CS 247G: Critical Play (Week 1 writeup)

Game

Inhuman Conditions, by Tommy Maranges and Cory O’Brien. Hosted online, played with a friend in the same room.

Target audience

The target audience is mostly likely adult, given the game’s chosen vernacular. The vocabulary, rules and definitions would be unusually complex for a young children’s game; moreover, the interview packets and backgrounds employ adult references (an interviewer may be prompted query a “Reality TV Star” on the topic of “Moral Failings”.

Formal elements

Inhuman Conditions involves a series of sequential decisions on the part of each player, that decide the content of the game; the structural arc of the game is precisely preserved from round to round. Simply, one player interviews the other, using prompts on a decided topic; the other player assumes a character (e.g. “Disgraced Scientist”) and attempts to answer the given prompts in character, as well as in accordance with a secret requirement or set of requirements. They must do this without making the interviewer suspicious that they are a robot (by enacting their requirements too conspicuously).

The formal elements of the game achieve a number of outcomes. Participatory selection of the game’s parameters determines what the players will be attentive to (interpersonally) for the rest of the game and ensures that the experience is different each time they play. After choosing a ‘penalty’ action that the suspect must perform if they violate their requirements, players are required to perform a useful validation step by coming to agreement on the nature of the penalty; this helps prevent later conflict along the lines of “That’s not what it meant!”.

While neither unusual nor ingenious in the world of games, the decision to provide the players with a range of difficulties at the interview prompt selection stage (from Intro to Hard) is a useful mechanism for encouraging players to pick up the rules progressively and to play the game multiple times (with increasing difficulty).

During the interview stage, the interviewer is faced with a decision: to click SUSPECT IS HUMAN, or SUSPECT IS ROBOT. However, the “SUSPECT IS HUMAN” element is unclickable until the end of a timer, creating a bias towards disbelief. At any moment during the interview, the interviewer can determine that the suspect is a robot; in order for the robot to succeed, they must last the full five minutes without being doubted. This curtails the impact of the human bias to guess prematurely.

Type of fun game intended — did it meet its goals?

• Fantasy (via role-play) and challenge (achieving one’s provided requirements without being discovered, or discovering the suspect before they can achieve their requirements). Indeed, this game successfully elicits both types of fun, though not to a particularly sensual degree.

Moments of particular success or epic fails

This was an enjoyable but fairly unremarkable game, with no moments of outstanding success or failure.

How could the game be better?

• Improved explanation/onboarding (definition of penalty is not particularly clear). “Violent robots may perform the penalty twice as part of their deprogramming” –– this is tough to decipher with no context. I and my co-player paused on this screen in confusion.

• Some of the penalties (say the # of fingers held up on your left hand, use a double negative) are dead giveaways, cutting the game short by instantly revealing the suspect to be a robot.
• Reduce usage of unnecessary terminology (“Interview packet”, “inducer”, “vulnerability”) that induces doubt in the players as to whether they are correctly understanding the intention of the game.