Marvel Snap is a game about exuding confidence to scare your opponent into retreating. It’s also a game about faking it until you can convince your opponent that you’re the real deal and that they should retreat.
It can also be a game about just having fun with your opponent, and not taking this card game on your phone seriously, like some perv. The point is: Marvel Snap is perceived differently by the millions of people who play it, and that is in no way better represented than by its Titles feature.
Titles are what you think they are; simple, snappy sentences you can pick to show up next to your avatar. It’s one of the first things your opponent sees when they matchmake with you, and they’re visible anytime you click on their avatar during the match.
They’re often funny, playful and occasionally subtle call-backs to iconic quotes from the Marvel universe. Think ‘Capable of greatness, perhaps’, ‘This is my first game, go easy’, ‘I will spare your puny planet’ and things like that. They’re meant to communicate something about the player who picks them.
And sure, many of those players only own one or two Titles anyway, so they didn’t exactly sit down to carefully craft their Snap persona. But many of us, especially those who have been hooked since launch, have amassed a wide range of Titles that they mix and match with their accumulated avatars to project a… certain aura.
And herein lies the problem: Marvel Snap needs to offer players the ability to craft their persona the way they want, not simply luck into the right Titles and avatars. And in that spirit, it also needs to recognise that many (likely, most) of its players are in fact responsible adults who can get away with saying something nasty here and there and not get reprimanded for it.
And what better way to support this section of the player base than offer purchasable Titles! Only they need to be the kind that toes the line between PG and R; cheeky enough to fly right over the heads of children, and under the radar of government bodies, or whatever.
There already exist a few of those in-game, like ‘Why yes, that is a loincloth’, ‘Ant-Man could’ve killed Thanos’, ‘Gooey yet firm’ and others – but they don’t go far enough.
For a game about cards and cartoon violence, Marvel Snap strangely has widely different age ratings depending on where you happen to live. Google Play has it listed as both T-Teen, and PEGI-7. The App Store, on the other hand, has a more general 9+ age recommendation.
All of that is to say that these discrepancies create opportunities for subjectivity rather than outright objectivity. Add the varying interpretations of those ratings in the different territories, and you have what I believe to be solid ground where innuendos (sexual and otherwise) and things of that nature can exist.
I’m no age rating expert, of course, but I’d like to think I’ve crafted a few new Titles that should be totally fine, or at least, skirt the line enough to make it through.
Here are a few examples, but feel free to share your own in the comments; you never know who’s reading this.
- Stop playing with your deck.
- This is a family show, use a condom.
- What if kink shaming is my kink?
- Everyone likes a tight 90, but what about a tight 69?
- Pull it out and crank it.
- My actual title was deemed NSFW.
- The last few drops always end up in your pants.
- No morning wood to chop?
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