Gossip is a video game created for the Atari 8-bit family 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. Crawford wished for video games that would simulate aspects of human social interaction via “social challenges.” He hoped these "people games" would appeal to those who were not interested in the more common gaming genres of combat and sports. Although the social interactions in Gossip are relatively simple, Crawford contends that they are comparable to the level of complexity found in The Sims. Gameplay The majority of the screen is taken up with eight characters: You, Val, Jim, Liz, Amy, Dan, Sue and Tom. The player uses a joystick cursor to select a character to telephone. That person’s phone rings with a jiggling animation and ringing sound effect. He or she picks up the phone and says, “Air-oh?” The player selects a person to gossip about, and then one of five expressive animations (strong positive, slight positive, neutral, slight negative, strong negative). The listener responds with his or her own opinion of the person. Development The social interactions he chose for this experimental simulation were declarations of affinity (e.g. “I like Fred,” “I hate Jane”). The theory behind the simulation was that people liked those who shared their opinions of others, and were also influenced positively by their friends’ opinions and negatively by their enemies’ opinions. Such declarations, Crawford said, were implicit in many pieces of gossip. He produced the following mathematical model: 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 AI characters did not perform discrete interactions with each other. They instead acted as nodes in a web of springs, trying to reduce the tension around them. 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. One issue that