We played Love Lingual, a card game by FLUYCO this week. Something that was very insightful and rare to experience is the feeling of playing this card game as a player completely outside of their target demographic with a group of people I was not very acquainted to. I would normally never play games whose target demographics I don’t fall under, so I really appreciated this opportunity to play it in hindsight, even if it was sometimes awkward and uncomfortable during. Based on the name, design, and risqué questions, it solidified its demographics as young couples looking to learn more about each other and are willing to open up to each other more. However, I would also add that this game could be played by a group of very close friends, who can use the provocative questions and topics either ironically or to throw shade at each other, which would add them to the target demographic.
This game is unique in the sense that there were no rules. After scouring the inside of the box and flipping it around and around, there were no instructions at all. It could only be concluded that the box is a tesseract and the rules are written on a side only visible in the fourth dimension. There were no competitive aspects, so I would say that the game is more PvE, where the environment are the questions on the card. Since there was no winning or losing, I would say the objective of the game is the objective of the metagame: to learn more about your fellow players. Consequently, the outcomes are (hopefully) only positive. We only needed our experiences, personalities, and the deck of cards, and a table sufficed as our playing space.
Going back to the point above of target demographics, I think that this actually raises a very interesting point about the dynamics of the game as applied to both demographics. Imposing the MDA framework on this game, we can see that the mechanics are largely the same (but definitely vary between people as they come up with their own rules), but the dynamics are completely different. The consideration behind answering a question, or drawing a card to answer, is completely different between these groups. For those in a relationship, it should be honest and from their heart, but it may be ironic, snarky, and crafted to generate the most amount of laughter for a group of friends. Thus, this leads to a different set of aesthetics: sense pleasure (possibly), fellowship, discovery, and expression for those romantically involved, and fellowship, competition, and expression for friends.
At its core, I believe that this game works because the designers know that people who play this game won’t be playing it for the game’s sake; instead, it works as a facilitator of conversations regarding more intimate, harder-to-express feelings and topics. This is partly why I believe designers chose not to include rules: they didn’t want to impose in how people talk to each other, and building house rules cooperatively improves a sense of fellowship (an aesthetic that they probably wanted to push). There are no wrong ways to play the game, as long as it gets the conversation going.
From my unique point of view as a player not in their target demographic, I thought that the game was well-designed. Even though we didn’t really know each other, there were definitely things we learned about each other through playing this game together. I noticed we shared only as much as needed to adequately answer the question, which is completely understandable. I think its lack of rules also helped in this case: none of us felt compelled to do something uncomfortable.
