We’re Not Really Peers
A critical play of We’re Not Really Strangers
We’re Not Really Strangers (WNRS) is a viral card game marketed to friends, couples, and a Get Z audience raised on emotional honesty as an aesthetic. Its pitch is to help us facilitate intimacy on demand through three levels of cards that handhold people from small talk to confession.
WNRS has almost no game mechanics — it’s prompts on cards. The game engineers a permission structure — a magic circle where one is given permission to be more vulnerable than they usually are. The learning that a game is designed around is directed towards the other people in this game. And the scaffolding of vulnerability mirrors a scaffolding tutorial: Perception is safe, Connection asks for more, and Reflection asks you to say your innermost thoughts out loud. Its turn structure enforces reciprocity, and there’s no win condition per se. The game explicitly tells you this: the only right way to play the game is by bringing curiosity into the equation. The only objective is connection itself.
The game assumes that the people you’re playing with are your relative peers. Scaffolding assumes both learners are standing in roughly the same place. With my game, I really wasn’t. Because of the more than 4 year age difference between us (I was the older one), I saw this assumption tested a little bit. I assumed this would happen with any stranger I was playing with, but I chose to spare several details of the depths of romantic heartbreak I’ve been through. Which was the responsible thing to do for sure, but I definitely felt like I had to do it at the risk of vulnerability. There’s just some things you don’t share with younger people so that they remain bright eyed and bushy tailed. Or they don’t think you’re some jaded oldie. I calibrated down to a depth that was nowhere near what I’d have risked with my friends.
WNRS is built to hand you Fellowship and Expression: the pleasure of being known more deeply. But what I actually got was Discovery: the fascination of learning how someone in high school thinks. She talked about her journey with trying to understand why learning was meaningful to her instead of just being a task given to her. How she evolved from being a bad student to a good student in this journey. I was genuinely impressed and took a lot away from the conversation. And I don’t even remember anything I said. I became the listener. And I think that’s the point of the game: What is initially the excitement of being known obscures the true excitement: learning more about the other person.
This interaction did reveal that the game can lead to asymmetries in listening versus vulnerability when age differences / life differences are apparent. Another thing I found bothersome is that the perception cards felt very repetitive. I felt I was being asked to give my first impression of her 3 different times, and we only played half the amount of cards we were supposed to. Another suggestion I have is implement the group dynamic feature of the game where everybody writes their first impressions of the others and folds it in a piece of paper to reveal at the end of the game. This introduces a level of anticipation as the game goes on about how “correct” we were about each other. I was actually disappointed that this wasn’t a part of the two player game since I played the group version of the game first.
The main ethical risk at play in WNRS is coercion. Because reciprocity is structural, declining a card feels impossible and unfair to do. It may even read as rejecting the person rather than the prompt, so there is a lot of pressure to disclose. A small mechanic could defuse this: if you gave each player a few pass tokens to spend across the game (kind of like the dig deeper cards), it would provide a game-sanctioned way to feel a sense of agency in opting out of a question without feeling like you’re being inauthentic by not answering as deeply as you want.
