Contrary to social judgment, I find many “judging games” provoke their players to sling social taboos. I’ll talk about Quiplash.
When you supply a quip in quiplash, you reveal what you find personally entertaining and what you think would appeal to the collective. You must balance comedic accessibility with raw humor score. The consequences for failure is in-group rejection. You either watch them burst out laughing at your opponent’s response (pretty fine because you can join in) or awkwardly mumble as they simply reject yours (sad!). The drive to evade tribal rejection is a powerful motivator, so you better be funny. You are being judged.
The thing about being funny is that you have to put yourself out there and understand your audience. There’s many different ways you can approach this, but there’s one you’ve encountered if you’ve played this game, or Cards Against Humanity: just make an arbitrary reference to sex.
Quiplash is at least better than Cards Against Humanity (CaH) in that regard. Maybe half or more of the cards in CaH do this outright. This can be entertaining for the first couple of times, but I find it regrettable how quickly these games devolve into it.
As you play multiple games of Quiplash in one setting, it is not uncommon to find people just phoning it in. In the beginning they may try to invent a witty quip, but once your brainchild takes a loss or two to a one word bodily fluid response, it is a bit demotivating to give it your best.
This is actually moderately mitigated by playing Quiplash with people you may not be the most familiar with. Acquaintances often at least pretend like they can generate quips without relying on human anatomy and its secretions. Don’t get too excited, though, it’s merely a temporary reprieve. Eventually the most socially transgressive member of the group breaks the floodgates, takes a perfect round with roaring laughter, and then you can say goodbye to player ingenuity.
We were talking about the drive for social conformity in class. The first person in Mafia to get accused is often the first to die. It’s the same in Quiplash. Whoever gets the strongest initial laugh response will sway the crowd in that direction. This happens on the micro level of a single 1 – 1 confrontation, but it also continues in the broader strategy of Quiplash. If you’re in a group that enjoys the crude, raunchy stuff, you better start throwing crude, raunchy stuff if you want to get laughs.
This is because the judging mechanic leads to a social hierarchy of humor. You get immediate feedback if you’re funny or not, and at the end you see everyone’s ranking. With games like this, winning or losing goes beyond the dopamine of ranking first – it has implications on the social makeup of the group. I actually know plenty of people who hate playing Quiplash because they always rank near the bottom. You aren’t being judged on your mechanical skill, you’re being judged on if people think you’re entertaining.
The mechanics of submitting humorous responses in one on one competition, combined with the dynamics of social judgment, give it a fun and light aesthetic, which can occasionally alienate players as well. The game encourages a humor-meta over the course of one playthrough with the round point mechanics. The points double in round 2 from round 1, so you get a chance to see what everyone liked in round 1, and tailor your round 2 strategy accordingly. The social judging dynamic peaks in round 3, where there’s a new mechanic introduced. Everyone gets the same prompt. Everyone gets three votes for their favorites and you can vote for one answer repeatedly. It is not uncommon for round 3 to have many similar answers – there’s only a couple of body parts that get people to laugh after all.
Of course, this is just the worst that Quiplash has to offer. I actually rather enjoy the game but this is just something that has always bothered me with it. Playing it again in the context of the Critical Play let me really try and focus to figure it out.
Also I’m not a party pooper, I promise! It’s not that I’m simply too refined or prudish, it’s the race to the bottom that disappoints me. I win reasonably often at Quiplash so it’s not that I’m bitter “oh boohoo nobody likes my jokes they just want to snicker at *** or **** or ************** * **** * * ********.” You can very reasonably succeed at Quiplash without regressing to a primal state, it’s just harder, but it’s all fun.
