Critical Play: Competitive Analysis

For this week’s critical play, I play the Cards Against Humanities. This is a physical card game made by Max Tech Lincoln. It’s been around since 2011. In short, this party game is mostly intended for young adults and teenagers becasue a lot of the cards have vulgar descriptions. That being said, the actual gameplay is essentially having a judge put out a prompt that enables every other person to provide an answer to that prompt using pre-selected or randomized responses. And the judge chooses the best response from that and whoever put down that response receives the card are essentially a point. There’s no real winning to the game. You play until you get tired of it or if someone keeps winning round after round after round I guess they could be a pseudo winner.

But yeah, the game that we’re creating in this class is very similar to Cards Against Humanity in the sense where you have a judge selecting responses from the rest of players,. There are a lot of differences though. For example. in our game:

People create their own responses to submit

Judge is trying to choose a specific person as the winner for the anonymous responses
During the selection period, the judge could answer personal questions and told more about themselves helping people to learn more about them
Game is won when the King selects the Queen’s response within 2-5 rounds, or when the non-King/Queen players are selected over the Queen for 2-5 rounds.
The judge changes turns only when the King fails to or succeeds in selecting the Queen in a set period of rounds.
Instead of every person for themselves, this game has a more group dynamic, where it’s the King + Queen vs. everyone else
The judge, queen, and other players are all randomly selected

That being said, there are some similarities that help user find familiaority with our game. These familiarities are as follows:

Group of people compete to produce a response to the prompt
There is a single judge per round
The judge selected the response they feel deserves the best

Being that the King is trying to choose a Queen, the dynamics of our game are played out different from Cards Against Humanity. Commrodery is more of feature, along with strategy, and creativity. Players should use their creative jokes and insight on eachtother to work together and outwit the King and Queen. When looking at the psychological needs that this game could fall under, I believe it really relates to affiliation, achievement, and sensual. This targets and pulls on so many different brain muscles that Cards Against Humanity doesn’t—being preselected responses with everyone playing for their individual wins. Furthermore, our game invite players to learn more about the King and eachother, thinking hard about what personal information they can add to get some competitive advantage.

We saw this to be true during our play time in class. Everyone was having fun, and we’re told by our test subjects that our game would be a good way to get to meet people, but an even better game to play with friends. Because the game encouraged participants to ask the judge/king questions about themselves (so they could write better responses), everyone learns more about each other.

Below are some images from play: