A GoUS Guest Appears! – Outside the Box: Life Invading Games
Recently, as I have grown increasingly busy in my professional life, I have found myself looking for ways to supplement my time in front of a 360 with something more…convenient. Rocking a handheld system like a DS or PSP is an obvious alternative, but this exposé is a little more Meta. Here, I will be focusing on games designed to complement, extend, or outright invade your everyday life.
The most common example of “life invading games” is Assassin. Simply put, a group of players try to ‘kill’ each other using fake weapons in order to be the last one standing. Each player in the game is given a target to eliminate, and upon doing so is rewarded with their target’s target. This goes on until just one assassin remains. Players use everything from “stabbing” with spoons and markers, to “shooting” them with Nerf and water guns, to crazy stuff like “poisoning” players with post-it notes on their drink. It’s awesome.
Because the game is largely free form, you usually play in tandem with your everyday life. It is not unusual for an Assassin player to show up at work with a Nerf gun and a sudden awareness of the tactically-poor position and orientation of his cubicle. It is enormously popular on college campuses, in larger companies, and lots of other social groups with a decent population.
What fascinates me about Assassin is how it manages to be so compelling while also being so simple. The game can be clearly defined in about three sentences, yet playing it can seriously alter a person’s lifestyle.
Mafia has been a favorite game of mine for several years. What began as a curious psychological experiment in Russia back in the 80’s has become quite the party event for a lot of people. Essentially you sit in a circle and are secretly assigned a role to play, either that of the “Mafia” or a simple villager. The Mafia kills people, the villagers try to find and remove the Mafia. The game has a simple day and night cycle; during the day, players debate back and forth on who to kick out of the group, and during the night the Mafia secretly chooses a player to kill. The result is an example of textbook paranoia: you don’t know who to trust, and have only your instincts and knowledge of how your friends and family behave to guide your decisions.
Traditionally, this game is played in person with a group of 7 or more people. Over the last few years, it has spurred variants that are played in internet forums or IRC, like the Phalla games at Penny Arcade’s Critical Failures subforum.
I wondered what would happen if one were to try to play Mafia over Twitter. The result was Mfia, run by The Narrator (@mfia). Originally, I intended for the game to take place entirely via Twitter, with debate and discourse unfolding in the form of dozens of reply tweets. As it turns out, the players instead chose to communicate with each other the same way they would with any other topic: however they pleased.
The experiment quickly took on a life of its own, and has since become a daily activity my friends and family share. They spend hours a day chatting with each other about this game. Each night they are glued to their cell phones or Twitter clients, waiting for the narration. My sister’s 45 year old non-gaming mother-in-law calls her during breaks at work (she’s a bank manager) to debate whether or not someone is going to try to kill her later in the day. Mfia has become synonymous with their daily lives.
With the advent of social networking (especially Twitter), I see these kinds of games taking on a whole new life. It’s already happening, with Facebook-like games coming to Twitter such as Spymaster and those that leverage modern smartphone capabilities like hideNtweet. This could very well be a new Meta “platform” for gaming, played by people looking to spice up their normal routine with a bit of mystery or intrigue.
I, for one, welcome it.
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Dustin “Dusda” Dahl is a freelance software developer with a habit for scribbling down his thoughts in the odd article under the guise of “almost being an English major.” When he’s not flipping through a new textbook on web development or debating the finer points of n-tier architecture, he kills time on his 360 or on one of his neverending game development projects. He currently resides in Salt Lake City, doing his best to take full advantage of the Silicon Slopes. You can follow him on Twitter, if you wish.