Thinking about the way One Hour One Life constrains the use of language by putting limits on message length (to represent the limited linguistic capabilities of young children) made me think about some other ways MMOs play with language.
In World of Warcraft, every player character (except for low-level pandaren, but they can’t interact with characters other than each other) is a member of one of two factions: the Alliance or the Horde, as determined by their race. All Alliance characters speak a language called Common, and all Horde characters speak Orcish. More race-specific languages like Gnomish and Troll exist as well, but they are rarely used. When you type a message into chat, you can choose what language to say it in from the list of languages your character speaks. When a character in your vicinity says something in a language you don’t speak, the game runs it through a cipher so that you see what looks like nonsense. This creates the illusion that the two sides speak different languages without depending on what languages the players actually speak. This helps emphasize the difference between the two factions in the narrative and also makes it more difficult for opposed players to flame each other.
In particular, when a Horde character says “lol” in Orcish, it displays to Alliance players as “kek.” Additionally, whenever any character says “lol,” they automatically do a laughing animation. This means that, for example, if you’re playing an Alliance character and you get ganked by some higher-level Horde, and then one of them remarks upon the absurdity of your death with a simple “lol,” you see them laugh while saying “kek.” It is easy to conclude, then, that kek is Orcish for lol, without having to do any intentional testing. As a result, kek has taken on the meaning of lol in some internet communities.
Interestingly, players usually don’t seem to try to circumvent developer restrictions on messaging in major ways. Someone could easily write a WoW addon that converts a message into a form that the unknown language cipher will convert back into the original message, for example, so that they can talk to the other side. But that hasn’t been done, or at the very least, it isn’t popular. People could also communicate long messages as small children in One Hour One Life by splitting them into multiple short messages, but in my time playing that game, I never saw anyone do that. Maybe players want to stick with the developer’s intent for restrictions on messages, or maybe they’re just too lazy to figure out how to get around these systems.