Me and Anders Psychofreud started putting together a messaging application today that i think is totally weird, but for certain reasons really compelling. First a little history.
If you haven’t played Animal Crossing on the DS or Wii, i strongly suggest that you find an opportunity to do so. On its own the game is addictive, but its weird implementation of massively multiplayer online play is really worth a long look. Nintendo are infamous for their friend code system, which puts users who want to play together through a good few burning rings before they can actually do so. Because of this system, you will never openly communicate with an identifiable unknown. The system allows for play with random strangers, but communication seems to be reinvented every time. If you are connected friends, you might get a full suite of options, but for random strangers you’re typically given what amounts to a few emotes and canned phrases. For a game with MMO pretentions, this is obviously hugely challenging.
Animal Crossing lets users that aren’t connected friends “interact” through side-effects of their actions. I had a real moment of wow when i spent a few irrational minutes making a pixel perfect nazi swastika pattern and put it up in my clothes shop for my (already utterly irreverent) animals to wear. Soon, the swastika pattern had migrated from my town to my few friends’ towns. And then the ball just rolled from there. Friends of friends of friends of friends would see nazi animals show up in their towns.
Media in Animal Crossing spreads like a disease. It’s a viral mmo.
An animal will show up in your town and ask for a new catchphrase. The next day, it might have moved out to another town. Which town? You’re not the one who decides. This lets you communicate ideas, but only to random recipients. This system is epitomized in the bottled mail system, which lets you write a message, put it in a bottle and toss it into the sea. Whoever gets the message is apparently completely random, throughout the online service. I have gotten bottled messages ranging from ascii cats to sorrowful suicide notes.
This is what makes Animal Crossing so enticing for adults i think. A combination of pure OCD collectomania and a world that seems wildly chaotic. In my mind, after a few weeks play, an Animal Crossing town is like an out of control train in a tight turn teetering on one rail.
What we begun putting together today is a purification of the bottled mail system. An anonymous client that lets you post messages into a pile, and retrieve random ones you haven’t written yourself. When you retrieve one, it is removed from the database. This ensures that a message is anonymous and personal. Of course, the system is widely open to abuse, but i actually don’t mind that aspect. Sitting on the beach sifting through debris for gold, you’re likely to find a whole lot of junk.
I’m hoping the system will find a place as a way to let off steam, and let off guilt. Somewhere to confess, or to be heard by someone who will know that somewhere, out there, a single individual posted this thought for a single individual to read. The internet is so often about the individual entity spreading information as widely as possible; the cluster bomb collateral damage model of information.
This narrows the focus back on the individual recipient, and theoretically eliminates the egotist exhibitionist publisher.
It’s the Anti-Twitter, anti-Facebook. It’s not about the masses, but the individual, sporadic connection of strangers’ eyes meeting sporadically through the window of a passing bus. The prototype is in development here, and I hope you’ll find it interesting as it evolves. At the time of writing it has almost no effort whatsoever put into the UI. Making it pretty comes next.