For my Critical Play, I played Never Have I Ever (NHIE). NHIE is a social/conversational party game played largely by teenagers and young adults. As a brief description: players take turns describing something they have never done. Players each hold up 5/10 fingers, and put a finger down when someone says something they have done. I played the game with 4 good friends of mine.
Our team’s game is called Love Island: The Game, loosely based on the couples’ competition first popularized by the British reality TV show. In our game, players randomly couple up and play through 3 rounds: Storytelling, Attraction, and One on Ones. Each round consists of a minigame centered around the round’s theme. For instance, in Storytelling, couples make up stories from their fictional relationship using prompts from the game’s card deck. After each round, players vote one couple out of the game.
Hence, NHIE felt like a comparable game, in that both games try to facilitate players getting to know each other and create fun by facilitating somewhat awkward but humorous inter-player dynamics. In this response, I will discuss how our game goes beyond the central prompt-answer loop of NHIE to make gameplay more engaging for all players. We do so by leveraging inter-team dynamics and content-prompting mechanics in a multi-round game with a familiar presence. I will also discuss how the choice of players significantly affected my experience playing NHIE, and how that provided important insight into how Love Island: The Game may function with a true group of strangers.
First: NHIE’s central prompt-answer loop. Each iteration of the game, a player prompts the other players by sharing something they have never done. Other players respond by putting a finger down, indicating they have done that thing. Players engage in this loop and reveal information about themselves in the process. NHIE’s gameplay mechanics make learning about other players inescapable. Often, player responses also prompted inter-player interaction outside the formal loop. When we played NHIE, players indicating that they had done something often sparked requests for backstory. I noted that this is where the core aesthetics of the game lived for me – in the informal interactions prompted by the formal mechanics. Our game’s concept relies on this as well. Each round, couples have structured ‘games’ to play together. But the voting mechanic (and other gameplay elements like recoupling) incentivize all players to comment on what’s happening, and gives them reasons to interact with other couples during the game. We also specifically crafted round themes and round prompts to create opportunities for players to reveal things about themselves, as we also seek to capture the getting-to-know-you aspect.
NHIE, however, does not include a team dynamic, nor does it place winner selection in the hands of a group vote. We chose to implement both these formal elements to add layers on to the experience of getting to know someone through a game like NHIE. The team dynamic gives each player an ally and invests players deeper into the game with a team to push forward. The group vote also makes the game ‘messier’ – we’re looking for players to playfully argue and guide discussion in order to swing votes in their favor. By anticipating these more chaotic interactions, our game tries to build their aesthetics into our gameplay framework. It is also important to note that our game differs from NHIE in our use of the ‘magic circle.’ The premise of a reality show/couples competition invites players to suspend disbelief and lean into the absurd/humorous rounds. NHIE does not do this, and this often leads to initial awkwardness before players warm up to the vulnerability the game asks of them.
Playing NHIE with four of my close friends was also unique, in that it was the first time I had played a ‘getting-to-know-you’ game with people I already knew well. I thought this was surprisingly interesting – it made the game much more intimate, and forced us to advance beyond ‘first order optimal gameplay’ – or whatever the analog for that is in a casual social conversation game. We asked deeper questions because we already knew the answer to the simpler ones. This was an unexpected gameplay dynamic, in that it suggested that NHIE is more than a ‘getting-to-know-you’ game for people you don’t know: it is a ‘getting-to-know-you-better’ game for anyone. Love Island, on the other hand, was designed first and foremost with the idea of playing with strangers, with the rounds having the objective of enabling players to get to know their partner better over time. After playing NHIE, I became interested in ensuring that our game was also enjoyable to play with people we already knew well. We add elements like the card prompts (which contain phrases that players need to include in their responses to the round), to inject small sparks for spontaneous interaction between players.
In conclusion, our concept Love Island: The Game mirrors the basic prompt-response structure of “Never Have I Ever,” but diverges and arguably improves upon it by incorporating engaging inter-team dynamics and content-prompting mechanics throughout multiple rounds of gameplay. I think these elements of our concept further broaden the player experience beyond the one offered by NHIE. Additionally, my personal experiences playing NHIE highlighted the significant impact of player selection on gameplay dynamics. Playing with a diverse group of strangers, much like participants on “Love Island: The Game,” brought up valuable insights into the social interactions that define the success of party games. I’m looking forward to seeing how these mechanics playtest with a group of players unfamiliar with our concept.
