Guy Shalev's The Friendship Game, with mechanics like real friendship
Paul Czege:
Quote from: d.anderson on March 11, 2011, 09:00:33 AM
There was, I think, a failure on our part procedurally. We created characters that had strong, volatile relationships, but we did not really make friends! My opinion, of course, but it made Secrets and conflicts loaded with relationship-destroying possibility - we had 'work' relationships and 'romance' relationships but the trust that underlies 'friendship' relationships (that permits deeper tests of trust) wasn't really there. I'm not sure how you would address this better than you have!
I'm actually thinking the friendship is an emergent property. The shared Secrets after Catharsis are gold.
Paul
Thunder_God:
I spent some time musing on the subject and my answers...
I am not surprised by what you say Dan, and I don't think you really did anything wrong. I mean, when you have a topic, which you come out with out loud, such as "Trust", you can either have the game be about trust through trust, or through betrayal. Or, when you think about the topic some more, it's not a binary state, but a continuum that the game focusing on anything on its length creates a game "About" that thing.
I created it as a "positive game", but seeing the impact of Secrets, if you push hard in the game, as many story-gamers do, the game is probably going to yield results that resemble a soap-opera more than anything else. This is because it becomes "all about the secrets!"
To have a game that resembles series like "Friends", you probably need to lay off on the secrets some, and use them to sprinkle the session with. This is more likely when you use the game as a framework to house what you want to tell/do anyway, rather than as the locomotive that drives the game (again, a continuum, not a binary dichotomy).
But it's still a game about Friendship, either way.
And Paul, that's a big issue, regarding all gaming, a chicken-and-egg question. Do you need to be friends in order to play a game with someone, or playing a game with someone makes you friends?
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