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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • This is interesting. Hinge pushed out a message to users that was like “studies show that ghosting makes you and the person you’re ghosting feel bad! It’s not a big deal to just say no thanks!”. I don’t know if it made a difference.

    One of the things to take into account is some people (often but not always men) are dangerous. Women have told me they’ve ghosted because the man was giving them danger vibes. Encouraging the person to unmatch might be good enough.

    One thing I’d like to see, I think, is some way for me to rate people I match with but didn’t keep dating. Like Alex was polite and punctual and respectful, but they hate cats so we can’t be a thing. All that info just goes into the void. Though i wouldn’t have this be free text, and there’s more ways to screw it up than do it right. Information about people ghosting or flaking would go in the same bucket.


  • I think getting people to pay anything will be a hard sell. But I also think “free” creates bad incentives. This is probably “better” but humans are really bad at understanding things.

    I wonder if a tip / pay what you want model would have legs. Probably there’s too many freeloaders, sadly.

    I would also feel pretty bad if I paid for the match and it fizzled out. Like we chat but don’t have a date, or realize there’s some deal breaker (eg: they’re moving away in a month, they smoke, they hate bisexuals, etc). Some of that would be covered by the profile, but some won’t, or won’t be noticed.

    I might try it, based on what I saw with the first couple free matches. But it would also get expensive really quickly. Cheaper than subscriptions though. I think hinge wants like $50/mo for it’s top tier.

    Like, do I pay $100 up front to have 100 likes in flight? Or do I bottleneck it to some smaller number and wait for the duds to expire? Wait for others to make the first move? The optimal strategy is unclear.

    Sorry, sort of just rambling a bit.

    Is NYC one of your target markets?



  • Pledge is kind of a weird term for it. Sounds like one of those culty christian “purity pledge” things. Would not recommend using that word. Maybe “like” or “wave” or “wink” or something like that.

    Is it 3 free matches per lifetime? Or per some smaller period of time?

    That’s good that it doesn’t hide matches. That’s a really irritating behavior on Tinder, Feeld, and others. Just tell me who’s already interested so I can focus on that instead of throwing more into the void.

    Now, next questions: What, if anything, are you doing about conversation and profile? In my experience, a lot of people absolutely self sabotage here. They have a blank profile, or one without any hooks, and then they get upset that the only messages they get are “hey”. Or they only send messages that are “hey”, and then are like “i hate small talk why is only small talk happening”

    Personally I don’t think you can fix that without like several generations of intense investment in education, but maybe a well thought out app could nudge people in the right direction. Hell, even a thing that scanned a message for a question mark and reminded the user “If you don’t ask them any questions, you’re not going to seem interested in them” would make a difference.






  • Run this flow by me?

    I load up the app. I see an attractive person. I hit “like”. Do I pay now? Or do I only pay if they also like, so there’s an extra step of “you both hit like but didn’t pay”?

    Does the other person get notified when I hit like?

    I think Tinder started by going to college campuses, finding who was hot and popular, and paying for them to throw parties. Anyone who went was told to install the app.

    I’m in NYC. I can get a date a week on the apps, but the quality varies. And like I just got ghosted twice this month. There’s room for improvement.



  • Adapted from one of the best dungeons I’ve ever come up with and run:

    The entrance is marked “You will never find what you are looking for”. Ideally, the players believe some macguffin is deep inside.

    Inside the entrance, the walls are unadorned, solid, black. There are no lights. It is pitch black inside, and whatever lights the players bring don’t seem to illuminate as much as they should. It’s also freezing cold. It quickly becomes a maze of hallways, rooms, stairways, and intersections of all the same cold, black. They may find the frozen remains of previous adventurers that entered. They don’t look like they died from violence. Just exposure to the cold, and maybe starvation.

    Have the players map it themselves, and slowly make the layout make less sense. Have hallways loop back into what should be another room. Turn around to go back to the big room, and they find a small round room instead. And always the freezing cold gnaws at them.

    The mechanic is

    spoiler

    You will, literally, never find what you are looking for. If you are looking for the treasure, you’ll find endless rooms and halls instead.

    This rule has more fun side effects. If the players decide to turn around and go back to the exit, they won’t find it.

    If the players split up, and then decide to regroup? They can’t find each other

    Leave tokens behind to mark your path? They’ll disappear.

    In my game when I ran this, they found a very large spiral staircase that went down farther than they could see. They spent some time walking down, looking for the bottom, and of course they didn’t find it. They decided to turn around and go back up, but per the rules of this place they didn’t find it. One of the players said “Fuck it. I have feather fall. Let’s jump.” They fell for so long, and it wasn’t until their goal changed of “let’s see if we can grab a landing??” that the bottom appeared.

    The other clue my players got was they found a survivor from the antagonist’s party that had gone ahead of them, and he said that the antagonist had just spent the whole time asking them a lot of personal questions. Where did you grow up? Where did you learn to read? What was your favorite toy? The trick there was to distract them from the actual dungeon, so they would walk without seeking anything.

    If the characters walk without looking for anything in particular, it will cycle through a bunch of rooms and eventually take them to the heart.

    (Yes, this was heavily inspired by House of Leaves)


    The players had a blast with it. I was so proud of them that they figured it out.





  • Seems like a recipe for subtle bugs and unmaintainable systems. Also those Eloi from the time machine, where they don’t know how anything works anymore.

    Management is probably salivating at the idea of firing all those expensive engineers that tell them stuff like “you can’t draw three red lines all perpendicular in yellow ink”

    I’m also reminded of that ai-for-music guy that was like “No one likes making art!”. Soulless husk.


  • A date. We weren’t a good match for romance etc, but she was fun to talk to. Also she gave me like the most thoughtful rejection text I’ve ever received. Absolutely refreshing compared to the usual ghosting or vague “not what i’m looking for”. It was weird to feel better about myself after a rejection, but that’s what happened.



  • …yeah so if you’re the kind of player who argues and fights at the table. Maybe stick to structured games with clearly defined rules.

    You ignored the “or play a game I don’t like” part. That is what this process is extremely likely to create. Go look at the blog post again. Go look at those rules.

    Furthermore, the process described in the blog post is

    When a rule is needed, everyone at the table quickly discusses what the gameplay should feel like and what rule(s) would support that. If a majority of players agree on the rule (voting is necessary only if there is dissent)

    Arguing is built right into the process! Someone proposes a rule, and you talk about it. And you know what I don’t want to do? Discuss the merits of rules mid-session. Especially large systems like “how does magic work?” or “can you change someone’s mind?”. That sounds awful. It’s one thing to do a quick “Do you think Alex can climb a ladder with this ‘Broken Arm’ consequence?” discussion in Fate. It’s a whole other thing to invent aspects whole cloth, and then try to integrate them with whatever else people came up with this week.

    Or, if I pass on discussing why (for example) dropping your sword on a low roll is going to have weird effects, then I end up playing a game with rules I don’t like. Why would I want that? What don’t you get about this? Do I need to make you a flow chart?

    System doesnt know how to handle something
    |
    |-- Propose a new rule
        |- is the rule good?  --> yes --> oh that is surprising. carry on
             | no
             |
          discuss  <-- the void of wasted time
             |
             | - were they convinced? --> yes --> go back to 'propose a new rule'
                          |
                          |-- no --> keep discussing? -- yes --> well this sucks
                                                 |-- no --> give up --------^
    

    Ironically, the game I mentioned as an example of what I do like (Fate) is very light weight. But not so light weight that it doesn’t exist, and I have to deal with Brian trying to introduce hit locations mid session, again.

    You seem to be imagining this like perfectly spherical frictionless group of players that are all super chill, on the same page about everything, and happy to just do whatever. I’m imagining what has been more typical in my experience, which is not that.

    Again…this isn’t your scenario. I don’t know what to tell you. You’re conflating taking game systems and adding other mechanics to it and just goofing around and making it up as you go.

    The blog post is about building a game system! Look at all the weird rules they made up! This whole blog post is about taking game systems (ie: rules people know from other games) and smushing them together! Anyone doing this process is going to start with some baseline system(s) in their head. Even if it’s just “let’s rock paper scissors for it” or “flip a coin”. It is in fact taking game game systems and adding other mechanics to it.

    They certainly had fun, but as I said that sounds like my personal hell.

    It’s okay to say “I need a game with explicit structure and rules”. That’s fine too, but maybe don’t argue with your players though.

    Arguing is built into the process described into the blog post. Unless you’re splitting hairs and saying “argue” isn’t the same as “discuss”.