We watched the trashiest reality TV show we could find with The Crush House director Nicole He and learned about Shrek breeding TikTok in the process.
That’s the tall task that stands before me when I meet up with The Crush House director Nicole He at a co-working space in Brooklyn. Rather than simply talking about her upcoming reality TV simulator or walking through a demo, I float the idea of first sitting down to actually watch an episode of reality TV first. She agrees, and now we’re sitting in front of a huge screen loaded with streaming apps trying to decide the exact flavor of trash we’re hungry for.
Now she’s bringing her skills to a new medium with her ambitious debut game. Developed by Nerial, The Crush House casts players in the role of a camera person on a Big Brother-like reality show. It’s their job to film all the drama as a cast of singles flirt and fight, all while fulfilling demands from the show’s needy audience watching via live stream. Butt guys want to see butts. Plumbers demand sinks and toilets. It’s a goofy simulation premise cleverly billed as a “thirst-person shooter.
“It’s similar to watching horror where you get to experience emotions, like outrage or cringe, but in a safe, artificial space,” she says. “The reality aspect of it allows us to feel these types of emotions. It’s easier to be outraged at someone on TV doing something bad if you know that they’re a real person and that’s a real thing that happened rather than watching someone kill someone on Game of Thrones. I think that’s the appeal of trash.
“How real is this? We know every single show is fake, but to what degree is it fake? And what are the motivations of the people on the show? That’s the thing that’s the most interesting to think about and talk about,” she says.
“It feels like the singles on this show are NPCs,” she says. “They barely have any agency and the rules around whatever they’re doing here are so artificial. What’s to stop the singles from dating each other? They probably are! They just present this world and are like, here are the rules of this universe. They don’t fully make sense, like a video game and these people are playing it in that way.”
Not every aspect of reality TV maps cleanly to a game. Early prototypes for the project were much more involved. Players initially had to take footage they shot during the day and then take it to an edit bay and slice together a video. Nicole says that the idea was too boring and didn’t give players the kind of immediate feedback that’s possible with the live streaming premise, where fake commenters populate the screen in real time.
Devolver Digital Indie Games Nerial The Crush House
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