Game: Cards Against Humanity
Target Audience: 18+
Game’s Creator: Josh Dillon, Daniel Dranove, Eli Halpern, Ben Hantoot, David Munk, David Pinsof, Max Temkin, Eliot Weinstein
Platform: Card Game
For my first critical play assignment, I played Cards Against Humanity with some close friends and learned a lot about my communication style. In this game, everyone draws two types of cards from the deck, the black cards being question cards with blanks, and white cards being answer cards used to fill in those blanks. Every round, one player plays a question card, and the remaining players need to choose an answer card that produces the funniest sentence. The game is adult-themed and filled with dark humors, which gave rise to some interesting ethical implications.
I find myself to be fairly proactive during the game. I would be rather excited every time I have a good card to play or someone else played a good answer card, and I would also be the first to search up references or colloquial phrases that we don’t quite get or understand when they show up. This probably says more about the people I play this game with, however. Given the adult theme of this game and many potentially offensive combinations of question and answer cards, I don’t imagine I would be nearly as active if I were playing with strangers or new friends, and I would also be more careful with the answer cards I play so that I don’t come off as overly edge or cynical. But since I was playing this game with friends I’ve known for more than 8 years now, I’m free to play whatever card I want knowing that an one-off dark joke won’t have significant consequences.
I think this game highlights that the social context can heavily influence the decision-making of players in these party games. In these judging games, one of the implied premises is that the players agree to a tone of humor and a range of acceptable responses. For example, when I was playing Job Job with another friend group, answers referencing media that many people liked would typically win over a generic funny response. This agreement forms the “magic circle” of the game, where answers inside the game are low-stake and detached from reality, but stepping out of it, especially in Cards Against Humanity, would break the game and even lead to real consequences. Therefore, in cases where players in judging games don’t know each other well, the “magic circle” would be smaller, and players’ decision making will be more conservative, giving answers that’s more universally well-regarded or acceptable. For closer friends, however, a larger “magic circle” allows one to wield a wider range of answers, be it sexual innuendos or political comments. The “magic circle” analogy can also be drawn between games – QuipLash and Job Job, being more family friendly, gives you less chance to step outside of the “magic circle”, whereas Cards Against Humanity with its adult theme makes it more likely to step outside the “magic circle” if one is not careful.
Another observation I had while playing Cards Against Humanity is that we sometimes find it hard to understand the game as non-native speakers of English. Some of the celebrities that the cards reference were ones none of us had ever heard of, and some of the phrases in the answer cards definitely took us by surprise (unfortunately English textbooks would never teach you what a salty surprise is). This shows how the cultural backdrop of both the game and players can have major impacts on the playing experience or how games get interpreted by the players, which is an important issue that game designers should be aware of.
For the ethics problem, I think it is the players who should be responsible for being supportive and preventing harm. In judging games like Cards Against Humanity, the ultimate goal is to let everyone have fun through the goofy responses people make, which is done by finding the common denominator among everyone’s sense of humor, i.e. the sweet spot in the shared “magic circle”. For some players, it can take time to align their sense of humor with others, and it is often in this process where the frequent rejection of their responses can create a feeling of frustration. Players should therefore be aware that the judging process is not merely for competition, but also a feedback mechanism that help everyone to converge on a shared sense of humor, which naturally makes being supportive and constructive a necessity for these games.
