Posted by Prairie on Jul 04, 2025
Over the course of our crowdfunfing campaign, Soft Chaos will be putting a fair amount of work into creating cool stuff about Stranger on the 'Net: interviews with past participants, podcasts, stories, and articles. We thought it would be fun to share all these moments of the past with you too! So here is Allison writing about how special this game is to her, and why.
The journey of Strangers on the ‘Net began in 2020, when the world was locked down. I had recently gotten over a rough breakup (that will be important later), and was reconnecting with the other members of Soft Chaos after years of isolating myself from friends. My love language is making games and it felt so good to throw myself into creative endeavours with people who I just gelled with.
What I remember about the start of the process is desperately wanting to make a game based on Charmander 31’s Pokemon Chat room (which, until recently, was still up!). Recapturing the feeling of being in those spaces at the dramatic age of 13 was something I had always tried to make happen. Throughout my years in grad school, I would send out invites for a bunch of people to log into that old chat room and just pretend it was the 90s again. You could drop in for 5 minutes or a couple of hours – the only rule was your username was anonymous. No one ever revealed who they were.
The pandemic was the perfect time to make this dream happen for real. In a more permanent way than those fleeting one night events. And so we began working on this project. When it was done, we knew we had something special. Something that would let people who were feeling lonely and isolated connect in meaningful ways. People had the time and desire to play something like this. What we needed to know next was how to share it with the world. And we decided on an unusual route.
We submitted Strangers on the ‘Net to an online theatre festival. One with a great reputation for innovation that had to pivot to an online format in a very short period of time. That meant they were very open to unusual formats of theatre, including an “online immersive 90s chat room experience”.
Being in this festival was an amazing jumping off point for our game. Strangers on the ‘Net was mentioned in CBC Arts (a national-level media publication here in Canada) on a list of “The best live digital events happening each week across Canada”. We were able to run the game a half dozen times for a large swath of people: some who had never even roleplayed before. After each game, we were flooded with messages about how important and impactful their experiences with us and the game were.
Each run we did at this festival was based around a different 90s Fandom, and each game resulted in unique and special memories and outcomes.
- A Sailor Moon run ended with in-game fan art made of their characters.
- A Star Trek run ended in an article for Fanbyte detailing the player's experience (warning: there are some spoilers for the second act plot twist, so if you want to avoid that, stop reading after they log off of the first session
on)
- An early Buffy the Vampire Slayer run ended up in two players falling in love and getting married (in real life!).
“Wait, what?! A marriage?! That seems like a big deal…” Well, remember when I told you that I had just gotten over a rough breakup? That Strangers in the ‘Net is the most important game I will ever design? And that we could tell early on how meaningful a play experience it was? This is in no small part because I met and fell in love with my (now) wife when she was playtesting for us.
We’ll be doing interviews with early players and facilitators of the game and releasing them as we continue our campaign, so you may very well get to hear this from her perspective but from my point of view, this is how things went down...
At the time, my wife lived hundreds of miles away in Boston, but was on Lex (a queer personal ads app) and (because, you know, pandemic) had set her radius to as high as it would go. She was on the app for dates, but I was looking for something even more important to a game designer: playtesters. She replied and so our relationship began.
In the game, I was playing a 16-year-old lesbian names Steph who claimed to be out and proud on a Buffy the Vampire roleplay server she ran, but in real life was closeted and had an unsuspecting beard of a boyfriend. Steph played Buffy and was dating the girl who played Faith. They would often write steamy Buffy/Faith roleplays in the server’s play-by-post section.
Now you might assume that this was the person I was going to fall in love with. It was not. My wonderful wife was playing Tara, and she was supposed to be focused on the character playing Willow. But instead, she spent the entire game aggressively (and successfully) courting my character. Despite needing to throw away all narrative consistency (How does Tara end up with Buffy?!), they ended the game dating (angsty teenagers in the 90s always found a way to make it work). And so did Dora (the person playing the character) and I. We started dating in 2020 and got married almost exactly a year ago. To this day, she has a hand-embroidered quote from the game that I made for her hanging on her office wall.
Now, we can’t promise that you’ll meet your future wife playing this game. But what we can promise is that this game creates the space for intimate, vulnerable, and intense emotional experiences. It allows you to explore identity and relationships in a special way that was unique to the partial anonymity of those chat rooms in the 90s. It gives you the chance to relive those early years of teenage life with all the understanding and self-discovery you’ve done since then.
We’ve had this game for years, and have continued to work on it in the background, waiting for the perfect moment to release it into the broader world beyond the festival runs we’ve done. We’re doing this campaign because we truly believe in the cathartic potential of this game: we hear it over and over again from people who have played. Thank you so much to everyone following the game and spreading the word. Your early support translates into real tangible support through the RPG Party event we have been selected to be a part of. So please keep it up! And I hope that, when the campaign launches, you’ll join us in bringing it to the world.
<3 See you online <3
~*~A11i50N 0f _S0f7_Ch405_~*~
