I just got Chloe a date with Doug, and now I’m manipulating the emotions of a high-school Prom judge. This is sick. Prom Week’s plots are raging, emotional torrents of cruelty, humiliation and, if you’re inclined, affection. If you’re old enough to look back on youth as a learning experience, making a teenager insult someone so their enemy becomes your friend has that horrible air of familiarity to it, but one that you can eventually (hopefully) look back on as an ugly fact of life. I like Prom Week, but there are times when its social strategy just made me feel bad about myself.
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Next up in our series of chats with this year’s Independent Games Festival finalists is Mike Treanor and Josh McCoy from the UC Santa Cruz team behind ambitious high school-based social simulation/strategy game Prom Week – which is in the running for the Technical Excellence gong at IGF 2012. Here, they talk flirting, ‘social physics’, bathrooms and their answer to the most important question of all.
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