Gossip (video game)

Gossip is an unreleased video game for Atari 8-bit computers, created by Chris Crawford while he worked at Atari, Inc. Although the documentation lists it as an Atari Program Exchange title, it never appeared in any published catalog and likely was never made available to the public. Crawford wanted to create games that simulated human social interaction through what he called "social challenges." He hoped these "people games" would attract players who had no interest in the typical genres of combat or sports. While the social interactions in Gossip are basic, Crawford argued they are as complex as those found in *The Sims*.

The game screen shows eight characters: You, Val, Joe, Liz, Amy, Dan, Sue, and Tom. The player uses a joystick cursor to select a character to call. The phone rings with a jiggling animation and a sound effect, and the character answers saying “Air-oh?” The player then picks someone to gossip about, and chooses one of five expressive animations (strong positive, slight positive, neutral, slight negative, or strong negative). The listener responds with their own opinion of that person.

Crawford based the social simulation on declarations of affinity—statements like “I like Fred” or “I hate Jane.” The underlying theory was that people like those who share their opinions of others, and are swayed positively by friends’ opinions and negatively by enemies’ opinions. He believed such declarations were implicit in most gossip. He created a mathematical model using two equations, where the change in the listener’s opinion of the speaker and the listener’s opinion of the subject depended on the speaker’s declared opinion and the listener’s existing opinion, divided by constants greater than 1 (he suggested a hypothetical value of 10 but didn’t specify the actual numbers used). The AI characters didn’t interact with each other directly; instead, they acted as nodes in a web of springs, trying to reduce tension around them. The original game engine was written in Atari BASIC and took hours to compute a single turn. Two attempts to rewrite it in assembler reduced the calculation time to moments. The game didn’t address sincerity, nor did it account for the diminishing effect of repeating the same statement.

Crawford was proud of the game, but he never developed a structure of goals and never published it. The two developers who worked on the asse