Consider Friends
I made a friend at GDC last week by the name of Eitan. Eitan requested a game-a-day about friendship that has nothing to do with social networking applications.
Thus, Friends, my commucept about friendship. This is one of those projects where I’ll let the program do most of the talking.
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February 29th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
This is the only game I’ve played that’s seriously depressed me. Congratulations on forging new ground, even though it’s not ‘fun’.
I can generally only keep 5-6 friends. And your model never introduces any more… I feel like the magenta things represent opportunities being lost and our inability to do everything.
On a side-note, I’m not sure if leaving this comment diminishes the potential for the game to speak for itself. Hopefully others also try to form an opinion before reading the write-ups or comments.
February 29th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
A few comments from the facebook post of this game:
Eitan G
Thanks for making the game on friendship! I played for a little while, and though the gameplay is simple I like the statements about friendship the game makes - it’s easy to make friends if you try, friends go away and you become less close, but you reconnect with them and then they are your friends again. You might want to check out “The Marriage” by Rod Humble (I might have muffed his name) for something similar.
[I checked out “The Marriage” a couple of days after this comment was posted. Interesting stuff! Rod is clearly a pioneer, and it looks like he has faced some of the same battles that I’m up against in terms of expectation, reception, and communication. I’ll try to get in touch with Rod soon… -Chris]
Joseph T
When I made the goal to keep all of the dots alive, I found this to be hypnotic.
Jennifer W
I’m much less likely to notice if a dot fades away when I have so many dots already around me.
March 2nd, 2008 at 4:00 pm
Interestingly, after finding out how the game mechanics work, my goal was to “win,” by bringing the game to an end. I tried social suicide a few times, but my good friends wouldn’t let me, forcing me to trick them into drifting away, and then running from them with my posse trailing behind. A final murder-suicide of myself and my two remaining friends finally ended the game.
Now, perhaps this is one of the reasons I’m a rather introverted person, and don’t have many friends - or perhaps it’s the other way around, and I simply played the game the way I did because I’m introverted, felt claustrophobic with all those friends around me, who knows? But I must say, it felt strange playing the game. When I remained still, most of those around me also did. If I moved away, they chased after me, but when I tried to get closer they ran away. They seem more like casual acquaintances, than true friends. They enjoy being in a group, but don’t want anyone to come too close. Perhaps out of fear that getting to know them may make you like them less.
Now, I may also be putting WAY too much thought into this, perhaps viewing them as green and purple dots would be better for my mental health :), but as a whole I find it a rather clever and realistic view of most so called friendships, although perhaps not the really deep friendships one can have with some of one’s closest and dearest friends.
However, to be fair, I only played it the one time, and my goal was perhaps not the best way to gather information about purple dot intercommunication.
All in all a great Game, as are most of your Game-a-Days. (Or is that Games-a-Day?) Your games remind me of Chris Crawford’s description of planning a game. Others may make science fiction games, he makes “a game about leadership.”
March 2nd, 2008 at 4:16 pm
Welcome!
> Interestingly, after finding out how the game mechanics work, my goal was to “win,” by bringing the game to an end. I tried social suicide a few times, but my good friends wouldn’t let me…
If this is your goal from the beginning, just don’t meet anyone. No one will make any effort to save you, as long as their friends are doing ok.
> They seem more like casual acquaintances, than true friends.
These are mostly “hang out together” friends. They’re there for you when you need someone, they’re there when they’ve got nothing better to do, and that’s about it. Dating would involve dots getting closer to one another, maybe even sticking together, and rapidly sharing friend groups. Marriage of course would consist of tying them together with a line of limited length, sharing friend groups as one, and no longer being eligible for stick-together dating, but otherwise being virtually unable to get lonely enough to vanish. Speaking of which, I don’t really see relationships as pure and pleasant as I suggested in this paragraph - have you had a chance to try AbstractDating?
> Now, I may also be putting WAY too much thought into this
Nope, I’d say you’re putting in just about the amount I intended. :)
Chris Crawford is a hero. Have you seen the Game-a-Day I made for Crawford? (TrinaryLife)
Thanks for the comment!
March 3rd, 2008 at 12:55 am
I have tried AbstractDating, it was… strange. One didn’t seem to have any control over what was going on. Not only during a relationship, I can understand that part, but especially the often immediate rebound relationship one began after the first had soured seemed a bit extreme. There were too many potential date partners and not enough belief that one’s actions had any influence on game events at all. I’m not saying that you should always be in control, but I do think that as humans we very often think we are in control, or at least that our actions influence the world around us to a much greater extent than they do. (When I flip a light switch at the exact moment my doorbell is rung, I have a strange sensation of “wow, how did I do that?” before it dawns on me that my actions had nothing to do with the doorbell at all.) I feel any game that lets humans play humans should at least offer them the illusion of control. It can slowly dawn on them, that this is not the case, but shouldn’t be more or less obvious from the start.
But I digress, quite a lot actually :), from my original post, which wasn’t about dating or marriage or meaningful relationships on a sexual or highly emotional level. I merely found the friends not very willing to get close, not in a physical sense, as I don’t think the game really represents physical proximity, but on a - for lack of a better word - lower emotional level than dating and suchforth. Telling a friend my greatest fears, hopes, dreams, etc does not equate to dating him, but does make him a closer friend, than a casual acquaintance with whom I may only talk about sports.
That being said, I replayed the game and this time did experience at least one instance of a friend getting very close, or rather not running away when I drew nearer. Perhaps this had more to do with the other purple dots surrounding him, forcing him to be closer to *someone* than he particularly wanted to be, I do not know, but it did seem to counter my point that they all flee.
Lastly, I have seen TrinaryLife, which is a decent implementation of Chris Crawford’s idea. Phenomenal if you take the one day development cycle into account, but that makes basically all of your work off the scale. I find it amazing that anyone can get, well, anything working in a single day. The main problem I have is indeed not with the implementation at all, but rather with the idea. The system is designed in a much too exact fashion, and leads to overly symmetrical evolution. For a small game on an 8 x 8 grid I’m sure it is perfectly fine, but from a theoretical science point of view I don’t much like it. Conway’s Game of Life takes its 8 neighbors, treats them all the same and asks only if a certain number of them are live at a given moment. Chris Crawford’s Trinary Life looks only at four neighbors (this in itself is not necessarily a bad thing, indeed Langton’s Ant only looks at a single cell, although it is in a somewhat different category than the Game of Life family), but these four are combined in an extremely non-random way. Therein lies my problem with the system. Perhaps there are as many interesting gliders and whatnot in TrinaryLife as there are in Conway’s Game of Life, but from what I have seen in a few very simple tests is that it appears to be simply a kaleidoscope simulator. Certainly pretty, but not as interesting as order from chaos.
Another main difference between the two is that the cell itself plays a major role with Conway, no role at all with Crawford. I have the feeling this also contributes to the kaleidoscope effect.
So I’m not a particular fan of the TrinaryLife game as put forward with those particular rules, although I do believe that Trits have quite a bit of merit, in that many questions are not True/False, On/Off, but often Left/Right/Straight or even Yes/No/Maybe. And indeed Red/Green/Blue. I simply hope a better set of rules can be thought up, that relies less on symmetry, among other things. Which of course diminishes my awe and respect for Chris Crawford not in the slightest.
March 3rd, 2008 at 2:25 am
AbstractDating provides a lot more control over success than is at first apparent, to the point that it’s quite “winnable”. The after-game tips reveal some of it, but admittedly too much of it is non-obvious from the activity itself, short of random conjecture and testing. That’s a big part of why I like this project (Friends) better. Although AbstractDating also contains a much larger metamessage, discovered upon “winning” it, in a way that Friends does not.
Telling a friend my greatest fears, hopes, dreams, etc does not equate to dating him, but does make him a closer friend, than a casual acquaintance with whom I may only talk about sports.
Interesting that you clarify this point. I think I may have misunderstood the nature of your earlier comment (sorry about that). Furthermore, my first response was from a more general and theoretical perspective, which was not very useful since in making this I was really my only point of reference. The only people that hear my greatest fears, hopes, dreams, etc. has been (and will likely continue to be) the closest girl in my life at the time, even as who that is changes over time. I don’t talk sports (even figuratively) with anyone. The friends in my life aren’t very close conversationally - we’re typically acquaintances with some common interest/cause or know one another at a distance through a shared project or an affinity group. At this point, the discrepancy is less about “how to model friendship”, and more to do with a very discerning observation based on the model presented here you have made (correctly, even if only partially and perhaps unknowingly) about how friendship works in my head.
There are precisely three interesting phenomenon about TrinaryLife, which together describe the emergent behaviors in their entirety: (1.) Information cannot be destroyed, i.e. patterns cannot cancel one another out since the trinary state captures deltas of change, rather than explicit values (2.) every point in the grid expands in exactly the same way as every other, such that any word or figure drawn will expand out in precisely the same fill-to-diamond-corner pattern as a single dot, preserving color and dimensions in the process (3.) because of points 1 and 2, the pattern will never self-destruct or settle into stable oscillations the way that Conway’s Life does. In short, it’s entirely non-chaotic, and kaleidoscope simulator (but one founded on neat CS/math ideas) pretty well sums it up.
;)