thoughts on learning & finite & infinite games
- status: excited ideation
- type: story with learning
- I had the experience tonight of playing Werewolf, for the first time I can remember in a decade.
- The other time I can recall playing it was on a volunteer trip to Kenya in 2009, where I got immediately accused and killed by the villagers, and felt unable to defend myself. I was a villager, and responded with "anything I could do or say right now would be equally possible if I were either a werewolf or a villager!" which felt to me honest and cooperative, but people thought it was suspicious.
- Promptly eliminated, I then had to wait over an hour for the game to end.
- I got upset at both the experience and the game itself.
- This is a kind of left hemisphere-oriented trust-building. It says "we are going to assume we are all perfect liars, and prove the inconsistency of the lies, and we have no data, so your accusation is unfounded."
- (Moreover, this game is stupid because we're supposed to decide to kick someone out of the game when we don't have any data!)
- Tonight at my friend's birthday party, I was a Villager again, and this time I played right hemisphere-oriented trust-building.
- I still incorporated key more-legible information, but as I said—there wasn't much. To be clear, in the decade I've been avoiding playing Werewolf, I've had a ton of fun with One Night Ultimate Werewolf, which both:
- is a faster one-round game in which nobody gets eliminated (so it doesn't trigger the fear of having a repeat of the being-kicked-out thing that happened in high school)
- has game mechanics that add a lot of hard-to-fake data that allows the left hemisphere to feel like it knows what's going on
- What does it mean to play right hemisphere-oriented trust-building?
- As a Villager in Werewolf, I think it's basically a group coherence exercise, in which you try to figure out who is sincerely oriented towards the shared villager goal of eliminating the vampire team. You are going to try to cohere with everybody around that goal, and expect that some people are actually on your side and therefore gonna be reasoning in the same world as you, and other players are not going to be on your side and are living in a different world where they have to lie.
- To be clear: I'm assuming a world where dead villagers still win if the villager team wins at the end. I think this should be explicitly stated (maybe it was) at the start of every werewolf game. Otherwise you're not actually on a team with your team, and then there's a totally different reason to distrust everybody.
- Holy shit, questioning this assumption yielded a bunch of really fascinating ideas. They're [missing block] below.
- When I got myself attuned in the right way, I found I had really clear hunches about who was a villager and who was a werewolf. I sometimes doubted these hunches, but I felt like I started to learn what part of me I could trust as a gauge on this.
- And at a certain point—a certain point—I found myself feeling that I knew, without a doubt, that two other people were also on the villager team. I could tell by the way we were thinking together exactly like people would who were trying to win as villagers.
- Now, do I think I could be deceived by some crafty people under those circumstances? I think it's possible. It just seemed really unlikely, since I could feel the orientation of those players as being towards the same purpose as me.
- Now, I've only played one round like this, so I really don't know how this works as a given group of players learns more and more about themselves and each other over time and develops counterstrategies etc.
- My sense is that there are groups of people where using this strategy yourself would be likely to just get you distrusted by everybody, but for basically any specific strategy there probably exists some group that will find it very suspicious.
- Modeling variants on the game - moved to Werewolf variant ideas
- Hilariously, everything that's above is not actually the main learning I came here to talk about! Although I wrote thousands of words of it before writing any of the below, and I think that my thinking in writing the above is strongly informed by the frameshift experience below:
- The other difference between how I played tonight and how I played a decade ago, is that I grounded in finite & infinite games as a framework for exploring the game.
- I sat in the circle as the rules were explained, and I grounded myself in simultaneously:
- finite game: genuinely trying to pursue winning, whatever that would mean
- (I didn't yet know whether I would play as Werewolf or Villager)
- infinite game: holding that I could have a fantastic time sitting there and breathing and observing and just taking in everything that happened
- even if "everything that happened" was just "I get eliminated first, like in 2009"
- I saw how we were all choosing to step into the bounded frame of the finite game, but that losing the game, or being eliminated from play, just means falling back into the infinite game of life, where there's still plenty to learn and experience from watching the others play.
- Note that playing the game trying to learn but not sincerely trying to win has a kind of nihilistic quality to it as far as I can tell, and you don't actually learn anything about how the game works because you've broken it.
- But, as I experienced tonight, it's humanly possible to try hard to win while also feeling completely relaxed about either outcome.
- Similarly to 2009, I got accused right off the bat, and I was hoping to stay in because I wanted to explore what would happen with future actions I might take, but had also basically accepted that my role for the game might be essentially to observe it, and that this would also be interesting.
- I really relaxed into the whole thing as a learning experience, where my primary aim was to avoid feeling hooked into fear or frustration.
- At one point during the round, a question came up about one of the rules: would an eliminated player's werewolf/villager status be revealed after the villagers voted to eliminate them?
- The narrator / game-runner was inclined to do it as "no reveal", though he had done it as "yes reveal" in a previous game with the same people awhile ago.
- Since we already had our roles, this was an awkward situation, because "yes reveal" makes the villagers' job substantially easier, so if the question of how this rule would go is considered part of the game, then there's now a strategic game to be played where the villagers want the narrator to pick "yes reveal" and the werewolves want the narrator to pick "no reveal".
- He tried to run a vote, which would have been fine as a closed-eye vote, but it was held openly, and I sort of tried to call it off because I didn't want it to just reveal the werewolves, who couldn't safely vote their preference because that would reveal they were werewolves... but nor did they want a vote to pass that would change the narrators mind away from his default "no reveal". But if they tried to propose a private vote, that would also be the sort of thing only a werewolf would do.
- I initially found this situation confounding, because spending a bunch of energy arguing for "yes reveal" seemed like a costly signal that only a villager should really be able to do, and so while I wanted to do it it almost felt like cheating. So I mostly sat there, bewildered.
- But a few other players did invest that energy, and that didn't cause the game didn't end, which meant, okay, that information is just now part of the game and I can't pretend it's not. So I sensed I could trust those people from the way they argued their cases, and I shared as much with the group. (We did get the "yes reveal" rule passed, and I was right about those two people being villagers,)
- As a villager, I didn't focus on accusing people, but just on trying to figure out who I could trust, reasoning that we could then think about it together. This worked remarkably well.
- I don't actually know what I would have done if I'd been playing on team Werewolf. There was something relaxing about orienting to honesty, and I think I had an easier time of it. But I also think the very spacious stance I was in could also have found a way to play creatively, enjoyably, and reasonably strategically as a Werewolf too.
4 linked references
Werewolf variant ideas
- Inspired by the insights described in thoughts on learning & finite & infinite games
Thread re Finite & Infinite Games
- my werewolf experience as described in thoughts on learning & finite & infinite games
March 6th, 2020
- Whipped up some thoughts on learning & finite & infinite games
- (and variants on the game Werewolf)