Fun fact for the fans of the “Baba Is You” game[1]:
> the naming of the characters Baba and Keke was inspired by the bouba/kiki effect.
Which makes a lot of sense for a game where meaning itself is one of the core gameplay elements. If you didn’t play that title yet and you enjoy puzzle games, try it.
[1]: Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baba_Is_You
'Baba is you' is one of the greatest puzzle games ever. The sheer amount of levels and variations is just staggering, although I must say that it absolutely does become quite frustrating at the end, and you can see from achievements that very few people actually stick with the game. While 8% have technically "beaten" it on Steam, you can get that achievement quite early. I have given up after about 60 hours with the game, because it simply stopped being fun, but I still recommend this gem to anyone, just don't be a completionist...
EDIT: Just looked up at 'time to beat' that completionist average is 48h and now I feel very stupid... I find that kind of hard to believe, there were some levels I literally spend 2 hours on, and the full game has over 200 levels... (and I would guess at least 10% of those are very hard).
> EDIT: Just looked up at 'time to beat' that completionist average is 48h and now I feel very stupid... I find that kind of hard to believe
I don’t know where that site gets its data, but yeah, I wouldn’t put any particular stock in it.
It’s from user submissions.
I'm in the later part of the game and I feel really stupid. Some levels are so small I feel like I can understand all possible strategies but none work. Lovely game overall though, highly recommend!
except both Baba and Keke are bouba.
Here is the Wikipedia article about the phenomenon of the bouba–kiki effect if you prefer text form or want to know more about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba%2Fkiki_effect
One of my favourite nerdy jokes is that the Fourier transform is a bouba-kiki transform.
I think this indicates the features from vision and audio got aligned properly and hence we know what is what intuitively.
I was once asked to contemplate the frightening concept of kiki tea....
Spicy.
This phenomenon of "sound symbolism" has received a lot of research attention in the last 10 years or so. For a long time it was considered a curiosity at best, and a total red herring at worst, but a lot of evidence is accumulating that sound symbolic effects are very real and may have profound implications for our understanding of sensorimotor cognition.
Recently came across another video that demonstrates the effect
The shapes just look like the letters. K’s have sharp corners, B’s are round.
The effect replicates in languages with other writing systems.
That seems to me like it just shifts the problem one level. Why are K's and Kikis spiky and why are B's and Boubas round. Why is it universal too across people with different writing systems and languages.
I can think of so many counterexamples on the spot: Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese syllabaries. It's really only the Greek Kappa that is spiky.
In Telugu, k is one of the smoother letters: కి (ki: the squiggle at the top is the i vowel sign).
I think it is related to the physics of the mouth producing the sound, and we do a form of synesthesia: doing b-u-b seems (to me) quite smoother of a transition than k-i-k. If I stop blowing the u sound my lips close again; when I finish the i I have released the muscles and I need to hold again for the next k. It al feels more sudden an explosive with k. Also the b sound you voice it (otherwise it would be p).
There is a pre-print which claims to have found this effect in 3 day old chicks. Given three day old baby chickens are not renowned for their literacy skills, it would point to some much more deeper origin.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.05.17.594640v1....
https://www.science.org/content/article/scienceadviser-even-...
This is the explanation that escapes the "smahtest" of people that study this.
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