I played the mobile version of we are not really strangers that was shared in the slack chat. This is originally a card game that is aimed at any group of people, familiar or not, with prompts to encourage sharing and meaningful connection. The founder Koreen is a model from LA, along with the card game we are not really strangers has a compelling instagram account where they set up games between strangers film it or just have people anonymously share their responses to certain questions. The particular version we played was a copy of all the cards on quizlet, so that changed our mda experience of the game. The original game is on physical cards, is organized by levels, and has notepads included for prompts that require writing. With our quizlet version we passed my computer around shuffling the deck of cards because there was no solid indication of what level each of them was on and we didn’t even come across any writing note pad prompts. This slightly changed our aesthetic experience of the game, while we still experience the same amount of discovery about each other I think that this reduced the challenge of the original game slightly. I say this because it was easier to evade answering a question you didn’t like by quickly shuffling the deck again without anyone noticing.
I played it with whoever was aroun
d me at the time, not really thinking much about it, so my boyfriend and one of his close friends at his apartment. When we started I was really excited to play with two people who don’t give themselves a lot of opportunities to have deep conversations with people. Of course, my boyfriend and I have deep conversations but I was looking forward to seeing the meaningful conversations between him and another male friend, both of them very thoughtful people. Throughout playing this game I think I discovered, and already knew, that I get uncomfortable with silence and I often don’t push people to go to deep places or do uncomfortable things if they are not willing to. In the game this looked like allowing someone to skip a question or say I don’t want to share that, which defeats the purpose of the challenge as I discussed earlier. But from my perspective, I asked them to play this game, so it was hard to force them to buy in at the same level as me. Especially when it was a question that I wouldn’t want to answer myself. But interestingly at the same time, I think the fact that I asked them to play, made me the decision-maker or person in control of the group. I felt this when sometimes they would finish an answer and sort of look to me in a “is that deep enough? Is that right?” kind of way. Which I would often just say nod or say thanks for sharing that, ultimately embracing that role. In the end though, they really got into it and started talking about past experiences without prompts or just looking through the quizlet deck to find questions we didn’t ask yet. We all stayed up much later than we normally would talking. I think that speaks to the power of the simple mechanics and dynamics behind this game, and also to the human need to share these kinds of things with trusted individuals.
Conversation cards as a game genre are interesting because they’re goal as a game is to blend into the background and allow the players to forget about the cards and just talk. That being said I think the social norms of the group have a direct affect on if the game is strictly adhered to versus more free flowing. Playing this card game with friends and significant others has a very different set of social norms than with strangers or maybe your classmates. You likely aren’t going to divulge as deeply to strangers or classmates than you are to your friend and significant other. In those cases you would likely follow the structure of the game pretty strictly to keep the next person sharing with little follow up questions, at least at the beginning until you maybe get to know each other better. But when I played with people I am close to there was often a lot of follow up and continued conversation after someone shared out an answer. That being said even between the three of us, there were places we weren’t willing to go/weren’t in the right mood for so it is definitely not a black and white differences of norms in different in social contexts. In my critical play, it was a couple and then a friend of his and mine, in a way this stacked social norms on top of social norms. For example, there are certain couple things you could talk about in response to the questions but probably wouldn’t in the presence of another person no matter how close they are to either of you. In this sense I guess you could say that our friend was left out of those social norms, but I would instead describe it as me and my boyfriend “toning down” our couple-ness norms to a more close friend norms level so we are all equally involved in the social situation.
