I played Cruel 2B Kind with four of my close friends (none of whom are in the class, so they could all be learning the game together). I was the puppet master throughout, making observations on how the gameplay developed. If there’s one trait that could describe my friends, it’s that they’re loud — whenever we’re together, you can easily hear us all laughing from far away. Everyone is witty and quick has a great sense of humor, so there was great potential in the given “Weapons” in the tutorial.
There was a little bit of a cold start at first where people weren’t really sure how to begin once the game officially started, but as soon as one person took initiative and started an attack, everyone else followed naturally. The pace of the game definitely increased over the course of the game — everyone started getting more competitive with how fast they could attack the other person (kind of like a game of ERS once everyone is in their groove, super fast paced and loud and heated, in a friendly way). Additionally, I noticed that the weapons being used started becoming more personal over the course of the game. Made up holidays went from silly generic things like “Happy Third Sunday of January” to something catered to the specific person, like “Happy MCAT Anniversary” or “Happy Double Text [insert name] Day”. These inside jokes became more prevalent and definitely contributed to the overall fun atmosphere. Because of this “dynamic” of personalized humor, most of the attacks being conducted were either the “intriguing” thing about someone or the made up holiday, as opposed to the celebrity mistaking. The one slight hiccup was people definitely counted to 30 at different speeds when the same attack was conducted, but the speed at which people counted definitely made the pace go faster.
I conducted another round with a couple mods. Taking into account the difference in everyones’ counting times, we all collectively decided on a different, more objective “reset”, in which the player would have to run and touch both the wall on either side of the room that we were in to make sure it was more “fair”. Also, to make things more complex, we implemented a rule where a person couldn’t use the same weapon twice in a row. If they wanted to reload, they would also have to touch the nearest wall before attacking the next person. The overall dynamic of the game was similar, except people got into it much faster this time now that they’d played it once already. The running addition made the game more dynamic — in the first round, people kind of just stood around while they waited for the reset, so it got more lively and rowdy.
If I were to run the game again, I would experiment with coming up with some sort of “sabotage” or “revival” mechanic, where someone can do some sort of action or fulfill some sort of criteria to defect from whoever their killer was and start anew. This adds more complexity and also draws out the game longer, which could make things more interesting and competitive.
