#the wisdom of crowds

LIVE

At some point in my life I discovered the nick case website, which contain some games about social behavior and mental health among other kind of works.

Sometimes I don’t feel good and I think about these games again. Well, especially one that I remember the most which is about anxiety and help to feel a bit better.

Adventures with anxiety

Adventure with anxiety is based on the native american belief that we have two wolfs fighting inside us: The wolf of compassion, love, understanding and generosity ; and the wolf of cruelty, hate, fear and selfishness. According to that belief, the one who’ll win is the one you’ll feed.

In that game Nick Case use a wolf to represent anxiety and how it can hurt us if we don’t learn how to communicate with it. Actually we even play as the wolf, whose goal is to protect our human!

It’s an interesting way to teach how to deal with anxiety while not saying we should reject it. The game is all about nuances : yes we should listen to it because the only purpose of our anxiety is to protect us, but no we shouldn’t always listen to it and when it’s wrong then the best way to deal with it is to try to reason with it.

Example:

My wolf: “Aaaah!!! They’ll hate our post on the nicky case project!!! We should stop you’ll be ha…”

Me: “Come on! I posted many things that people liked and…”

My wolf: “And sometimes people didn’t like it! What makes you think they won’t hate this one? Do you want people to hate you or laugh at y….”

Me: “OK OK I’ll show it to someone else before posting it and they’ll tell us if it’s worth it or not. Do you feel better?”

My wolf: “Ah! You are thinking about that guy? Well, I can work with that.”

Me: “Nice! It’s settled then.”

And this is how that game suggests to deal with the anxiety. A good one!

Well, to be honest in my head there was way more things about mental health, but in reality most of the interactive games are rather about social behaviors. In that category I can talk about some of them among the most interesting. Like…

The wisdom and/or Madness of crowds

That one is less than an adventure than a puzzle game. At each step you have a text explaining something about history or a fact about connection, and it makes you connect the heads with each other to see how an information or a behavior can spread.

More of an essay than a game as are most interactive games on the website, The wisdom and/or madness of crowds is a good way to understand how our connections can affect people and ourselves, how we can act good or badly depending of who we are around us. For example when among our friends we have half drinkers and half non-drinkers you easily starts to think half of the world drinks. Or when challenger was launched in 1986 despite engineers warnings and it killed 7 people because the big boss only listened to the other big bosses they usually agree with. Or when a fake news appears and you don’t see many people refuting it.

You have all of these in it, and it’s pretty interesting! Give it a try!

As another kind of game you can find there is one I found while looking at the list of Nicky Case’s projects :

Coming out simulator.

Here we have one of Nicky’s first games. A very personal one where they talk about their coming out, what was said, and what happened next. Well, half-what happened.

You know I’m pansexual and I made my coming out too but I had the chance to have tolerant parent (my mom said something upsetting though). So what was in that game… I wasn’t ready for it. Like I wondered how we even could say things like that or act like their parents did. But they said it was full of things that was said so I believe them. Yet I didn’t feel comfortable at all while playing.

But that game is worth playing! Because he was seriously well-made, and the start as well as the end was rather funny. Well, not entirely but you feel Nicky takes it lightly today and is more like “yeah it happened and now I’m good, everything is going well for me”.

I’ll just talked about another one. One I hesitated to shared but it actually is good so…

Nothing to hide

A big brother kind of game in which you live in a world where people agree to say they don’t need a private life, that we should watch everyone 24/7 and that if someone isn’t visible by the cameras so they are suspicious and must be arrested immediately. Thus in that game you must manage to be seen by them all along while trying to flee your father, the minister in that world.

The hardest of them all! Especially for my puzzle game skills that are pretty low. And worst: my skills at 3 am! Where I’m the most impatient!

But it’s honestly an well-built world I wanna know more of and it’s pretty fun to do. So it’s worth a try! Just know that it’s the demo of game since long dead, which I’m incredibly sad about.

With these examples you have an idea of what you can wait from that website. Well, most of what I didn’t talk about are more essays like The wisdom and/or madness of crowds but they’re all interesting in some ways. And it teaches a lot with the media of interactive stories.