“Okey” is a historical Turkish game of chance where players compete to get all their tiles numerically ordered or in color matching groups before the others. The players are handed 14 tiles initially, but each round required the players to draw one tile from either the previous player or the middle stack and discard a tile of their own. The platform of the game is most commonly physical, with colored tiles (not much unlike Mahjong) and boards placed on each of the 4 sides of a square table, one for each player. Okey can only be played with 3 or 4 players, and only in group settings, like family dinners, parties, and social gatherings. These restrictions on the number of players and player interaction patterns completement the platform, forcing small social circles to form around the game to enable fun banter and meaningful interaction. Nowadays, Okey can also be played on mobile platforms with online friends synchronously joining to play and bet on their hands, supported with simulated chances of drawing each tile and chatrooms to mimic the chatter that plays a major part in the physical version, sometimes even acting as a distraction or psychological manipulation mechanism. Okey’s status as both a social game and a game of chance makes it especially addictive compared to other chance games like poker, achieving a unique combination of randomness and social manipulation through its use of fellowship aesthetic and formal elements such as conflicts, players, rules and resources.
With Okey being specifically designed to create genuine social circles and interaction that make up a big part of an average Turkish person’s social life, fellowship is a core aesthetic that feeds into the addiction by creating inter-player conflicts that tie back to inter-person conflicts in real-life. While play testing, I have observed that players who are friends in real-life supported each other verbally and psychologically during the game, and were more content to see their friends win, compared to other players who sometimes had more bitter/discontent reactions in the face of loss. The game’s ability tie real-life dynamics and the player dynamics in the game lead to increased and more personal conflicts each round, raising the stakes of winning, and therefore, the competition to win. Due to the social fear of “losing face”, players are more likely to keep requesting rematches, and new bets, like a person trying their luck at a slot machine for the 5th time thinking their luck will turn. The strict limit on the number of players complements this dynamic, keeping each “hand” and its outcome close and personal. In larger groups, it’s more difficult to establish individual conflicts between players, and games (like group sports) leverage group conflicts instead to fuel up competition and addictivity of the game. In Okey’s case, each player racing against all the other players to be the one to complete a full hand first, this player interaction pattern utilizing the limits on the resources of time and tiles to keep all players on their toes and thus make the game more engaging. Although, the game’s physical mechanics are regulated closely with rules and limited very specifically as can be observed in the examples above, there are no social rules that regulate the social aspects of the game. This can sometimes lead to bad playing experiences where players can get too agitated, manipulative or rude against one another, but ultimately, even if through toxicity, this also contributes to the randomness and addictivity of the game. Compared with the randomness of the hands dealt and tiles drawn, the competition’s reactions and such toxic interactions make players want to play more to prove themselves.
Therefore, as both a social game and a game of chance, Okey leverages real-life social dynamics to encourages addiction, diverging from other games of chance who use similar mechanics to Okey elsewise, through its use of fellowship aesthetic and formal elements such as conflicts, objectives, rules, and players.
