Gossip (computer game)
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| Developer(s) | Atari |
| Publisher(s) | Atari Program Exchange |
| Designer(s) | Chris Crawford |
| Platform(s) | Atari 8-bit computers |
| Release | 1983 |
| Genre(s) | Art game |
Gossip was an experimental video game created for the Atari 8-bit family by Chris Crawford. Crawford wished for video games that would simulate aspects of human social interaction via “social challenges”. He hoped these "people games" would appeal to those who were not interested in the more common gaming genres of combat and sports.
Although the social interactions in Gossip are relatively simple, Crawford contends that they are comparable to the level of complexity found in The Sims.
The screen at right is a screen grab from an emulator that Crawford contributed, which features colors as if displayed on a PAL version of the Atari computer. In High Score!: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games (ISBN ), an actual screen shot appears with different colors, typical for an NTSC computer, 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 phone would ring with a jiggling animation and ringing sound effect. He or she would pick up the phone and say, “Air-oh?” The player would select a person to gossip about, and then one of five expressive animations (strong positive, slight positive, neutral, slight negative, strong negative). The listener would then respond with his or her own opinion of the person.
The social interactions he chose for this experimental simulation were declarations of affinity (e.g. “I like Fred,” “I hate Jane”). The theory behind the simulation was that people liked those who shared their opinions of others, and were also influenced positively by their friends’ opinions and negatively by their enemies’ opinions. Such declarations, Crawford said, were implicit in many pieces of gossip. He produced the following mathematical model:
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