Best Friends (Who Hate Each Other)

Every now and then, I trick my friends into busting out some old indie game, precisely because I think it has cool features that are lost to time. As a design community, we’re sometimes pretty bad about learning from our past, which I think is both counter-productive and a crying shame. Most recent case in point: Best Friends from 2006. Have you heard of it? I’m guessing you haven’t. Canonically it’s a game about girlfriends who on the surface are (ahem) best friends but are actually boiling with insecurity and jealousy. It was designed by Gregor Hutton, the same Gregor Hutton who made Remember Tomorrow and 3:16 Carnage Amongst the Stars. I’m going to talk about just one aspect of the game which I think is genius: the character creation. What Do You Hate About Them? You start with naming your character. Just a name, and then you stop. You don’t say anything else about this person. No description, nothing. Then our character sheet has a list of five hatreds: I hate ____ because she is…