Good Taste

Title:    Good Taste
Date:    Nov 15
Type:    Social Game
Role:    Design & Visuals
Collaborators:    Blake Andrews, Zachary Barash & Hannah Monck
Description: This was designed to explore making an ‘intervention game’, that is, a game which by its nature causes players to re-contextualize something familiar and consider it in a new light. MAGNET, the NYU facility that houses the Game Center, very quickly becomes a home for the MFAs, since we spend so much time there, but it’s also a space populated by so many strangers, since we share the floor with a number of other programs. So it’s a space that is at once familiar and filled with friendly faces, but also filled with people you don’t know and sort of ignore. This game uses those strangers as game pieces, and forces you to consider strangers’ tastes as a sort of combination trivia and empathy game. In Good Taste, players speculate about a game a stranger may have played, and the other player guesses whether they have or haven’t. This has a nice balancing effect, as you try and pick something that could go either way- you can’t pick something too obscure or too obvious. Those are the full rules up there, so you can play it as well… if you’re in an environment filled with games-related and games-adjacent people. It requires a pretty specific game piece, admittedly.