Practice Your Long Distance Relationship Skills In 'chat with me'

Communication is hard enough. Text messages and emails leave so much unsaid, with plenty of space for messages to be misconstrued. Differing punctuation can leave one side feeling slighted while the other has no idea of the potential problem. So much can go wrong in day to day conversation—and that makes long distance relationships so much harder.

Jenny Jiao Hsia's chat with me is a prototype long distance relationship simulator. Players access a computer desktop with a few different buttons to push and folders to open. A prototype made during Hsia's time at the NYU Game Center, chat with me is small, with less places to explore than a full game like Nina Freeman's Cibele. What's there, however, is enough to push forward the narrative of the relationship based on player responses to their partner.

Players will watch as their responses please or displease their partners on the other end. Often times, talking about the day's struggles with make the partner sad, with both ending up frustrated and unsatisfied. Closing the chat earlier—while initially a bummer—leaves out the details of the hard days and makes everyone a whole lot less sad.

And that's the struggle. Having limited communication with an important person makes time a scarcity. It forces folks into decisions: What's the most important parts to talk about? If they're sad, should it be kept out? Should the need for expression be sacrificed for "making the most" out of time together?

Chat with me takes the player through these decisions. And despite being in a conversation with a computer game, the decisions are hard. Visual feedback makes it apparent whether the answers were right or not, or, at least, the player will be able to perceive them as right or not. Distance makes misconception and misunderstanding a mind game—even more so than with regular ol' communication.

With each log off, each party is left to think far too much about what they've just experienced.

Chat with me is available for free on itch.io.