This weekend on the podcast Tam tipped me off to something called Kind Words (lo fi chill beats to write to), which started as a humble monthly bundle exclusive game in July but is now available through other platforms like Steam. Weirdly it doesn’t actually seem to be purchasable on the Humble store, just through that one bundle. The biggest challenge about the game is that I am not entirely certain it qualifies as a game, but is instead more of an experience. I realize that is not exactly selling it strongly yet, but hang on and stay with me.
The idea is sorta simple. You are a character sitting in a room listening to this radio that plays the chillest of music, and as you sit there paper airplanes come zooming through your room. You can click on them and open them up for a note from some anonymous stranger on the internet. The catch however is that the notes are supposed to be positive or helpful. It might be a kind word, a favorite quote or even a recipe for some excellent brownies. The notes themselves are heavily policed to keep from allowing anything to disrupt the friendly ecosystem of chillaxing.
Your interaction is through Ella the Mail Deer, which is super shocked that you have never had a Mail Deer before. She folds your notes into airplanes, and in the case of requests which I will get into later she serves as a go between to keep the whole arrangement private and secure. The idea being you are placed in this box where everything you say is kept secret, and not subtly nudged in the direction of positivity rather than negativity. The thing is it works, just a few moments into the experience and you find yourself being willing to share advise or stories with complete strangers, or at least I did.
The most basic interaction is to send a note out to the world via paper airplane. There is no interaction involved with these and they just blast your comment out to the world. I’ve opened dozens and dozens of these and not a single one so far has been anything bordering on toxicity. The internet has taught me that anonymity is a bad thing… but generally speaking those relationships are when only one side is anonymous. When both you and your audience are anonymous, and you are placed in a box and told to do good things… weirdly people seem to do exactly that.
The other kind of interaction is that you can make or read requests from others. These are situations where the other person is wanting some sort of feedback to something they are going to say. As a result you get 14 lines worth of text instead of the usual 7 lines on a paper airplane. Reading these confessions if you will invoked two different reactions. Firstly it made me realize that so many people have exactly the same fears, which sort of binds us all together. Secondly I started wanting to share my own wisdom with these folks, or whatever passes for wisdom.
You find yourself trying to help out in situations where there really isn’t a clear answer. I can tell a lot of the people I am reading notes from are significantly younger than me, and at age 43 I have gone through a lot of these same experiences. For example the one that I am responding to in the above screenshot is someone bemoaning their friends getting involved with relationships and other things that make them no longer available to them. This happens and it is a part of the natrual flow so I attempted to summarize that concept in a note with the advise to keep putting yourself out there to meet new friends. I went through this especially as my friends started having kids and dropping off into a void that they are only now starting to emerge from.
There is also a low-key sticker collecting mini-game where when you reply to a request you can attach a sticker to the bottom. Everyone starts with one of the random stickers, I started with the blobfish sticking its tongue out. So when I wrote replies I always remembered to attach the sticker because as soon as you get a sticker you can start sending it out as well. When someone has replied to one of your requests you are given the opportunity to attach a sticker as a thank you, and as you get more stickers you sorta developer a larger vocabulary of options for thanking other players.
The only negative about the “game” is that you wind up losing time while sitting here responding to things. This is in part why AggroChat yesterday was so late getting out because I just kept clicking on paper airplanes or responding to requests. I even shared some of my own fears in request form and got back some pretty cogent responses. This as a whole is a really interesting social experiment and it seems to be working. I greatly approve of their inclusion of a Mental Health Resources button on pretty much any page where you can put input. That said in many ways this is a form of therapy as you send your troubles off into the void and get back a satchel full of positivity in return. If you too suffer from depression or anxiety… or just have a bunch of worries, I would suggest checking Kind Words out. I definitely feel better after spending a little time in this super chill isolation chamber.
