One authentic relating game I enjoy running is "Constellations". The rules are simple: someone calls out a prompt, everyone in the room identifies the person for whom this prompt fits the best, and then places a hand on that person's shoulder. You can only put your hands on one person, and that one person can be yourself. If you want to abstain, you can put your hands behind your head; this means that you are not picking anyone, and also that you cannot be picked. Generally, the lead facilitator gives a few example prompts, and then opens it up to the floor (though the facilitator should still give prompts afterwards, up to one third of them).
Some example prompts:
- The person you feel most connected with
- The person you think was most popular in high school
- The person you think is the best writer (great opener if you're running it at a writing retreat)
- Someone you'd like to get a beer with (the prompts don't have to be in a "most x" format, it's fine if there are several viable contenders for each participant)
I like this game because the rules are very straightforward, it checks a few different AR boxes (physical touch, edgy social dynamics since some people won't be picked, group participation, encouraging embodiment), and you as the facilitator can easily modulate how edgy the game is.
You can continue on with surface-level prompts like the above for a long time: the person you trust the most, a person you want to get to know better, the person you've known longest, and so on and so on. You can play this game at corporate retreats, if you stay here.
Approaching the edge
Constellations can get a little edgier, with prompts like:
- The person you think was sad the most recently
- The person you think has the highest body count
- The person you think is hottest
- The person you think is the least like you
It is very often up to the facilitator to increase the amount of edginess. This is because it's very scary as a participant to throw out a prompt increasing the amount of edge, since it is a marked action that Says Something About You (perhaps that you're desperate for attention, or you want to reveal something gross about yourself, or you want to embarrass someone). But you, as the facilitator, are protected from much of that reputational harm - you're just guiding the group through a thrilling experience that they signed up for.
As the questions get edgier, some interesting dynamics start to emerge. Even within the contained space of an edgy authentic relating games night, the containment box can only do so much. The shoulders you put your hands on during constellations will have effects in real life, unless you're playing the game with a group of strangers you plan on never seeing again. So the amount of deception increases with the edginess of the questions, and this deception can take on various forms. For what it's worth, I expect that most of this deception happens on a sub-conscious level.
Assessing Damage
Some people are more likely to be offended than others, when hands are placed on them for negative prompts (e.g. "most likely to commit wire fraud", "most virgin-coded"). When one of these prompts gets lobbed out, in addition to identifying the person that fits best, participants will often also identify "who is not going to be offended by me putting their hand on their shoulder". This can look like someone who put their hand on their own shoulder, or someone who preens or shrugs at the amount of hands already on their shoulder.
As the negative prompts get more fraught, the offensibility consideration is going to take greater and greater priority over truthfulness.
I... kind of feel like there is a metaphor for life there? If you signal that you are open to negative signals, you are going to receive more negative signals, and this might mean one or more of: "you have a negative trait", "your friends think it is safe to provide you negative signals" (which is a good thing; providing others with negative signal is often a risk to the person providing it), or "you seem generally emotionally resilient and good-natured" (also a good thing).
Flattery
Sometimes there is a nice prompt, and instead of answering honestly, participants may put their hands on the person they want to flatter most — they'll curtail their pool of contenders to be people they expect to have continuing social relations to.
Straight-up Lying
Sometimes, a participant will just want to keep private information private. If you have a crush on someone and they are the hottest person in the room to you, but you do not want them to know this, you will not put your hands on their shoulder when the prompt is "the hottest person in the room".
This is doubly fraught if the private information is someone else's. For questions such as "sad most recently" and "highest body count", some participants converge on a strategy of looking for the people who put their hands on their own shoulders, and then picking between them. But say you have a friend in the game who has a wild past you know about, but they want to keep it hidden so they did not put their hand on their own shoulder. It's a lot scarier to go to them and put your hand there in that situation, isn't it? So you may choose to keep the answer to yourself.
Isolation
Counter-example! Often, there is a person or two in the AR game who is somewhat more closed off to the experience, because they're trying something new, or their friend brought them along without fully cluing them in to what they signed up for, or something else. This is fine! They have strong boundaries and they know what they like and don't like, and this is healthy.
When you provide a prompt like "person you feel least connected to", all hands will go on their shoulders. No one feels a strong incentive to lie about this, because everyone's like "yeah I probably won't see this guy again" and "this guy already knows he's uncomfortable and out of place here". There will be nervous giggles as the ultradense constellation coalesces, but this will not stop the constellation from forming.
This will, ironically, be a very intense and edgy experience for the person in the room that possibly wants it least.
This is just to say that not all edgy questions will lead to dishonesty - specific social dynamics do specific things to the amount of honesty displayed.
Some Impossible Questions
If you die in constellations, you die in real life. This is why even within the bounded box of constellations, there are prompts that will fail (everyone will either decide to abstain, or run assessing_damage.exe and uses that output instead). Examples of questions I consider too edgy to be viable are:
- The person you find most annoying
- The person you find least attractive
- The lowest-status person in the room
Examples I consider borderline (i.e. can maybe work in tightknit, high-trust, and open-minded groups) are:
- The most attention-seeking/status-grubbing person in the room
- A person you do not respect
- A person you do not want to get closer to
Constellations+
I've run many AR game sessions now, including several that feature Constellations. Increasingly, the fun comes from observing others play — the way they hesitate, manage reputational risk, calculate offense thresholds. If you're observant, you can sometimes see the precise moment they decide when authenticity is worth its price, or when they chicken out (neutral, non-derogatory). My goal in turn is to precisely lob prompt grenades, aiming for the pareto frontier of maximum truthfulness and splash damage. In other words, trying to figure out how close we can get at uncomfortable truths, with the specific group of people inside the room with me, before the social fabric tears.
I wonder how much this skill translates to life outside the game 🥸