What is the female equivalent of chatroulette?
A chatroulette game is a type of game where there's no rules, and there's no objective or time limit. It just kind of happens. And it happens so fast, in fact, that some games are said to run forever. And a lot of the time, the people who make these games go insane when they find the girls who are online, and they can't believe how many are there. And they send hundreds of thousands of packets of information at a time. And what happens is that as many people as want to see the same picture, they all get together in the same area, they all share the same internet connection. And they form a large, dense network, and the probability of them all meeting in real life -- well, you can't even see it. It's already happened. The larger the network, the better. And what's more, because these networks form so quickly, they tend to remove barriers to communication. We have no idea who posted the picture; it could have been another person. It could have been another person's picture. It could have been another person's network. It could have been the internet. It could have been everything. It could have been a picture of someone that we all saw together, and we all feel free to express ourselves. But only if everyone else does as we say. And this is what we mean when we talk about games making themselves into a sort of semi-civilized art form.
As the name suggests, a chatroulette is a sort of simulated game of sorts, with a goal of about as high score as possible. And the term game implies a certain degree of strategy. It implies that there is a fixed objective value attached to the pieces that you get, the pieces you get from the competition. But the goal of a chatroulette isn't to win or lose, the goal of a chatroulette is to have a conversation with its participants and to make them want to keep on chattering. And what's more, because it's a networked, chatroulette-like, kind of a new experience, it creates other kinds of feedback loops, natural rewards and unintended rewards. If you're a chameleon and you chase the song, you might attract more video chat partners, which in turn attracts more people to keep on chattering, and so on. And these things met, in the real world, to such an extent that in-jokes and allusions to the game-like nature of these conversations have become part of the fabric of modern society.
So instead of trying to perfect a game, how about we try to find out what kind of conversation we're building? And what would that tell us about ourselves? Well, if we wanted to, we could ask these participants real questions to get to know them better, like, what's your name? What's your email? What's your Twitter handle?
