Hello, you,
Happy Halloween! Halloween will be in absolutely no way relevant to this letter. Sorry.
As you know, I am writing a game in which, along with having a rip roaring adventure on the high seas, you can also, if they like you back, have romantic/sexual/sexual-and-romantic relationships with one of three ROs I am writing in. You can also be friends with them. You can be ordinary friends, or you can be particular friends. This latter is represented by its own variable (I've called it bestie), and I wrote it to be an alternative path that still allows you to build intimacy with ROs if you're not interested in sex and/or romance.
[NB: for this game, I am not including poly or open relationships, because I think if I add any more complexity to the code I will simply never finish it.]
The romances are easy to code for, because romance usually involves, fairly early on, the people involved having a frank conversation about what this means to them. I can just put in a bit during your second one-to-one in which you can tell the game what you want this relationship to be.
But the thing is, friendships are almost always emergent properties. You might at some point have a conversation in which you acknowledge what you already mean to each other, but unless you're under about 10 years old, you are unlikely to ask someone on like the third or fourth time you hang out if they want to be best friends with you.
Also, friendship is different. Most romantic relationships (though obviously not all) are exclusive to two people. But you’re allowed to have as many close friends as you like.
So I've ended up writing it so that you can be close friends with all three ROs, if you put the work into the relationships, but you can only have one bestie. This sort of makes sense from a coding point of view, because it means I can include entirely platonic versions of all intimate scenes. That way, you still get the closeness, and the reveals, and the opportunities to support the RO. I can also still have your bestie be the character who is there if your player character gets hurt, or sick, or whatever. It is a particularly intimate friendship, and that comes with tacit obligations on both sides.
But is my invention of the bestie variable a neat way of ensuring aro/ace PCs don't get left out of the prospect of real intimacy with the ROs just because they don't want to hold hands? Or in forcing an exclusivity onto that friendship, am I attempting to squish it into a box where it doesn't really fit?
And I think probably the answer to both those questions… is yes. Friendship is emergent. That is important to how it works. But intimate friendship, though not exclusive, comes with expectations and obligations on both sides. If one of my best friends is in trouble, I think they have a right to expect my practical and emotional support in the way that a friend I have coffee with now and again doesn't.
So should there be anything stopping the player from becoming besties with all three ROs?
Is there anything that limits how many intimate friends you can have?
Well, yes. And as you have probably worked out for yourself, the limit is time. I read through Jeffrey Hall’s landmark study on how people make friends, and he identified some pretty clear limits within which people usually consider another person to be a friend.
People rarely consider a new acquaintance to be a casual friend until they’ve spent at least 43 hours with them in the three weeks after meeting them (about 14 hours a week).
They might upgrade the new person from ‘casual friend’ to friend after somewhere between 57 hours (over three weeks that would be 19 hours a week) and 164 hours together (this one is taken over three months, and is about 14 hours a week).
They might upgrade that person from ‘friend’ to ‘good/best friend’ after 119 hours (over three weeks this is about 40 hours a week!) to about 219 hours or more (over three months this is about 18 hours a week).
Hours seem to be worth more therefore if they are concentrated over a shorter period of time.
So basically, if you meet a new person and see them for about 14 hours a week, after 3 weeks you might be ‘casual friends’, after three months you might upgrade to ‘friends’, and after another month you might get up to ‘good friends’. So like, two hours of hanging out every day for four months gets you one good friend.
Alternatively, if you are a first year uni student and consequently able to massively hotbox all your relationships, those hours seem to be worth slightly more, so your ‘good friend’ score can come after only 119 hours rather than 219.
And presumably, though the study didn’t cover this, if the period of time taken to acquire your ‘friendship hours’ gets longer rather than shorter, you need more hours to compensate? Which might be a factor in why it seems so much harder to make friends when you’re middle aged and really busy.
Are all hours of equal value?
OK. You’ve spent your 219 hours together. Did they definitely all count?
No.
Hours spent together because you have to be together (for example if you’re in the same class at school, or you’re colleagues) basically don’t count.
Hours spent engaging in small talk, at least after leveling up to ‘casual friends’, is actually worse than nothing. The chat, if there is chat, has to be what the researcher terms ‘striving talk’. Basically, that means anything that isn’t small talk: joking around, catching up on each other’s lives, Big Talk, whatever.
And you don’t have to talk. The researchers initially hypothesised that conversation was essential, but they found that hanging out and doing a shared activity (for pleasure - see above) is just as good. (Though I suspect that one has to account for taste. Personally, interesting chat is absolutely fundamental to all my important relationships.)
What about if you meet in a group?
I was surprised to find that the study didn’t account for this. It just asked people to record number of hours, not how many people were there.
But I did find some fascinating research into group communication. It basically discovered this:
If you are having the kind of intimate conversation in which you are actively keeping up a mental map of the minds of your interlocutors as you go, the upper limit is about four people in the conversation. We can only really keep four people in our heads at once, including ourselves.
But here is the absolutely WILD part: if the conversation is about the mind and behaviours of another person, the number of people in the conversation goes down by one!!!
How cool is that?! The average number of people in a deep conversation is just under four. If the conversation is about another person, the average goes down to just under three!!
The mental exercise involved in holding your imaginary version of someone in your head is the same whether they’re standing in front of you or not!
Anyway, in the absence of better data, I am going to say that any conversation containing fewer than five people counts towards your total friendship hours.
What shall I do?
OK. In the game, by the start of chapter three, you have been with the crew for about 5 weeks (possibly up to 9 weeks, depending on how chapter 2 went). And since you are all trapped in a small ship together, I think it definitely counts as the ‘hotbox’ scenario.
You sleep for 8 hours ish, you’re on duty for another 8. That leaves eight hours a day in which you could, theoretically, be forming friendships. Additionally, the three ROs are very good friends with each other already, so will be spending time together with or without you. Though of course shift patterns mean it is unusual for all four of you to be off at the same time.
So let’s say on average you have 6 hours a day available with each person (in fact, the maths doesn’t work on a day by day basis, but it’s easier to think about this way).
You have to eat an evening meal with the entire wardroom each day (11 people), so that’s minus two hours which will, because of shift patterns, always come out of the 6 available. You then have to spend at least some time going to the head/washing etc.
So, and I know this is ridiculously back-of-the-napkin, I’m going to say you have about three hours a day available for forming intimate relationships, if you like.
That is 105 hours over five weeks.
I would say that makes it reasonable for you to reach chapter three considering all three of the ROs ‘friends’, assuming you finished chapter two on good terms with them. You’ve presumably spent a lot of the month between chapters socialising with them, and now have a fairly solid foundation. Then, in chapter 3, you get a chance to spend some serious quality time with one RO. if you were already friends, this is a chance to get up to ‘good/best friends’. This is sleight of hand, of course. In reality I’m not going to change your friendship stats from one chapter to the next, but I think it works. You tell me how important this relationship is to you by the end of chapter 2, and in the gap between chapters, your PC puts in the hours to justify how close that makes you.
All this to say, and to answer my own question: I don’t think it makes sense to have ‘Bestie’ as an exclusive category that you can only have with one RO. Friendship doesn’t work like that. I also think it probably doesn’t make sense for ‘Bestie’ to be an explicitly stated thing between you (though I will give you an option to not become closer friends than you are now. It’s not always explicit, but it is always actively chosen).
But I do think it makes sense for that badge to be earned by choosing to spend lots of extra time with this person rather than someone else, for example when shore leave is available.
That means, because I’ve only written one one-to-one scene per RO in chapter 3, it is de facto only possible to reach ‘bestie’ status with one of them, and then only if you were already friends at the start of the chapter and haven’t subsequently pissed them off too much. But you can still be close friends with either or both of the others. And of course you might choose to spend shore leave with a different RO in a later chapter, though since shore leave is rare, your bestie or partner might be a bit hurt that they weren’t invited along.
To sum up:
‘Bestie’ is non-exclusive, but requires a significant time investment so is a challenge to get with more than one person, at least in early chapters.
‘Close’ is non-exclusive, and if you ended chapter two on good terms with them, it is possible to get to ‘close’ with at least two of the ROs during chapter three..
If you aren’t already on good terms with an RO at the start of chapter 3, it’s extremely difficult to get to ‘Bestie’ (though you can get to ‘close’). It is possible to get to ‘Couple’ from only a medium friendship score, because hormones.
‘Bestie’, like ‘couple’, is opt-in. You can choose to just remain ‘close’ friends rather than deepen your friendship further. In this case, the RO will not be hurt if you don’t invite them to stuff.
Thank you for being here while I talk to myself!
Enjoy the rest of your day!
Grace xx
PS: What do you think about these numbers? Obviously, the entire study can only capture what people report about their own perceptions of the intimacy of their relationships, but I still think it’s interesting.
This week’s interesting link
The study about how long it takes to make friends
Deep dive, but I enjoyed it!
The study about modelling other people’s minds!
Two links this month, you lucky thing!
Right now, the project for which I am doing most of my wheat googling is a choose your own adventure IF game I’ve been commissioned to write for Choice of Games. You can find out all about it, and play the 60K word demo, here.
