Prototype Questions! Trust & Dare

Game Description: 

For P1, my team is developing a mod of Truth or Dare, called Trust & Dare. Trust & Dare is a fishbowl / random draw style game where people are split into partners and complete Dares that restrict one or more of their senses, forming trust with their partner through the process! 

 

Mechanically, the dares will be pre-determined and written on cards color-coded by the sense they restrict (ie. hearing, seeing, speaking, etc.). There will also be “double trouble” cards that restrict more than one sense for double the points. Some cards will require both partners to lose the sense and others will only result in one player losing the sense and the other partner will have to make up for the impairment. Some dares will be a race against the larger group and some will only be completed by the pair whose turn it is. Players will spin a wheel and have to choose a card of the color the wheel randomly lands on. 

 

Prototype Questions: 

  • Will this dare make players laugh? 

Inspired by the questions in the video, “is this game fun or not?”, we are looking to inspire a particular type of fun with our games – physical humour and camaraderie. Thus, asking if a dare will make players laugh is an important criteria to consider. To test this, we will prototype different dares based on different senses and try them out individually with test players (without needing to run the entire game). For example one dare we have brainstormed is to take your partner’s sock off while you are blindfolded and race other pairs running the same dare. We predict this will cause both partners to laugh at the absurdity of the situation and to giggle over the precariousness of losing your sight and having your foot touched and tickled. 

  • Should your partner stay the same or change over the course of the game? 

This is an important question to ask to hone the purpose of the game. Ultimately, are we building a game to form a deeper trust between two people or plant seeds of trust in many different permutations of pairs across the larger group? Which way is more fun for participants that know each other well? Which way is more fun for a group of new acquaintances? Does  the influence of alcohol and a party environment change the answer? We could prototype test this with a group playtest, bringing together a group who do not know each other well and choose one condition and observe for uneasiness and/or bonding. My intuition is that it would feel more comfortable and natural to keep the same pair over the course of the game if the group is strangers or new acquaintances so that they could slowly build trust but that a group of friends might be eager to switch partners often, as they have pre-existing relationships and do not need to build up trust from scratch with their partner every round. 

  • How motivating is this game to play with acquaintances vs. good friends?  

This question will significantly impact how we design and market the game as well as the intimacy of the dares we choose. Our founding ethos of the game is that it would be well suited to a party setting where individuals might know some players very well and other players not at all and that the dares would help the players develop trust and relationships with their fellow players through laughter, physical bonding, and “trust fall” style exercises. We could playtest this theory by mocking up a party scenario, inviting pairs of friends from different contexts so that certain pairs know each other well and others not at all, and playing a run-through of the game, running dares of different intimacy / trust levels. We could observe how eager the strangers are to interact with each other through the game compared to the pre-existing friends and ask participants post-game survey questions on levels of comfort and fun with strangers vs. friends and if they were to play again, what context they would bring the game to (ie. close gatherings, large party, get-to-know-you / ice-breaker contexts, etc.).



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