Alex Hayter of Blot Interactive found himself with an odd task. He had to get his grandmother to say “Sheen” over Facebook chat. Sheen, as in the TMZ darling, walking disaster, and sometimes-actor, not the luster after giving the kitchen table a smooth wipe. He had to manage this without using the trap words “Charlie,” “tiger” or “winning.”
In conversation with anyone else, he would, very jarringly, suggest a movie night featuring Hot Shots! Part Deux and hope for the best. His grandmother, on Facebook but not otherwise attuned to the zeitgeist, was in the dark about Charlie Sheen. “That proved to be difficult,” says Hayter, “I didn’t get her to say it.”
Blot Interactive has made a Facebook game that requires you to be a little craftier than just maxing out your credit cards to feed fake cows. Chat Fu is partly inspired by the it-happens-to-rhyme-with-it board game Taboo, where players must get their friends to shout out a word. However, Chat Fu features a sneaky twist that’ll have social mediates snickering. One player is blissfully unaware they are locked in a match of wits.
Like Taboo, players are assigned a word they need to get someone else to say, and anchored to that word are a small set of terms the player cannot use. Unlike Taboo, there are ninjas, martial arts, throwing stars and customizable avatars. Players can select a category to draw words from, and a friend to try to juice it out from. On the dashboard, you’ll see animated fists-a-flying, while your unsuspecting chum, who is looking at a regular Facebook wall, will be lucky to see an emoticon. After succeeding, you’ll be given the option to let your friend in on what happened and seek revenge, or you can refuse, and carry the secret to your grave.
“I don’t really consider myself as much of a prankster,” says Hayter, “and to be honest, I’m pretty terrible at playing Chat Fu. Whenever I play the game I take a very long lineage approach to try to get the person to say the word.”
Hayter’s in a unique position because, working for Blot, he’s ushered a huge portion of his own social network playing the game. So they know his ruse. Many are actively trying to dupe him back.
“You know they’re playing the game by the first thing they say,” says Hayter, “if they’re just suddenly asking you strange questions. If they’re not very good, at least.” So in a funny way, Chat Fu has forced Hayter to reconnect with people he hasn’t spoken to in a while – which is precisely how you end up talking with your grandmother about a man who has made a career from treating women like garbage and slinging hashtags.
There is a certain stigma thrown at Facebook games. Tarnished by Zynga, Candy Crush and other drones of freemium, social media games are best known for exchanging real world funds for near-useless fake money and annoying the shit out of your friends, not creating an experienced amplified by being the only one in the room playing. Of course, you can trade cash for cartoon coins, but Hayter explained there are upgrades and avatar junk that can only be earned through play. So even if there’s a hole burning in your PayPal account, there’s no fast track to becoming a Chat Fu master.
“We wanted to make something that wasn’t just another Facebook game,” says Hayter. “We wanted to make a cool game. Facebook just happened to be the ideal platform for it.”
As for other recent touchy Facebook subjects, when I asked Hayter if there’s been some office eeriness amidst PRISM-relevant matters and Big Data’s mining of certain key terms, he admitted he hasn’t had the time to look over the US’ hit list of evil words, “but that’s not to say we’ll never have an NSA content pack.”
Now’s the time to start deciphering the most organic way to get my cousins yapping about bulk fertilizer.
