One Hour (If You Get The Chance)

It's been a long day, and all you want to do is sit down and play a quick game of One Hour, One Life. You love the opportunity to build a lasting legacy for future players, so this game is a great outlet for you. After starting up Steam, loading the game, clicking through the menus, you finally spawn as a wee little baby...

"Ugh, we don't need another baby"

...and then one minute later, you die, because your mom ditched you for her other friends.

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In a game like One Hour, One Life, the ability to connect with the online player community isn't just a feature, it's a requirement. Fundamentally, you can't progress past the earliest stage of the game without a random person on the Internet agreeing to help you by feeding you and keeping you alive in your helpless baby state. This is a great way to foster community if your Random Internet Person decides to keep you alive-- but this person can also singlehandedly decide that you don't get a chance to play this time around. Your randomly-chosen mother is the Gatekeeper for the game, and she decides whether or not you get to play.

"Gatekeeping" is often an issue in online player communities: the concept that some subset of players can decide who is or isn't allowed to be part of the community. The decision to exclude someone can be made based on any number of factors, but it's very rare that the decision is based on anything more than superficial discriminatory biases.

Often, gatekeeping takes place by means of social harassment, such as male players heckling and insulting female players in a game's chat system until the female player (or whatever "unwanted player") leaves the game. In these cases, gatekeeping systems aren't fundamentally built into the game; instead, it's simply that a built-in feature (such as an online chat system) is being abused for gatekeeping purposes.

However, some games do allow and even encourage the creation of exclusive player communities, such as MMO's that feature "Guilds" (or whatever native term a game uses for "Named Group of Players"). However, Guild-like structures are generally intended by game designers to foster community, and are rarely permitted to be so large that not being part of the guild takes away from the player experience.

But then we get to One Hour, One Life and its "helpless baby" mechanic, and given how famously terrible people on the Internet can be, it's hard to see how gatekeeping wouldn't be a major concern here. Through this mechanic, players are not only allowed to gatekeep and given trivial means to do so-- they're practically encouraged to, at times. If a settlement doesn't have enough resources to feed another player, well, it's a lot easier to just let the new player starve than to frantically work to supplement food production.

Maybe Rohrer doesn't view this as a concern, or simply expects more from his player community. After all, every player had that same experience of being a helpless baby and relying on another player allowing them to enter the game; won't empathy change how players act? Or, maybe since the player's mother is chosen at random, a couple exclusionary players won't spoil the experience for everyone since odds are that you'll spawn (or respawn) to an inclusive player.

But more likely, I think it boils down to a design choice made by Rohrer, either consciously or subconsciously: if the player community ever becomes one where players are uninviting and unwilling to pay forward the generosity they were extended by the player who mothered them, then the game shouldn't continue. After all, some parents swear by the "if you can't share it, then nobody gets it" tactic as a means of encouraging kids to play nice; and it seems Rohrer is using that strategy for his own (digital) children here, too. Is this the "right" choice? It's hard to say. But in a game where respawning is sometimes half the battle, design choices like this can be the defining factor in determining a player's experience.