ni.com