I’m not much of a reality TV watcher. Genuinely, I’ve been humiliated on this count in RPS morning meetings, with certain “colleagues” whose names rhyme with “Malice Knell” making references I don’t understand and laughing at my expression of hurt and confusion. My grasp of reality TV basically ends with the finale of the very first season of Big Brother, feat. Nasty Nick. But you could argue that you don’t need to watch reality TV to understand and enjoy reality TV, because the basic reality TV thrill of forming weird parasocial attachments to people who are role-playing as themselves is now the golden rule of digital society generally.
“‘Reality’ stuff is huge now, and it’s not just reality TV,” says Nicole He, designer of The Crush House – an enticing, absurdist and engrossingly unpleasant new sim from Reigns and Card Shark developers Nerial. “It’s any kind of celebrity or influencer or streamer or something like that – there are so many parasocial relationships in that way, and I think that really started with reality TV, and then [continued] in the era of social media. It’s one of those topics that we don’t talk about in an explicit way, necessarily, but it’s something that you hopefully think about as you’re playing the game.”
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