Malcolm Ocean's roamblog

Werewolf variant ideas

created 2020-06-04 · edited 2020-06-04 · open in Roam
  • learning game
  • In particular, the purpose of this ideation is to think about how the game might be modified to support learning on many levels.
  • Context on the Game Werewolf
    • I'm going to assume for the sake of this writing you know roughly how the game Werewolf (aka Mafia) works.
    • Very briefly—this may be utterly inadequate—there are two teams. The werewolf team knows who they are vs who's on the villager team, the villagers don't know who the werewolf team is, and both teams are trying to eliminate each other, which for the villager team is primarily a challenge of figuring out who is actually on the villager team, while both werewolves and villagers want others to think they're on the villager team.
    • Look it up if you're confused.
  • Thinking about scarcity & abundance:
  • What happens if some villagers lose if they're eliminated?
    • (even if all werewolves end up eliminated)
    • This is actually really shitty, and I bet some people even play Werewolf in this shitty way. By "shitty" here I'm not being judgmental, I'm pointing at how it seems like it would entail people being shitty to each other, because of creating a kind of scarcity among the villagers, which would naturally generate Game A dynamics of trying to sacrifice others to avoid being targeted.
    • It seems to me that the more scarcity of legitimate victories the villager team has, the harder it is for the team as a whole to actually win, because they need to fight with each other and can't cohere in the same way. You have an incentive to get other villagers both eaten and voted against.
    • The two obvious versions of the game, varying this parameter, are:
      • 100% scarcity, ie all villagers for themselves. there will always be at least two villagers at the end, but all eliminated villagers lose
        • (with this, could redefine win condition as "in game at end", and then you just need end-triggers)
      • 100% abundance, ie all villagers win if the villagers win
    • But you could also have a version with a mix! I explore dynamics of this here:
  • Exploring a whole new metaphor space for talking about variants:
    • At a high-level, the new metaphor is that you have a team that could basically trust each other if only they could figure out who else is on their team. And their mission is to eliminate murphys before the murphys eliminate them.
      • (playful idea: the team could be called Here Co, which is a flip of "cohere", & the game is about coherence)
    • "Anything that can go wrong, will." — Murphy's Law
    • new terms
      • "jitsu"
        • the move that involves public voting, with the aim (if you're a person) to eliminate murphys
        • (sometimes "lynch" in Werewolf)
        • I think that once I fully clarify the metaphor for this game, there will be a more appropriate name for this move.
    • 3 roles
      • murphy
        • wins if everything that can go wrong, does (ie all persons are eliminated)
        • I love this metaphor because it makes the whole thing seem more game-like and learning-oriented, and I think reduces the extent to which simply a scary metaphor makes the murphy team scary. it's like, they're trying to deceive me to stress-test me, but this isn't a matter of their character
        • Oh—it has to be murphy instead of the environment, because the environment doesn't deliberately take out your most important players. Like it's a fake environment that fights back.
        • (there could also be a scarcity/no-scarcity situation for the murphy team, but let's ignore that for now and assume murphy team wins as a whole)
        • Part of why I shifted away from the werewolf metaphor is that it doesn't make sense
          • ecologically: the wearwolves starve if out of food (though I guess they could migrate to a neighboring village?)
            • but this wouldn't actually work well as the new deaths would be immediately obvious when they arrived...
          • psychologically: in lore, werewolves are still people and actually want, themselves, to continue having relationships with their loved ones (who live in the same village)
        • Yeah, the murphy metaphor seems to be the perfect name for the at-night stage, where it's like, the thing that could most "go wrong" for a team (in some ways) is that they lose the member that is most contributing towards their shared purpose
        • However, does the murphy one itself have issues?
          • In particular, does murphy appear to you in human form and convince you to make bad decisions...?
            • I was initially thinking no, but then on some metaphorical level yes.
            • and—ha! in this game-metaphor, instead of the goal being "safety" from the murphies, the goals are:
              • care for the capacity of your team to think clearly
              • detect shared purpose / teamship
            • hm. I'm undecided about this!
        • Other potential names
          • "black hats" is simple & evocative
          • liars, deceivers
          • meddlers, disruptors
          • pretenders, hiders
          • I think "murphy" is playful, and would create an affordance among players of this game to recognize when they're being murphy in a real-life context
            • like "oh, I seem to be casting myself in a role of trying to disrupt this group's shared purpose while pretending I share the purpose and am helping with it"
            • this is actually pretty common in group coherence work, and usually stems from the person having a feeling of scarcity around some other purpose they have
      • person
        • (is a general category for the "uninformed majority" team)
        • interconnected person
          • wins if all murphy eliminated
          • (could give variable score for "how many team members remaining")
            • (I considered "how long this took", which is usually ~equivalent, but the frames are different. the current metaphor doesn't obviously lend itself to one or the other, at the moment.)
            • N points where N is the number of surviving persons
        • scarcity-minded person
          • wins if all murphy eliminated
          • loses if eliminated
            • (could give variable score, where nonzero-but-fewer points if eliminated but also all murphy team eliminated)
              • (has a very different feel than the all-or-nothing vibe of "if the villagers win but I die, it was all for nought / idgaf")
              • (also very different options)
                • say the default person score is N points where N is the number of surviving persons... these are all very different things that an eliminated scarcity-minded person might get:
                  • N-1 or N-2 points
                  • N/2 points
                  • 1 or 2 points
                • (some are much closer to zero, or to non-scarcity)
                  • They also might have totally nonlinear effects! Like it could be that it's actually easier to cooperate as a scarcity-minded person when you get no points if you're eliminated, because there's less calculus to do you just focus on helping
              • (could also vary this by whether )
          • exploring name ideas...
          • scarcity-minded person is sort of the most direct metaphor
          • but self-{absorbed,obsessed} person could also make sense
          • After writing a few thoughts over on a new psychopaths page, I found myself thinking that this role couldn't possibly metaphorically fit with "sociopath"
            • because they still care about the human team winning
            • whereas a true sociopath character would only care about making it to "the end of the game"
            • but then I realized that win condition doesn't actually say that, it just says wins if all murphy eliminated, which a sociopathic person does want because... OH. Oh interesting. I'm actually implicitly importing some old meanings from the werewolf metaphor version
              • with werewolves, all a sociopath wants is to stay alive, and they're only safe once there are no more werewolves
              • but if, in shifting to the ((murphy))-metaphor, we take the sting out of being eliminated... then... yeah. hm...
                • damn, this breaks a bit. because there aren't clearly two different ways to metaphorize the whole thing
                • there could in principle be a character that only cares about making it til game-end, which I guess would basically mean that if only they and murphy were left, they would also win, which is not true of a person
                  • oh yeah, that's a coherent win condition with coherent strategies to pursue, mostly to be vaguely helpful to everybody but not very helpful to anybody
                • this idea feels bizarre as long as I continue importing the werewolf metaphor, but once I set the werewolf aside, it's clear that this is a coherent role that's basically the opposite of observer
                  • but "sociopath" is only one way to language this, and not necessarily the best way at all
                    • especially since a real sociopath might be on a team where they are indeed actively wanting to execute the shared purpose (in this case eliminating the murphys)
                  • ones that are about not getting targeted might be
                    • dodger
                    • nothing to see here
                    • survivor
                  • ones that are about the meaning of this in the context of the game, similar to observer
                    • "no spoilers"
                      • (as long as you stay "in" the game, you don't find out any secret information; there's a role of trying to do this)
                    • "talker" etc
                      • (this player wants to continue being part of the discussions, even though they don't care about what happens)
              • this scarcity-minded person, whatever you call them does actually only care about their own survival, because they are
      • (thoughts on other roles)
        • a player whose win condition is getting eliminated
          • this category is inspired by the "Tanner" in One Night Ultimate Werewolf, but the most interesting ways to do this role (particularly in )
          • troll
            • wins if eliminated by force → all other players lose
            • loses if eliminated by being recognized as the troll (game continues... unless it would otherwise be over)
            • (probably) loses if makes it to the end of the game
              • otherwise troll could just play as a not-particularly-helpful person, which is boring
            • This name is slightly more appropriate in the multi-night of the game,
              • because, given how humans want to have fun, not just win, this player is basically incentivized to subtly annoy other people and make enemies (to bias them towards wanting them out)
              • and all other players, no matter what else they're trying to do, need to avoid being motivated by that sort of thing or they'll lose to it
                • and in fact thus themselves have an incentive to ignore that dimension of the game, to keep it enjoyable and winnable
            • In the one-night version, a better name might simply be "distraction"? There's still sort of an incentive to make enemies, but there isn't the same incentive to actually muddle the discourse to the point of incentivizing people to try to get rid of you because you're adding muddle.
            • I wrote most of the above before adding this option
            • Could also explore if there's a version that has the same condition but something like... Aha! Loses if the other players successfully identify the player as troll, but wins exclusively if either team votes to destroy them without stating this.
              • This is actually beautiful, and I think this version is better for learning because you explicitly want to train differentiation of the purposes, and who has shared purposes! And moreover, because this keeps a strong check on how annoying the troll can be! They lose if other people identify they're the troll and block them.
                • Basically there's two different emotional orientations for the person team, to the trolls vs murphys
                  • murphys are real external threats that need to be dealt with
                  • trolls are only threats if you take them seriously, but if you can identify a troll as such, they can't actually hurt you anymore
          • observer
            • wins if eliminated → game continues
            • loses if makes it to the end of the game
            • (optionally, wins more the sooner they're eliminated)
            • The way this role fits in the less-scary more-meta metaphor here is that this player just wants to watch. They still aren't quite on either of the other teams though, because whichever team eliminates them has missed a chance to
            • I considered naming this player "bored" or something, but that suggests that once a player is eliminated they're actually "out"... and they can be, but I think the whole framing is better if you call attention to the fact that players who are eliminated from the finite game are still participating in the larger infinite game container!
            • Unlike the troll, it doesn't seem to me like it makes sense for there to be anything like loses if eliminated by being recognized as the troll (game continues... unless it would otherwise be over)
              • Or certainly not loses. That wouldn't be consistent with the observer metaphor.
              • The observer wins more the more they get to observe, no matter how that happens.
              • However, there could be another move!
              • "the players can, without spending a troll-recognizing move or a "jitsu"
        • a player whose win condition is simply surviving until "the end"
    • this game would have super fucking fascinating dynamics, where the more scarcity-minded persons you have...
      • let's look at the intriguing limit only-1 cases, actually
        • where it's impossible to lie saying you have this role and not have the other person who actually has the role know you're lying
        • (I suspect with more even ratios, it would be much less common for people to try weird overt strategies that involve trying to explicitly get other people to know what kind they are.)
      • 1. say there's exactly one interconnected person and many scarcity-minded persons
        • then you could almost imagine, in a naive round of that game, the interconnected person saying "I'm the interconnected person! if you're a person, you should trust me because I care about all of you"
          • but this would immediately bork in left hemisphere land, as an explicit declaration, because
            • if it's a fakeable signal (which it is on the explicit level) then it doesn't count (and is therefore sort of suspicious)
            • to the extent it's not a fakeable signal, then murphy has an obvious incentive to bork you, which.... OH. fascinating, if you were interconnected person, you actually would be more okay with this than if you were scarcity-minded person!
              • but it's still... non-ideal, from all persons perspective, to have the non-scarcity-oriented person hit by a bus. this is legit bad for the person team, afaict, especially if everyone else is in scarcity mode
      • 2. by contrast, say there's only one scarcity-minded person and many interconnected persons
        • one weird naive strategy here is actually to reveal that you're the scarcity-minded person and say...
          • there's actually a few things you could say!
            • "if you don't fuck with me I won't fuck with you"
              • this is not a very useful threat because many of the main ways you can get fucked with remove your ability to respond
            • "please protect me from dying, because I... don't want to lose if there's a chance I can win"
              • but this is mostly a plea to the murphy team...? this is weird.
                • neither other team actually cares if you survive, although the werewolves are probably slightly better off with you still there, since you have incentives to lie if... well, no, that's not actually true. the scarcity-minded person still really really doesn't want to get "jitsu"'d, and so being accused of...
              • I actually think that your overall chances of winning probably mostly depend on helping the villager team win, because like, if the number of villagers goes below the number of werewolves, the villagers have basically lost at that point (oh, there's a weird edge-case where the doctor can keep someone alive)
              • and therefore, even when you're nominated for "jitsu", and need to defend yourself, it's actually just still pretty true that your desire for an actual murphy to get eliminated instead is stronger
                • (this, btw, is why I think that real psychopaths will actually be able to play along fine in Game B—it's truly a game where the benefit from playing positive-sum, positively-correlated games is actually stronger than the benefit from playing zero/negative-sum, negatively-correlated games)
      • oh man! another super weird version is actually to have only one murphy! ...I think in this case, any decent-size team of only-interconnected person would I think basically win every time. But this is where certain dimensions of the difference between the two person roles would become more salient, I think
        • basically because... with a large murphy team, there's a sense that a bunch of the person team just isn't going to make it, because it'll take at least N turns where N is the number of murphys
          • technically, again, this probably should mostly not affect the strategy, but I think it would tend to evoke in a scarcity-minded person more of a sense of scarcity.. and the scarcity is real, although—aha, I guess the point is that it's still possible for the entire villager team to win (including all scarcity-minded persons surviving)
          • so there's a kind of tentative abundance among the scarcity-minded person
          • whereas if you have say 3 scarcity-minded person, 1 interconnected person, 2 murphy (guides say 2:1 villagers:werewolves)... then at least one of the scarcity-minded person players is definitely going to lose
            • which! is a totally legal thing for the game. after all—most finite games (including all versions of this that have any non-person players) don't allow everyone to win
            • but what it does is it means that those scarcity-minded person players are effectively not fully on the same team with anyone else.
            • they have partial teamship
              • oh this is an interesting thing, nested win conditions. oof, I don't think this will happen here because it's not a useful level to play the game on, but that's a situation that in real life means that the player with the outer win condition has a distinct power over the player with the inner win condition... I think? Oh! No, the power-over dynamic doesn't emerge at all because no interconnected person has anything to gain by threatening a scarcity-minded person, and has much to lose. that would be a fascinating thing to try to incorporate, but this isn't the spot for it
  • There's a chat-based version werewolf.chat/ that has a bunch of complex role examples
    • But it's a different purpose, not oriented to learning
  • This is deeply related to the Endeavors Grid that Ross and I made, related to reality & feedback. Well, finite & infinite games is as well.

3 linked references

learning game

thoughts on learning & finite & infinite games