Writers Are Not Strangers

The Gaming Philosopher

At that moment, I formed a hypothesis about the work, which is apparently part of a PhD project. The hypothesis was this: the game gives a random story fragment to players at the beginning of the game; it asks them to rate it; it then shows us the writer’s response to the rating, engaging our mechanisms of personal sympathy; it shows us another random fragment and asks us to rate it; and finally, when all the data is in, the researchers will check whether people give higher ratings to the fragments after they’ve become aware of the fact that the writer will respond emotionally to the rating, that is, after they’ve become aware that writers are not strangers.

It was a good hypothesis, but also totally wrong.