Overthinking trashy TV with The Crush House’s architect

The hardest part of any TV binge session is figuring out what to watch.

That’s the tall task that stands before me when I meet up with The Crush House director Nicole He at a co-working space in Brooklyn. Rather than simply talking about her upcoming reality TV simulator or walking through a demo, I float the idea of first sitting down to actually watch an episode of reality TV first. She agrees, and now we’re sitting in front of a huge screen loaded with streaming apps trying to decide the exact flavor of trash we’re hungry for.

She rattles off a few shows she hasn’t gotten around to yet, but one catches my attention: Couple to Throuple. The risqué Peacock series brings couples looking to experiment with polyamory to a resort and gives them a buffet of eligible singles to play with like toys. It’s a poor representation of polyamory and one that’s haunted me even since I watched its first season earlier this year. If Nicole and I are really going to dissect the grotesque thrill of reality TV and how it laid the foundation for The Crush House, we both need to be so deeply submerged in mud that even a pig would gag.

Sick pleasure

Nicole He is no stranger to reality TV, though she doesn’t describe herself as a “fiend.” It’s a more casual interest for her that aligns with some larger themes she’s been exploring throughout her career. She’s perhaps best known for the True Love Tinder Robot, a matchmaking robot that determines a user’s reaction to dating app profiles via hand sensors and automatically swipes left or right based on that. Between that and her new move to games, He was a creative technologist on Google’s Creative Lab team. There she was able to explore her fascination with humanity’s relationship with both technology and one another as shaped by it.

Now she’s bringing her skills to a new medium with her ambitious debut game. Developed by Nerial, The Crush House casts players in the role of a camera person on a Big Brother-like reality show. It’s their job to film all the drama as a cast of singles flirt and fight, all while fulfilling demands from the show’s needy audience watching via live stream. Butt guys want to see butts. Plumbers demand sinks and toilets. It’s a goofy simulation premise cleverly billed as a “thirst-person shooter.”

“The feeling of being a voyeur is part of the pleasure of watching reality TV,” Nicole He tells Digital Trends in discussing The Crush House’s ethos. “You get to watch people do things that are kind of insane — literally have sex! There’s a tension in that. I think most people are like, ‘maybe I like that but I’m uncomfortable with their own feelings towards it.’ Those are really interesting emotions for a person consuming media and those are part of the things we’re trying to get at in the game as well. But we’re not moralizing about it. It might be a little naughty, but it is a sick pleasure we get and that’s also fun.”

It’s that fascination that brings us together to watch the first episode of Couple to Throuple. At first glance, the series is similar in structure to a lot of dating shows. There are hot singles, a mansion in the middle of a picaresque locale, convoluted weekly challenges, and an unnecessary host that wanders in and out of scenes at random. That’s all normal, but the Peacock show dials the shock and awe of reality TV up a notch in service of its poorly handled three-way hook. The first episode ends with full frontal nudity and some night vision hookups that leave very little to the imagination despite being hidden under a bedsheet.

As we watch the episode, Nicole and I trade commentary just as any two people binge watching crappy TV would. We poke fun at its cast members, laughing at their occasionally bizarre one-liners and questioning each person’s motivation for coming on such a show. It’s through that natural process that Nicole explains what she finds so appealing about even the most revolting hate watch.

“It’s similar to watching horror where you get to experience emotions, like outrage or cringe, but in a safe, artificial space,” she says. “The reality aspect of it allows us to feel these types of emotions. It’s easier to be outraged at someone on TV doing something bad if you know that they’re a real person and that’s a real thing that happened rather than watching someone kill someone on Game of Thrones. I think that’s the appeal of trash. We get to engage in this petty behavior that’s fun, but without doing things that are actually bad for our community or friends or families.

“The pleasure of watching reality TV is that you get to gossip and shit-talk about people without the social consequences of that.”

After making it through the first episode’s uncomfortable closing moments, Nicole and I begin to dissect what we just saw. She continues to dig at the strange appeal of reality TV, pointing to the way shows like Couple to Throuple blur the lines of truth and fiction. Though the trashiness is the ultimate appeal, she sees an undercurrent of humanity — even in a show like this. She points to one sweet confessional where a man explains that he wants to bring another woman into his relationship because he wants his partner to have a close female connection that she can confide in at times where he can’t fully get what she’s going through.

“How real is this? We know every single show is fake, but to what degree is it fake? And what are the motivations of the people on the show? That’s the thing that’s the most interesting to think about and talk about,” she says. “But I also find that the thing that really makes this stuff worth it is that even in this show, you watch these people and they’re acting insane or doing this for exposure … but there are some moments where I feel like they’re having a genuine conversation that didn’t move me very deeply, but a little bit! Those are the moments that make this stuff so interesting because the rest of it feels so fake.

“Sometimes when you’re watching someone on Love Is Blind, you’re like, yeah these people are here to become influencers, but then they act so insane that you’re like, ‘maybe it is love!’”

The old rigamarole

Our conversation naturally begins to shift toward video games and the shared DNA they have with reality TV. When we critique Couple to Throuple for treating its “thirds” as chess pieces that the couples get to move around, she draws a line between that dynamic and the language of gaming.

“It feels like the singles on this show are NPCs,” she says. “They barely have any agency and the rules around whatever they’re doing here are so artificial. What’s to stop the singles from dating each other? They probably are! They just present this world and are like, here are the rules of this universe. They don’t fully make sense, like a video game and these people are playing it in that way.”

That thinking is perhaps why The Crush House feels so natural as a video game premise even though nothing like it has really been done before. The project was originally inspired by Terrace House, a Japanese show about six strangers living together in a house. The fictional Crush House has the same premise, though it leans more into trashier, Western TV. At the start of every “season,” players pick a handful of cast members who all interact with one another around the house. It’s an ant farm filled with combustible elements and players are simply there to observe and document it all.

That’s accomplished by a system called Rigamarole, which allows the team to create a functional game with 495 possible cast combinations. Each character has their own specific traits. The game’s writers don’t so much craft bespoke scenes between every character as they create templates that characters with the right dynamic can slot into. If a romance scene calls for two characters who are friends, one being an extrovert, Rigamarole magic will fill that scene with the right characters accordingly. That system creates a working simulation of reality TV that still feels natural and reactive.

Not every aspect of reality TV maps cleanly to a game. Early prototypes for the project were much more involved. Players initially had to take footage they shot during the day and then take it to an edit bay and slice together a video. Nicole says that the idea was too boring and didn’t give players the kind of immediate feedback that’s possible with the live streaming premise, where fake commenters populate the screen in real time. Other features — including a more involved casting process, confessionals, and a disembodied host known as The Voice — were cut for dragging an elegant premise out.

Rather than getting too bogged down in adapting every aspect of reality TV, the team at Nerial was more concerned with creating a strong simulation. The more Nicole describes how it works, I begin to see a connection to The Sims. Part of the appeal of the series is that the simulation is so compelling that players can just sit back and watch it unfold like a show. While The Sims had a bit of an influence, it’s actually the weird media around it that had a larger impact on The Crush House.

“There’s a lot of these TikTok accounts where people essentially create reality shows from The Sims,” she says. “There’s a whole genre of TikTok called Breeding Out the Shrek. They make a Shrek character in The Sims and then they see how many generations it takes for the babies to stop having Shrek traits. They make TikToks about this whole family lineage of Shreks … It’s been very interesting to see the way that people engage with the format of reality TV on top of The Sims, outside of the game itself.”

Even before The Crush House’s release, Nicole was already seeing spectators react to her game in the same way — well, minus the Shrek breeding. She recalls sitting in on streamers playing the demo and routinely seeing their audiences parroting back comments from the fake commenters in-game (“Pants are a prison for the ass” is already a popular line among viewers). It already seems to capture the same voyeuristic joy of reality TV, but in a comedic package that’s both critical and reverential of the format’s junk food appeal. It’s a celebration of trash and all the complicated emotions it brings with it, for contestants and viewers alike.

Perhaps that extra distance from shows like Couple to Throuple, where contestants are treated like sex toys, is healthy. Late in our conversation, I bring up a New Yorker report from earlier this year in which Love Is Blind contestants detailed a manipulative workplace that exploits its cast members for little pay. There’s a dark reality to reality TV, one that The Crush House explores in its own absurd way. All that junk food comes with a sobering side dish — one that Nicole predicts could bring empires like Netflix crashing down if they keep crossing moral lines.

“You hear about some stuff they do in real reality TV, and those are worse than the ways we would treat these fake characters,” she says. “If they ever unionized, we would not have reality TV anymore!”

The Crush House launches on August 9 for PC.