We have all been there.
A misinterpreted misspelling on a Twitter post, a Vine interrupted by the cops who don’t understand the Planking fad, the usual antics of a life in social media. You don’t need to be a celebrity or a major brand to run a successful social media profile, and you certainly don’t need to be either of those things to have your life ruined by one.
[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":1770114,"post_type":"feature","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"games,","session":"D"}']The latter scenario inspired actor/producer Jose Pablo Cantillo and Revera Entertainment executive producer Jeff Levine to make a card game. In Free Me (currently in its last days on Kickstarter), you lose in order to win — lose your followers, friends, and your sanity, to be precise (although not necessarily in that order.) By collecting social media blunder cards like spoiling a popular TV show or posting a “Like” of your sister’s raunchy bikini shots, players attempt to free themselves from the bounds of a mobile phone-screen-dominated life.
Free Me then throws some real life antics into the mix with its Black Card Challenges. These cards demand real-life action on players’ social media profiles, and can rarely be undertaken without some form of embarrassment. Cantillo and Levine claim these challenges to be optional, but that’s going to be up to your how well your friends can throw down the peer pressure.
Above: In Free Me, you have to lose everything in order to win.
While I can stop using the thousands of dollars’ worth of technology around me at any time I want, I reached out via email to the duo — for a friend — why the move away from the Vines and the Instagrams was worthy of immortalizing on card stock. After my editor has reviewed our conversation and publishes it on the site, I will completely ignore Free Me’s message of a peaceful mind by posting this all over the Internet.
GamesBeat: What is it about social media, and the behaviors therein, that’s rife for parody?
Jose Pablo Cantillo and Jeff Levine: The social media world allows one to have a voice. This allows for a lot of interesting and unusual behavior. Many people need to find a way to stand out, communicate, and make themselves heard. This often pushes people to do or say unusual things, and these circumstances were rife for parody.
GamesBeat: What about the card game format was specifically attractive for this project?
Cantillo and Levine: Social media is everywhere, and what better way to laugh about all of the unusual things that happen then to sit around and play a game poking fun at its behavior. At times, social media feels likes a game. People being careful what they say, what they do, how [others perceive them]. Let’s face it — social media plays an integral part of peoples’ lives. People often live their life online, from dating to work to meeting new people.
When we came to put down our devices and enjoy the world around us, that’s when we felt like we were winning at life. The core objective of our game play was our desire to interact and to laugh. We are huge fans of comedy, so having people laughing around a table with their friends was our ultimate goal.
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Above: A main component of Free Me is to get friends around a table, and punish those that attempt to re-attach to their cell phones.
GamesBeat: How big a problem is media addiction in your mind, and how do you and your co-creator want to counter that within the game?
Cantillo and Levine: Social media is here to stay. We are not trying to contest this or be an anti-social media campaign. It’s evident that today there is a sense of people forgetting to connect with people. Many people, including us, have their face buried in their device. Lost is taking in our surroundings, interacting with people, eye contact or meaningful conversations. Our game is not trying to remedy this, but just take a deep breath and connect with friends for a little while. And make fun of what’s become of our world … instant everything, with a lot of make-believe mixed in. Comedy that sometimes writes itself.
GamesBeat: What particular elements reinforce turning off mobile phones and ignoring status-update pings from a laptop?
Cantillo and Levine: In the beginning, the players put their phones on the table, and if a player plays with it, then they will have to draw an additional black [challenge] card. This raises the stakes. Some people may just roll the dice, and think, “Well, I’m going to win so who cares … and I need to check this or that”. It’s another opportunity for stakes and a fun variable in game play. And another opportunity to point out how connected we are to the social media world.
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GamesBeat: How do you plan to make sure these Black Card Challenges don’t go, for lack of a better term, “too far”?
Cantillo and Levine: We can’t police what people post. However we were very careful to pick fun things that were more on the silly side, fun to do, fun to watch or fun to say. For example, such as ordering a drink in operatic style, or barking a love song, or acting as if you are the star of a music video. The idea is to have fun and poke fun poke fun, not to disrupt or start a movement.
GamesBeat: Was there any consideration to the schadenfreude aspect of poor social media users? How consistent narcissism and the economy of hate could actually contribute to a person’s follower count?
Cantillo and Levine: This is true. The object of putting the game in the world was to poke fun. We weren’t trying to make a statement on friend and follower count. The objective was not to take ourselves too seriously. For example, when you see someone online posting a picture of their big biceps but see the wall behind them warping, just knowing they manipulated the picture to put forth a better image of themselves, well this seemed so silly. Or someone with little or no experience in baking suddenly becoming an expert. These seemed like a perfect opportunity to insert comedy. Today in the world of reality television and digital age, the loudest usually wins. The more outrageous, the more people want to see. [This is] train wreck social media, if we don’t take everything we see seriously, and look at it through a different lens, we can find ourselves circling back to living in the moment.