Upon viewing this assignment, I was immediately drawn to the Getting To Know You games category. I wanted to explore how games could be used to facilitate deeper understanding between 2 people beyond just the surface levseel – I wanted to see if games could get 2 people to get more vulnerable than they would have been otherwise. So, I ended up playing Wavelength, created by Alex Hague, Justin Vickers, and Wolfgang Warsch. It’s an analog social party game of deduction where two teams compete to guess the location of a hidden target on a spectrum based on a single clue given by a teammate.
I played this game at Game Nights with Jinhyo, another CS247G student, and throughout the game we did our best to try and get to know each other through the game. An important change we made was since we were the only players, we modified the rules to have both of our goals to be to have the other person garner as many points as possible. In essence, we were all on the same team. This decreased the competitive aspects of the game and created an atmosphere where the deduction was based more on getting to know someone since there were less stakes of ‘losing.’ We ended up really enjoying the game and the way we modded it. I think a reason to why we enjoyed the game was because it allowed us to telegraph our own communication styles and opinions. By using an observation-heavy strategy in Wavelength, I was able to demonstrate an empathic form of communication that prioritized the other person’s perspectives over my own, and to illustrate that effective communication relies more on interpersonal connection than on objective clarity. Furthermore, the game being designed to bring out subjective opinions really helped facilitate those behaviors.
I think that there were 2 main elements of the game that really allowed for an empathic strategy on my end. Firstly, the game emphasizes a spectrum between two binary categories. For example, one of the categories I got was Nerd vs. Jock. I had to select a hint (ping-pong, for those curious) that fit the region in the spectrum I was placed in. Since we are playing for the other person to guess what I was talking about, I needed to have my hint both suggest something about the way I think, and also make sure the I am telegraphing that perspective to the other person. Secondly, there was the reveal. I think the action of flipping the spectrum to reveal where the region actually is is not only a physical versiom of sensation fun that serves to excite the users, it also allows for a visual indicator of where the person’s hint lands on that binary scale. It allows for validation or calibration of the person’s mental image of the other. Because of this, I was able to iterate on my vision and perception of the other person, in order for the next time I was guessing or giving a hint I could better read the way they are able to think about different binaries. For example, Jinhyo had expressed her interest in animated movies, so when I got Bad Movie vs. Good Movie, with my region being in the good movie territory, I thought of a movie that would be easy for her to visualize as something that I thought was a good movie: Coco. Not only did I think Coco was a good movie, I guessed Jinhyo would consider it a good movie, and that her perception of people’s view of the movie was generally positive, to the point where me saying Coco would signal that it was in good movie territory. Both of these mechanics serve as functions to create the aesthetic of Fellowship fun. Furthermore, the strategy utilized with our mod of the game also creates an aesthetic of Expression, as both of us discovered new ways to project ourselves to the other person, and in the process were able to discover something about ourselves, our perceptions, and what aspects of ourselves we display to others.
I think the game and the strategies we adopted was ultimately a success in us getting to know each other. Each category was able to prompt conversations where we would go more in-depth about our thoughts, perspectives, and how our histories influenced those perspectives. It also would create conversations where the subject wasn’t necessarily about the binary card we got, which I think is evidence of a good Getting To Know You game. Overall, the structure of Wavelength easily facilitated social connection as well as the strategies of the players playing it.
Ethically, I think Wavelength responds to the norm of social tuning. This says that players will naturally align their attitudes and beliefs to that of the other players in order to build a shared acceptance between them. I’d say that this is a reasonable norm to expect players to follow, as the game is built on following this norm for the best chance of winning. These norms will arise when there is some distance between multiple people, which is good for a game meant for closing that distance between two people. I think this does exclude groups of players who might have irreconcilable differences. For example, social tuning is less effective of a norm when a group has faced trauma from another group. In a case like this, certain rounds might not facilitate the social connection the game is encouraging, since those groups would feel like they have reason to create distance. Overall, though, I think in most circumstances the game reinforces the norm of social tuning, which I think is a good norm to have when trying to get to know someone.
