Insert something delinquent here
Hi all,
Here is where I talk a little about the game Mafia
The live action party game Mafia works on levels of fellowship, drama, fantasy, discovery, self expression and challenge. There is fellowship in that players get to kill (not literally) other people, drama in the tension of finding the Mafia or being caught as the Mafia, fantasy in the role play element of civilians vs Mafia, Discovery in finding out who the Mafia members are, Self expression in the choices made about who should be killed, and Challenge in the goal of surviving to the end of the game. The main reason it works so well as a party game is that it is social and lets people debate towards a common goal for the civilians whilst it works well for the Mafia in the drama of staying within the game.
Strategy works well mainly for the informed party. Sometimes the game is played with a policeman, sometimes it is played with a vigilante. This blog focuses mainly civilians vs Mafia where the informed party is the Mafia. Mafia formulate strategies by trying to sway the uninformed party as to who the mafia people might be. I can think of a strategy where Mafia members go against their own Mafia members to gain the trust of civilians, meaning the voice of certain Mafia members becomes more credible and less suspicious.
Does the game work online? I think it can, but for the most part, it won’t work. Why: The game itself generally loses many of its dynamics since there is a different medium. People can’t look at each other online like the would in live action. There have been suggestions about using a webcam to fix this problem, but I think that is less likely to happen since many issues arise when a group of people can all see each other, mainly privacy. However, I think it would be a good experiment to turn Mafia into a text based game. Many of the same mechanics apply such as the informed minority and the uninformed majority. There would be a small group of mafia members with a large group of civilians of roughly 30 people. Within the group would be a spy who is given the name of a single Mafia personnel. The players would participate in an online room and can talk freely during the day. Instead of providing players with facial expressions, the players instead write a small section about their job description. The players can come up with any occupation of their choice and players initially use that to try and estimate the credibility of each player. The Mafia and the spy will give a false description of their occupation since the Mafia don’t want to be caught by the civilians whilst the spy doesn’t want to be caught by the Mafia. The players talk online and discuss who they think is the Mafia during the day and vote to kill someone at the end. During the night, mafia can select a civilian to kill without any other players knowing who. The spy tries to formulate a strategy to help the civilians through moving the discussion against a Mafia member, but does so without being caught by the Mafia who try to kill the spy. Once the name of the Mafia member given to the spy is killed, the spy is given another Mafia member. The Mafia are allowed to participate during day discussions to try shift the blame onto other civilians.
