Gossip was an experimental game created for the Atari 400 by Chris Crawford. Crawford wished for games that would simulate aspects of human social interaction, thus creating games with “social challenges” that would broaden the universe of computer and video game genres. He hoped people-games would also appeal to different audiences from the then-prevalent combat-based and sports games. He especially hoped to appeal to women.
Although the interac...
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Gossip was an experimental game created for the Atari 400 by Chris Crawford. Crawford wished for games that would simulate aspects of human social interaction, thus creating games with “social challenges” that would broaden the universe of computer and video game genres. He hoped people-games would also appeal to different audiences from the then-prevalent combat-based and sports games. He especially hoped to appeal to women.
Although the interaction involved was relatively simple, he considered it to be to “people games” what Pong was to video games in general. He contends that social interaction modelling in The Sims is equally simple.
The screen at right is a mock-up that Crawford contributed. In High Score!: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games (ISBN 0-07-222428-2), an actual screen shot appears with different colours and eight characters: You, Val, Jim, Liz, Amy, Dan, Sue and Tom.
The player would use a joystick cursor to select a character to telephone. That person’s...
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