A Friendship Like Birthdays

This game features a friend who says things that make you feel uncomfortable, or that are otherwise inappropriate.

You can choose to either unfriend them or still be their friend. At each stage it says that the probability of you unfriending them for that specific comment is .1% times the number of times that you've ignored your friend's comment.

If you eventually unfriend them, it will list the cumulative probability that you ever would have unfriended them.

The whole thing is a thought experiment: while minor things can seem too small to end a friendship over, the cumulative weight of many things can be a good reason.

For me, the whole game is centered mechanically around the probability scheme and narratively around the friendship idea. And the probability thing to me isn't as effective as it could be. It does teach the idea of cumulative probability and how even small percentages can grow, but there are three weird things. First, the probability that we'll quit right then has no bearing at all on what we, the players, do. Are we intended to simulate the game and only have a .01% chance of quitting on the first term? It doesn't count what we do and simulate it. It's possible we could be watching someone else's universe where they have a percent chance of quitting, but since we're in control, that percent isn't true.

Second, why does each individual chance of quitting go up linearly?

And third, if we want to demonstrate the snowball effect of independent successive probability choices as an educational lesson, why not fix the probability of 'quitting each turn' and show that even with a low constant probability, the cumulative probability can get large? As it is, it might confuse players into thinking that the large cumulative probability is primarily caused by the increasing individual probability and not by the cumulative effect.

The friendship part is interesting to contemplate and a good thing to ask ourselves. Do we forgive people for their past transgressions? Do we conditionally forgive people as long as they stop doing the thing they shouldn't be doing? How many times do we forgive? So I think leading to that contemplation is the game's highlight.