Talk:Event E2/Proposal Squirrelloid
Murderer
I am such a fan of the Mafia! game. Especially when I'm the murderer. Anyway, for clarification, the murderer will continually change, correct? Each round one random pirate is the murderer? Also, so the murderer selects a victim and challenges the SF. You state the loser is dead and is /planked from the shack. So, what if the Murderer is defeated? How can the populace vote who is the murderer if the victim survived? --Hedgehog2005 08:44, 3 February 2006 (PST)
This is a little more random than standard mafia because there are no 'bad guys' to be caught. Rather, everyone is a potential murderer. This changes the social lynching aspect of the game because its no longer about catching the bad guys, its about mob mentality running smack into a desire for self-preservation. Everyone will have an interest in not being lynched, but everyone will also have an interest in lynching SFers that are better than them. The successful winner will both be a decent SFer and be able to convince others that he is less threatening than other players still in the game. Eg, diplomatic and SF skills are both important. The witch hunt for the 'murderer' is just that, a witch-hunt. Machiavellian thinkers will surely realize that, and choose their lynching strategies accordingly. (Eg, yes, the murderer does get planked from the shack if he loses).
I could certainly run a standard mafia game (where murder is automatic and mafia are chosen randomly to start with), but there are a couple of problems inherent to doing that in a competitive format and in implementation. (1) Mafia is inherently an unfair noncompetitive game, because the two sides are rarely balanced. Its played solely for the fun of playing. (Which of the mafia or the town has the advantage depends on the ratio of mafia to townspeople). Further, the game is also played till one side wins, not one person wins, which reduces the competitive nature. It would be hard to award prizes for this type of game. (2) In standard mafia, knowledge of who the mafia are is 'real' knowledge that can be used to further your side's chance of winning. In the case of PP, anyone who wanted to cheat could click around the room until they found a pirate with a game they could watch ongoing. This would give them a 50% chance of knowing who the attacker was. In the current incarnation, this is not so important since attackers are generated randomly each round, and thus an otherwise unavoidable implementation problem is avoided because it becomes irrelevant to the social gameplay. If mafia was a persistant identity of some players, this would allow unscrupulous players to determine their identity and further unbalance the game. (3) Having SFs to decide who actually dies each night would unfairly advantage the town if there was a group who were mafia, because the mafia could lose at night in SF and during the day to lynching. The structure of the game would have to be seriously modified to accomodate this.
Now, using a standard mafia format with no SFing (mafia autokills), 2 and 3 could be avoided, but doing it on PP adds nothing to the game. Thus the proposed incarnation, Murder in the Dark, while obviously borrowing some mechanics from mafia, is also making a new game thats effectively a combined social and SF tourney which builds upon advantages of the root mafia game and embellishments made possible by PP. (Online mafia is easy to play over IM programs with a group chat for daytime and individual tells to 'God' or moderator by the mafia to announce who theyre killing. In fact, a twisted crazy version of mafia developed by me and a couple of other people while undergraduates called Quantum Mafia has been implemented on the web... i can dig up the url if there is interest. But neither of these are improved by play over PP. The proposed game is made possible by the PP platform, and thus a better PP event.)
That said, i do enjoy the Mafia game, i even created a variant (twisted and crazy as it may be). I just also realize that implementing a game in a specialized setting should only be done when the game benefits from that setting. Why play game X in PP when you could play it as well (or easier!) in a different format?
--Squirrelloid "longwinded"
