Assignment 1: Social Metaphors
Social metaphors of many types lie at the heart of most of the games we play today. Upon looking closer at games down to its basics, one can basically see the parallels to our social lives the game possesses. For example, if someone takes The Sims and breaks it down to its core gameplay, they might realize that it is a doll house with more features. Looking at some of the role-playing games I play, some of those games boil down to office “excel sheet” handling and organization. The game basically teaches me how to optimize and organize, just like an office setting would.
The game I chose to play was sissy fights. In this game, you are a kid in a school yard environment and you interact in groups of other kids, trying so kick people out of the group. This is done by insulting the other kids. One can defend themselves, attack someone individually, or choose the option of teaming up on someone. When you get hit to many times, you lose the game.
The social metaphor in this game basically is the schoolyard environment where bullies and mean girls used to run rampant. The way the game mechanics work, it is easy to relive the feelings associated in the schoolyard environment. Upon starting this game, I came into the Sissy Fights world on my own. It was clear to me from the moment I started playing that people like to run together in little cliques, much like I remember from elementary school. In some of the games I joined, it was pretty much a free-for-all, not many alliances were evident. Other games I joined had blatant alliances that basically would always team up on the new guy and make their initiation to this game a hard one. It was hard at first for me, but I convinced my brother to come on and play also. Since he was just a room away from me physically, we had a better chance going around and winning some games. The fact that I had to result to that shows how closely this game mirrors the school yard experience.