Game Seed: Dishwater
May 15th, 2007 11:59 am

I’ve talked about Journey to the End of the Night already, but what I haven’t talked about is any of the other games that Gideon Reeling ran that weekend, because we didn’t get to play them. The description that intrigued me most was that of A Small Town Anywhere: message-passing, paranoia and a relatively short time limit. Sounds like a Dispatch game to me!

We could probably investigate to find out what their actual setup was–there’s an email address right on the page–but I want to try working it up from first principles, as an exercise. Say you’re one of 20 villagers with a dirty secret. You have some dirt (or possibly just clues to dirt) on other villagers, which you want to expose, while preventing anyone from exposing you. You have an “idiosyncratic postal service.”

How does exposure work? What role does the post office play? Do you actually know other villagers’ secrets, or just clues to them, and if the former, what’s to prevent you from blurting it out immediately? Does this run on a point system, or is the last unexposed person the winner?

Posted in Game Seeds by Brendan
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Josh
May 16th, 2007 2:50 am

I think that the post would be central to this. I assume that the gossip would be collated and revealed through the medium of anonymous, or at least covert, mail, which the post-master can add to, amend or delete, or mis-deliver - maybe not at will, but within certain parameters. I also seem to have assumed that there would be a hide and seek element to this, which is actually quite appealing. I also like the idea of being able to hide from the postman, on the grounds that if the gossip can’t be delivered then it can’t hurt you…

Brendan
May 25th, 2007 12:27 pm

Hmm, maybe you deliver dirt by putting two words on a card–[Person] and [Shame]–and delivering it to the postman, who cuts them all in half and gives everybody one Person and one Shame at random. Then you try to piece them together, and you can share with people you trust, but they might be using you, and you’ll be devaluing your own secrets.

I also think a point system would be more useful than a last-man-standing model. Say you get points for each reveal of another person, but if you are yourself exposed you lose half your current total–actually giving early losers an advantage, and making your position increasingly precarious as you gain points.

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