This week: Semantic shift! With sandboxes! And then I go down the rabbit hole or corpora research only to find what we already knew. But it was fun to do, so read on!
Box O’ Sand
For the past four hundred or so years, a sandbox was a literal box of sand set aside for children to play in. Then, several decades ago, it began to pick up a metaphorical use as a way to discuss spaces where people could play and be creative. Now it’s a whole genre of game. But let me back up.
Last October I bought a copy of a video game1 called No Man’s Sky, a sandbox game that consists mainly of flying around discovering cool stuff. I had first tried the game upon its initial release and enjoyed it, but didn’t have a PlayStation with which to indulge. So, when the announcement came that the company that makes the game would be porting it over to the Nintendo Switch, I got excited2. In other words, I had expected to enjoy the game when it was finally ported over to the Switch.
But I was a little surprised by how much I’ve been enjoying it. Back when, I used to devote my time to strategy games, both tabletop games like Chess and Go and video games like Starcraft and Civilization, games that require a deep level of concentration and, well, strategy to do well. In recent years though, I’ve fallen down a well of sandbox games like Animal Crossing3 and No Man’s Sky. What’s unusual, and what signals a shift for me, is that these games have very little in terms of story. Instead, players move around at will and do pretty much whatever they like within the confines of the game’s world.
Which brings me back to the topic at hand: sandbox. When used to describe a game, as noted above, sandbox becomes a metaphor for open world and creative play rather than story driven leveling. From Merriam-Webster:
: a video game or part of a video game in which the player is not constrained to achieving specific goals and has a large degree of freedom to explore, interact with, or modify the game environment
So, when it comes to a game like No Man’s Sky, you don’t really have to follow any missions should you choose not to. Instead you can just fly around. And did I mention finding the cool stuff to look at?
But the definition offered by M-W4 is actually just one part of a much broader definition encompassing the different metaphorical uses of sandbox:
: a place, area, or environment that provides opportunities for variation and experimentation in a way suggestive of children playing in a sandbox
What’s most notable is that of the four sub-definitions, three are directly related to computers and programming (the fourth is a business example), which begs the question of how and when this semantic broadening began. After all, if it emerged from the computer industry, as the definitions would suggest, then it can’t have been all that long ago5.
I decided to do a little research, more out of curiosity than trying to re-invent Merriam-Webster’s wheel; I wanted to see if there was a specific point that was readily apparent within corpus data that indicated a switch from a general metaphorical usage to a narrow tech and game usage.
I started by having a quick look through the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), a collection of, “more than 475 million words of text from the 1820s-2010s” originally compiled by BYU6.
Sandbox returned a respectable 193 results, with the oldest dating to a Christmas story first published in 1873. The vast majority of the results referred to sandbox as a literal sandbox, as for children, with a few interesting exceptions in the 70s from t.v. shows like M*A*S*H and The Rockford Files where it took on a metaphorical usage as a reference to either a war zone or as a veiled euphemism for a place where adults could, uhm, play. By the late 80s, sandbox had returned to being either a literal play area or a nostalgic reference for adults. By the mid-2000s, we’re firmly into sandbox as a metaphor for a creative space, but there’s not an explicit reference to games (in the corpus results) until a 2016 reference to the Legend of Zelda series of RPGs.
By way of comparison, I decided to run a separate search for sandbox in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), which is a much bigger corpus from more sources, also originally compiled by BYU.
Here, sandbox returned more than 1100 results, so I reduced it to a random sample of 100 just to keep it somewhat manageable. The results were not so different from the COHA, with most results referencing either the expected literal or common metaphorical uses. And while there was no smoking gun, the random sampling suggests that the computer and gaming uses of sandbox as metaphor really took off in the early 2010s, mainly due to the proliferation of writing on the web about computers, etc.
I ran one more search, this time opting for the biggest and baddest of the corpora, the NOW corpus of over 16 billion7 words. I again narrowed things down to a random sample of 100 results and, if the gun wasn’t smoking, the barrel was certainly warm to the touch. There were several results from 2021 and 2022 that used sandbox as part of a tech company’s name or as the name of a specific game. In other words, the metaphorical usage has become so well-understood in tech and gaming circles that it is a shortcut for explaining what a company is trying to make or for what the gameplay style of a game is.
Taken together, the three sets of data indicate that the metaphorical usage of sandbox has been growing steadily for decades but has only recently become so common as to become common vernacular within the tech and gaming spheres, by which I mean, it does not need to be spelled out as a metaphor but can instead be relied on to carry the entire semantic meaning within a single word. Which is more or less what Merriam-Webster said when they included it in their definition. So, uh, look at this wheel I just invented!
Before I close, one particular rabbit hole I didn’t have time to get lost in was the definitions Merriam-Webster doesn’t include for sandbox - the word began as a device for sprinkling sand. Variations of this sandbox would show up on tallships and railroads throughout the 1800s only to fade out as the ships and trains themselves disappeared. Searching the historical corpus with strings like “sand-box” and “sand box” bring up some interesting and related examples.
And, of course, no article like this is fully complete without the caveat that this whole thing is not to be quoted. There is some interesting research to be done and I feel pretty strongly that there is more nuance to be gleaned from a close comparison of the various corpora results, but this article ain’t it. However, I have linked the three corpora I used and access to all three is free. Go take a look, it’s amazing what you’ll find if you do.
Down the Rabbit Hole
And speaking of sandboxes, I’ve built my own by following the herd over to Mastodon, where I am on the Lingo server. There are lots of like-minded wordy and linguistically inclined people, so come join us if you’re so inclined. Love to have a chat.
But this is the rabbit hole, so, here are a few vaguely connected fun facts about birds, elephants, software companies, and etc.:
The Twitter logo is a mountain bluebird, and the company existed for a few years before it adopted the bird as its logo. The first logo was known as Larry. The name Twitter was chosen because the word meant “a short burst of inconsequential information.”
Synonyms for tweet include chirp, chirrup, trill, warble, call, and sing. Most birds chirp in the same range as human conversation, about 50 - 60 db. That said, the loudest bird call in the world is that of the White Bellbird, recorded at over 125 decibels.
The sound elephants make is generally called a trumpet, but they are capable of communicating via a wide variety of vocalizations including barks, grunts, snorts, and squeaks. The loudest modern elephants max out by roaring at 115 db or so. (And for comparison, jet aircraft hit about 120 db during takeoff.)
Elephants are not mastodons. Instead, mastodons diverged from the evolutionary pathway that would eventually produce mammoths and elephants about 25 million years ago. Further, mastodons were smaller than mammoths and held themselves more parallel to the ground. Their tusks were straighter and their teeth more pointed, the better for chewing wood pulp.
The company Mastodon shares its name with a rock band, a town in Michigan, and an early steam engine for an American train company that ran in the late 1800s.
From the Archives
And speaking of social media, here’s the last time I talked about it in depth, from last May. Enjoy!
I’m not really much of a gamer. I can go weeks or months without playing a thing; in fact, my poor little Nintendo Switch routinely has to be dusted before I can get anywhere close to actually playing anything.
Look, if the aliens running this simulation were to create a game specifically to appeal to me, NMS just might be it - there’s a story, sure, and there are missions, but mainly, you just fly around in your space ship and look for cool stuff. Which, I mean, you know in the Matrix (the first one) where the dude asks to be put back in? Give me a space ship and some cool stuff to find and plug me back in.
Like everyone else, I bought a copy of Nintendo's Animal Crossing right as lockdowns began to take effect. It's not quite the full sandbox, but it is an example of the type of game I'm talking about. The only only thing there really is to do in the game is whatever the hell you feel like doing in the game. Repeated play and time unlocks some features but generally, the game you play on your first day and the game you play on your 300th day is the same game. That's not true for games with levels.
Merriam-Webster has had a lovely redesign to their site; it does seem, at first blush, as though they have leaned heavily into modernizing and refining the site to reflect the most current usages of a given word. Nothing wrong with that, but it does mean they may not be as good a source for historical data as they once were.
Presumably, Merriam-Webster has enough information to tell us exactly when there was enough usage to warrant a sub-definition, but the data isn’t readily available on their website.
Generally speaking, it’s a great place to start looking at any kind of language shift.
Yes, billion, with a b.