Gossip (video game)

Gossip is a video game created for Atari 8-bit computers by then-Atari, Inc. employee Chris Crawford.

The documentation indicates that Gossip is an Atari Program Exchange title, but it was not listed in any of the published catalogs and may not have been released at all.

Although the social interactions in Gossip are relatively simple, Crawford contends that they are comparable to the level of complexity found in The Sims.

[citation needed] The majority of the screen is taken up with eight characters: You, Val, Jim, Liz, Amy, Dan, Sue and Tom.

The social interactions he chose for this experimental simulation were declarations of affinity (e.g. “I like Fred,” “I hate Jane”).

where xa,b is a’s actual opinion of b, x'a,b is a’s declared opinion of b, l is the listener, s is the speaker, o is the object (the person being gossiped about), k1 and k2 are constants greater than 1 (Crawford gave the hypothetical value of 10, but did not specify the actual values used in the game).

The original game engine was written in Atari BASIC and took hours to complete the calculations for a single turn.

Two major attempts were made to rewrite the system in assembler language, which reduced the calculation time to a few moments.

Although they raised this point during development, it was said that Crawford would simply state that if they understood the concept they would know it would be fun.

[2] Crawford applied a similar social model in Excalibur for the management of the Knights of the Round Table and diplomacy with the other kings of England.