Google Meet with The Sims mood bar

For readers between the ages of 25 and 35, you probably spent some of your childhood playing The Sims. What a wild game. Instead of living life, you could make other people live little lives that you get to control. I’d venture to guess there are some interesting underlying psychological implications from this game, but I know little about psychology and this newsletter is about design.

One of my favorite aspects of The Sims is their iconic “needs” meter. It shows things like bladder, hygiene, social, fun, and more in a bar chart that decreases if you neglect the need.

When you’re on a call with someone, or meeting with them in real life, you get a sense of how they feel about what you’re saying (I guess this is just human communication 101). Anyway, I wonder what it would be like to be able to quantify emotions and needs in apps like Google Meet. You can imagine an experience where on long calls, someone’s fun meter would slowly deplete. This would be helpful to get a read on people when you’re presenting an idea.

There are no biometric markers to quantify emotions in a digital context… yet. If there were, the world would be an even more interesting place.

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