Screwed
Screwed is a social card game, designed to facilitate conversations about sex positivity and healthy relationships. By allowing players to maintain agency and choice, the game supports their ability to participate at the level they feel comfortable.
How might we use a fun, collaborative game to initiate conversations about love, sex, and intimacy among a group of close friends?
process:
Screwed had the initial goal of creating an approachable way for friends to share their experiences around love, sex, and relationships in a less heavy way. Our team brought together a diverse collection of perspectives in ethnicity, sexuality, religion, and experience with sex-positivity. By encouraging these conversations, the game becomes a tool to facilitate learning in community.
Game design requires many lots of trials and errors to create a compelling and consistent experience. During our playtests with various groups, we learned that the comfort level between players makes the difference between enjoyment and embarrassment. That led us to shape our game around the experience of playing with close friends and helped frame the game’s questions.
challenges:
How do we get people to play a serious game?
Our first challenge was to determine a format for our game. We studied existing conversation mechanics from popular games and therapeutic activities, including Truth or Dare, Uno, and Scruples—a game that tests morality). These examples exposed the need for open-ended questions, action cards, and opportunities to force another player’s hand.
What do we hope players take away?
As we developed questions and rules for the game, we paid attention to balancing the deck between straightforward questions and more in-depth topics for conversation. We incorporated action cards to allow players to break the pattern of asking and answering questions, keeping the play dynamic. Our playtesting also informed the need for creating rules that allowed players to manage the degree to which they participate and share, without disrupting the flow of the game.
outcomes:
The Screwed deck contains 69 cards—57 Question cards and 12 Action cards. The Action cards permitted players to break the game’s standard rules — playing an Action card lets players break the rules and either opt out of answering or intentionally shift the group dynamic. Our final concept kept the simple, functional aesthetic we had developed through our playtests and we created some easily-transported packaging.
action cards:
rebound
(game play changes direction)
hand stuff
(pick one card from any player’s hand)
group play
(draw the top question card and ask the group)
cum again
(next player draws 2 cards at the end of their turnn)
not in the mood
(skip your turn)
ask for it
(make up your own question and ask the group)
Thanks in part to the addition of suggestive language to add humor and playfulness, we witnessed players transition easily from difficult topics to bursts of laughter, depending on the question at hand. Offering players the opportunity to choose their first hand created an initial sense of security; they were able to select cards that they felt comfortable answering. Our design process revealed that open communication and personal comfort were two of the most necessary elements. The game was most fun when players loosened up and overshared!
Photography by Taylor Sokolowski.
