rrrrthats5rs

RRRRThats5Rs.com was created in early 2006 with the goal of satirizing and mocking online gaming, but has grown into a social experiment. The site’s games are designed to be simple, frustrating and pointless to see how players will react to slight changes of expected gaming behavior.

Although online games seem like a chaotic and fluid genre, the types of gameplay intensely clusters around the latest trends. One game becomes tremendously popular and a long slew of copycat games follow… whether defending a castle, escaping a room, or anything involving stick figures and death. These waves of games condition the average player to behave in a precise manner and expect a nearly identical gameplay.

At RRRR, we see this as the perfect opportunity for experimentation, so we create behavioral traps in our games by installing non sequiturs – changing some aspect that is always constant in most typical games, and not warning the player.

Below is a summary of design experiments we created on RRRR – the rationale behind each game, some playing statistics, and our favorite comments.