STBYM Halftober Monsterfest Playlist, Episode 6: A Game of Werewolf

Are you a werewolf? You have to tell me if you're a werewolf. It's the law. Up next on the Halftober Monsterfest Playlist is the 2017 episode "A Game of Werewolf" about the deep psychology of a beloved social game.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Night falls, werewolves, open your eyes and say hello to
the pack. You're hungry, aren't you? In silent formation, you
prowl between the farm houses. You smell some warm human blood.
The pack gathers in the churchyard to confer which of

(00:20):
the sleeping villagers smells the most delicious to you tonight? Oh? Really? Him?
All right? Stagger back to your homes, wash the blood
from your muzzles, and go to sleep. Daybreaks, everyone wakes up.

(00:41):
There's a sound coming from the town square. The constable's
bell is ringing. Something terrible has happened. Welcome to Stuff
to Blow your Mind from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hey,

(01:02):
welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is
Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And during that introduction
you were either going omg, omg, omg, or you were like,
what the heck is going on? That's right, uh, for
those of you who don't know what the heck is
going on, we were referring to the game of Werewolf,
sometimes known as Mafia. Right, I came to know this

(01:24):
game as Mafia. Did you did you do Mafia first?
Or Werewolf? Werewolf first? And that's one of the reasons.
I'm a werewolf purist on the game, and I've looked
down upon those who play it with a Mafia theme.
Now we will explain the rules to the game if
you don't know what they are in just a minute.
But so I came to know this game first as Mafia,

(01:44):
and I played it when I was in high school.
I played it with a bunch of friends of mine
down in their basement, and we would play for hours
at a time. It could just go on and on
and on, and we'd introduce all these ridiculous variations, because,
as you'll learn, once you know the basic rule of
this game, it can take on any kind of textural
overlay you want. It can be about werewolves, it can

(02:05):
be about Mafia, or as we did when I was
in high school, it can be about elves and orcs.
And so every time a character dies, I guess they
wouldn't die that the moderator would say, depart to Valan
or oh that's that's good. Yeah. So basically, it's a
social deception or a social deduction party game, depending on
how you look at it, in which an informed minority,

(02:28):
in this case, where wolves attempt to overcome an uninformed majority,
such as medieval villagers you know, or vice versa, depending
on which team you're you're playing on. Uh. But yeah,
it is a deceptively easy game to learn. I found
that just about anybody can get into it, even if
you're not a gaming person, because you'll frequently I'll frequently

(02:51):
find myself at a at a a gathering and not
everybody will be a board game geek. There'll be some
board game geeks there, but hard to bring everybody together
on what to play. This is one of those games
that brings people together. Well. Right, if you're at a
party and you say, hey, let's break out the D twenties,
it's time to play Dungeons and Dragons, a lot of
people are not not just going to be weirded out

(03:13):
by the geekiness of it, but they're also going to be, like,
all these rules, I gotta learn how to play. It's
really for some people they just don't want to be
bothered with all of the minutia of how to play
the game and what the hit points are and everything.
Were Wolf is like a version of D and D
that takes away almost every single rule and strips it

(03:34):
down to just pure role playing and basically the only
dynamics in the game are accusation and lying and killing. Yeah,
and and you don't need to you don't need a board.
You don't need to buy a copy of the game,
though there are some nice print versions of the game available.
But basically, all you need or just some index cards
or scraps of paper and a willingness to either draw

(03:55):
a werewolf and some villagers on them or just throw
some ws and v's and hand out the scraps. Robert,
you have made me this morning an amazing collection of
Werewolf game player cards on I believe how stuff works
branded envelopes. Oh yeah, yeah, I mean, because you can
really use anything and you can just throw them together
at the drop of a hat. So it works well.

(04:16):
If you're with people at a cabin or something, or
even in a hotel room, you can grab that that
Howard Johnson notepad and the Howard Johnson pen and pages
of the Gideon Bible. Yeah, if you want to go
sacrilegious on it. Um and you might have to tweak
the the fluff there a little bit for it. But
but but yeah, this is this game is just a

(04:37):
wonderful balance of to put it in those gaming terms
simplistic mechanics, but the deep mechanics once you start playing
with it, and and and then entertaining fluff. Yeah, and
they will eventually prove scientifically and technologically relevant, which is
the interesting thing and what justifies this foray into the
land of the Werewolves today. But I think for those

(04:57):
people out there who have never played the game and
are silk on what what's going on, we should describe
the rules, right, And hey, I just wanted to let
you know we played a few rounds of were a
Wolf with our co workers here in the opposite how
Steph works, and so we may play a few clips
for you from those games. And I wanted to give
a shout out to our co workers Alex, Lauren tar

(05:18):
Ramsey and Sarah for being really great sports and for
killing us again and again. Yeah, they really got into it.
We had to, We had to remove a fair amount
of cursing, but it was worth it. So at the
beginning of the game, you gathered together a bunch of
players and every player is randomly assigned a card telling
them their role. So for most players, you're going to

(05:39):
be a villager for a select minority in a group
of say eight, your select minority might be like two,
and those players are going to be werewolves. Then the
game proceeds into two phases that repeat back and forth,
night and day, day and night. Now a game master

(06:01):
runs the game and informs everyone when to close their eyes,
when to open their eyes. So you would say something like,
al right, villagers, nightfalls and your sleepy medieval town. Everyone
closes their eyes except for the werewolves. Werewolves, open your
eyes and indicate who shall die tonight. So the werewolves
silently confer. They usually with some kind of eye contact

(06:24):
or pointing game, and they figure out who they want
to devour or I don't know, just disembowel and leave
in the middle of the town. Yeah. I mean, that's
the delightful thing about about being the game masters. You
get to throw in details about how they're torn apart.
All right, the sun comes up, but not for you,

(06:44):
horse trainer. He was eating right down to the boots
and I didn't even get a chance. It's a little
less pressure now that I'm dead trying to lead the body.
I need some supplies. Robert, what's your favorite terror parts story? Oh, generally,

(07:06):
I just have like a portion of the individuals left
behind because I like the idea that the werewolves are
becoming so confident that they don't even have to eat everything,
and they would just they're just as happy to spread
terror throughout the town as anything else. I'm still so
full from that policeman last night. All right, So night
eventually comes to an end. That phase ends how the

(07:29):
villagers wake up, they find out who has been eaten
or torn apart in the night, and then they have
to dish out their own medieval mob justice. Right, So
the dead villager who has been chosen by the werewolves
is removed from the game, and I would say, for
total purity, I think that villager should not only be
removed from play and can't make any comments, but should

(07:50):
be banished from the room where everyone is playing, or
at least into the corner there's got to be some steaks.
Well I but then you have somebody who gets eliminated
right away, and well what I usually say is, look,
you're a ghost now, and you can't talk. You can observe,
but you can't talk. And it's always amusing when the
biggest chatter box in the room is reduced to a ghost.

(08:12):
You're you're the grandpa and the cloud in the family circus.
But yeah, so, like like you said, day comes around
and the villagers have to essentially form a mob to
find the killer and take care of them. And now,
since these are werewolves, they're very powerful at night. You
can't stop them at night when the full moon is out.

(08:32):
But during the daytime, they're just regular humans and you
can take them to the gallows if you are pretty
convinced that they're guilty. But how convinced are you? That's right?
So it comes down to a lot of a lot
of blind accusations, a lot of you know, self interested accusations.
And the cool part two is that you have werewolves

(08:53):
in there trying to uphold their cover as a human,
and they're going to make a case to probably for
a non wolf because because they know who the other
werewolf or well werewolves are, ye, why would they accuse
one of their own. So if you're Alice the werewolf,
you don't want to accuse Jeff the werewolf. You want
to accuse Rodney the villager of being a werewolf, right,

(09:14):
or jump on someone else's suspicion, uh, and then start
encouraging that anything to cast the suspicion away from you,
and at the end of all of this, there'll be
some sort of a vote. The villagers will decide who's
going to be executed for the crime of lokanthropy and
then only then and I think rules may vary on this,
but the way we play it is that at this

(09:36):
point they can perform an autopsy and they find out
if that was indeed a werewolf. Okay, So in some
versions of the game, you don't find out. You don't
know whether you just executed an innocent villager or a
werewolf until the end of the game, when it's finally
revealed who was who. Ah. That sounds rewarding as well,
because on one hand, with the with the autopsy, it

(09:56):
gives the person a chance to see like, I told
you so, I told you I wasn't werewolf, right, But
on the other hand, I do you're a ghost and
you can't comment right? Well that I like to think
that's their last thing they get to shout before they
drift into the nether realm. Nice. Okay, So you've got
this day night cycle where somebody, some player dies and
gets removed from the game every day and every night,

(10:18):
and the cycle continues until the end of the game.
So what brings about the end of the game. Well,
you can tell which team wins if suddenly the werewolves
out number the humans, right, or in some versions, I
think if they equal the number of humans. Well, right,
I mean, if you've got the same number of werewolves
and villagers. Yeah, and the villagers don't stay much of
a chance. Yeah, and then it's just werewolves slaughtering humans

(10:40):
in broad daylight. Welcome to Werewolf City. Yes. Now, of
course the regular villagers win once they eliminate all of
the werewolves in their midst and the moderator can announce
to them You've gotten the last one. Your village is
safe for now until the next game starts, which is
probably in about five minutes. Now, that's the basic game
of Werewolf form. Fia Mafia is exactly the same, except

(11:01):
instead of werewolves, their mafia members, the same rules, everything is.
It's just different texture, yeah, different fluff, which I have
to reiterate that I think werewolves are tremendously more fun
because I don't really like I don't like playing my
my cool parlor game with murderous criminals. I like the
idea of the fantastic Werewolf's gotta be monsters. Yeah, okay,

(11:23):
so there are a million different ways you can throw
some spice into this game, right, People play this game
with all different kinds of crazy invented third party characters,
so it's not necessarily just villagers and werewolves. What if
you add in Robert, give me, give me another player class?
The one I love the most is the sear. Okay,
how does that work? The seer has a separate phase

(11:45):
in the night. So there's the phase where the werewolves
get to open their eyes and pick out who's gonna
die and then close their eyes. But then you have
another phase where the sea or opens their eyes and
they get to point to one person and the game
master will give them a thumbs up or at comes
down about there the presence of lecanthropy, So this gives
one villager the chance to have secret knowledge. Generally, it's

(12:08):
you know, the odds are gonna play out that it's
probably gonna be about who is not a werewolf as
opposed to who is a werewolf? But then they have
to be careful about tipping their hand and the argument
so that that follow exactly. So you say, uh, day
comes around and you say, well, I know Jeff is
a werewolf because I'm the Seer and I got the
thumbs up on him last night. Guess who's going to

(12:28):
die tonight? Obviously the person who's revealed themselves as the
Seer right now. There are other variations on the privileged
Knowledge character. There is a for instance, the Innocent Child,
and this is when I tend to not use. But
this one involves one player who gets to peak during
the night, so it's risky. So instead of having a

(12:51):
separate phase in the night where you can ask the moderator,
you have the option if you choose to open your
eyes while the werewolves are conferring, right, and this gives,
of course the werewolves a chance to actually spot you spying.
So it adds this extra extra level to the play.
I guess now. One way I know I have played
is with a character that would be a doctor, or

(13:12):
maybe maybe even better would be the apothecary. Well, this
is kind of like the Seer, but instead of asking
the moderator every night, the doctor can choose one person
to make immune. So say the apothecary, can they wake
up at a different phase in the night and they
give a potion to someone and if that is the
same person that the werewolves have selected. That person, that

(13:36):
person gets saved by the potion. The werewolf attack does
not succeed. Oh that's nice. There's one that we sometimes
use called the Hunter, where they get to take somebody
down with them if they die, which adds some sort
of like shootout mentality to the proceedings. Another one, I
don't man if that happens early in the game, the
Hunter probably is going to be randomly getting another villager, right, yeah,

(13:59):
I mean that's what of the problems with a real
you know, itchy crossbow finger, you know. So tell me
about the Cupid, Robert, Oh, the Cupid is one of
my favorites. So this is just a villager basically, but
they get a phase at the very beginning of the
game where they get to secretly pick two players to
be star crossed lovers. So if one dies and they

(14:20):
could be they could be a human villager or they
could be a werewolf, you know, in masquerading as a villager.
But if the other lover dies, their character throws themselves
off a bridge. Love knows no boundaries monster them. Yeah,
and it's so this one also adds that sort of
crossfire dynamics of whoa, this happened and then something else
happened as well. Now you can imagine that the strategy

(14:41):
in this game. This game is odd because at one level,
it seems like when you start the game, you're just
going to be making these totally random accusations. I mean,
what do you have to go on? Maybe you thought
you heard somebody next to you opening their eyes. I
mean it's hard. It's hard to have anything to go
on at the beginning of the game other than just
mere suspicion. But strategy I do think tends to come

(15:03):
in more as the game goes on. Yeah, that first
phase of play, I think they're in my experience, there
are basically two elements that are gonna work. Unless somebody
really does creak their chair and make a very audible
sign that that clues and everyone else. You're gonna have
existing uh social dynamics coming into play. So like two

(15:24):
friends who kind of pick each other at each other
a lot um, they're likely to accuse each other of
being awarewolf just because other factors. Uh. If an individual
in the group has a large beard, I found, they're
likely to to draw the uh you know, the fun
suspicion of everyone else because there's nothing else to go on.
What if they've just got dark dried blood on their lips,

(15:47):
that'll do it too. Now another thing that comes into
play so is this when when I play it. When
I am the gamemaster for a game Awarewolf, I generally
ask everyone to choose a role in the village. This
is not a game mechanics role, but just a fluff roll.
So you're just a villager, but you get to I'm
the dairy farm Yeah, you get to be the dairy farmer.

(16:07):
Or you're the you know, you're the town fool, you're
the you work at the winery, you're a monk, etcetera.
It just gives it an extra level of role playing fun.
What do you what do you all do here? What
are you up doing? The demokratic Republic of I'm a tailor,
but I'm real bad at it. I'm the I'm the

(16:30):
leacher in the town. I hear that help you prevent
pantherpy Yeah? Okay, useful? Useful. A lot of industries sprung
up around this whole werewolf thing. Try since I build coffins, coffins, lechers,
terrible tailors, what do you do on the town want
of you werewolves? Yeah, I'm the werewolf groupiece. I don't

(16:55):
really have a job. I just like go from North
Catatonia to South Catatonia and I'm just like, look at
the werewolf remains. So you would not be wanting to
kill a werewolf or put one on trial or is
that your thing? Yes? I leave it there. The werewolf
traumas has really had an effect in the populary. Yeah,

(17:16):
I see that, all right. I'm a warlock. Warlock, Okay,
do you need any fancy ropes? I can make them uncomfortable.
I need you to come by my place at three
to do another werewolf protection spelled werewolves. Midwife an the

(17:41):
only person do anything. Nobody in this village makes food. No, no,
So we've got a warlock, we've got a midwife, we've
got a groupie, we've got a terrible tailor, we've got
a coffin maker, and we've got a bleacher. Yeah. And
there's just a voice that tells you things that happen,
Like right now is the sun sets mazy sky and

(18:05):
the babbling group comes up. If there are two were
most among us, let me see your eyes. But this
can also give people ammunition for making blind accusations in
the opening phase. Okay, so sometimes the accusations wouldn't be

(18:27):
truly strategic just in terms of winning the game, but
they might be playing along with some you know, not
actually strategic elements that are just part of the fluff.
So it's this weird mix of rationality and irrationality in
the game play. Yeah, yeah, I would say so. But
in terms of player classes, classes that have mechanics attached
to them, the list just goes on and on. There

(18:49):
there are tons of fun classes to play with. Some
of them, you know, they kind of break the game, uh,
and you decide, well, we're not going to have that
one again. Other ones introduce new mccans, new dynamics that
they can just keep you playing Werewolf into the wee hours.
Here's the one I would go with. Tell me if
you think this would break the game. The RoboCop. So

(19:10):
the village has one RoboCop that each night can administer
harsh justice just to a random individual. Or how does it?
How does the RoboCop decide? I guess the robocops following
something you a list of orders. Well, it's by the
rubric of serve the public trust, protect the innocent, and
uphold the law, and then maybe a secret fourth category

(19:31):
of course we don't know. Well, hey, hey Robert, Okay,
so here's the thing. We've just described. This weird game
about killing your friends and then accusing your friends and
then killing more of your friends. Why is this so popular?
I I've had the experience that whenever you introduced this
to a group of people, especially if they haven't played before,

(19:51):
they get ravenous for the game and they're they're like, yeah, yeah,
we gotta play more. Let's let's keep going. Yeah, it's
so very addictive, and and I think the the appeal
of the game does come down to a few key reasons.
So some of these we've already touched on. But first
of all, there's a very low learning curve. Virtually anyone
can play. Don't have dn D rules, it's just you

(20:13):
can learn it in five minutes. And also, again, while
you can brought by some pretty cool print versions of
the game, everything you need is easily printed out or
just scribbled on index cars and you're good to go again.
Howard Johnson, Stationary and pen and you're playing Werewolf. And
then there's this if anyone out there has ever played
rock band or guitar hero at a social gathering. You

(20:35):
know how that can just sort of treat was popular
for a while. It was, and I always noticed how
it just turned the room into this is this zombified
state where people aren't really interacting socially with each other.
They're only interacting with each other in this this soulless
presentation on the screen. It's like what was imagined by
the bad guys in the movie video Drone exactly. Yeah, Werewolf.

(20:58):
On the other hand, it actually in Courage is social
interaction among the players as well as varying degrees of
role playing depending on you know, how comfortable the group
is with that. But that will that will come out
organically as you play. And then, like a lot of
great games, it's deceptively complex, easy to learn, but full
of new twists and challenges as the players adapt and

(21:20):
as new optional rules are introduced, So you learn to
lie better and you get better at spotting the lies
of others, and if as you're doing a lot of
back and forth role playing as well, it just gives
you more and more ammunition. Now I know. There was
one interesting article about this game that was published in
two thousand ten and Wired that we both read, and
one of the things that it points out is that

(21:40):
this game is tremendously popular among people who work in
the tech business. That's a kind of odd thing to note, Like,
why do you think that is? Yeah, this was an
interesting article. They talked to Frank Lance, director of the
New York University Game Center, and he pointed out that
the game sanctions a lot of a titilating social activity.

(22:03):
So we're you know, we're talking stuff like flirtation, confrontation, betrayal,
meaning that it's not only great for extroverts because obviously
a bunch of extroverted theater majors are going to jump
in and have a lot of fun with this, but
introverts as well. Uh, it's instantly have license to engage
in all of this fun social interactions. Yeah, stuff that

(22:24):
you might normally be very intimidated to do in real
life is sanctioned within the game. So there's a lot
of direct eye contact and accusing people and being yeah,
like you said, just being very confrontational. It's appealing to
do that in a controlled setting for people who don't
feel much permission to do that in the rest of
their lives, right. So so Frankie pointed out that this

(22:46):
obviously ended up appealing to more introverted members of the
tech industry. However, there's a c net article from the
two thousand nine that pointed out that that the game
was also a hit with more of the corporate types
as well, because sure, you're you're not pitching an idea
to a room full of investors, but you are a
secret werewolf trying to shift blame onto an innocent human.

(23:09):
And that's basic CEO of material, right, That's like what
they teach in business school. Or you're a seer or
a child with secret inside or info when you're trying
to make a purely logical case without revealing your privileged status,
so the level of social interaction can be seen. It's
practice for actual villainy, or or just this fun exercise

(23:29):
that lets you, uh, you know, move social muscles that
don't get a lot of exercise otherwise. I can't wait
to get all the CEO hate mail and it's gonna
be great and like Mark Zuckerberg's right, and then you
guys are totally biased ps not a werewolf. Okay, So
I've got a theory about why the game is so appealing,
And I think it's that it mirrors and simultaneously simplifies

(23:55):
so many high stakes, real life decision dilemmas because cause
the dynamics sort of like you just mentioned with with
the idea of this business. You know, you've got some
bisbro who is a secret werewolf and trying to pull
one over on the people who are being disadvantaged by
what he's doing. The dynamic of the informed minority versus

(24:16):
the uninformed majority is so common in the real world. Basically,
this is a description of what is meant by the
word conspiracy. Oh yeah, it's a werewolf conspiracy. Now, the
concept of a conspiracy, I think gets a bad rap
because it gets associated with the more wild versions like
conspiracy theories tends to mean people who think interdimensional Sasquatches

(24:37):
did nine eleven. But but there's no doubt that under
the broad definition, conspiracies exist all around us. Like any gang,
any criminal gang is a conspiracy. Every network of corrupt
politicians and people who buy favors from them, that's a conspiracy.
It's an informed minority trying to get advantage over an
uninformed majority. Unethical company is of course as we mentioned

(25:01):
could be described as conspiracies, and in every case there's
this small group working against the interests of the larger group,
trying to keep their behavior secret and avoid accountability. Meanwhile,
the larger group is trying to root out all the
people who are working in secret against them. And it's
entirely possible in all these real world scenarios that this
will lead to innocent people getting blamed and unfairly punished.

(25:24):
And so Where Wolf is cool because it reduces these
most vexing problems in human civilization to this simple party game.
This really distilled dynamic and one of the one of
the cool and appealing things about Where Wolf is that
at the end of the game, you always get to
find out what actually happened, right, even if you lose,
there's resolution to the mystery. You know, in our constant

(25:47):
prosecution of the various mundane conspiracies in real life, time
after time we find that we can't be certain what
really happened. You know, the bad guy gets away with
it and you never find out what they did or
who they were, or you prosecute somebody and they claim
innocence all the way to the gallows and you can
never really be sure you did the right thing. The
appeal of Werewolf, I think is you get to play

(26:09):
this dangerous game that we're all constantly playing in real
life in simulation, and you get to find out for
sure how well you did at it. Alright, listeners, on
that note, I'm gonna ask everyone to close their eyes
as the commercial break session of play commences, and then
when we come back, you may open your eyes and
we will discuss the history of Mafia and Werewolf. The

(26:39):
Warlock goes by the coffin shop three pm. Un He's
got his uncomfortable robin that the terrible tailor has tailored
for him terribly. The coffin acres nowhere to be seen,

(27:01):
so while he's waiting, the Warlock is taking a tour
of the facilities. Opens a little baby coffin with spider lamps,
opens a medium sized coffin, empty satinliner. Opens the large
sized coffin, and the coffin maker is within everything except
for his face. The Apothecary, I shouldn't have. I don't

(27:33):
have any direct dealings with her now. The apothecary has
wanted to be a werewolf for a long long time,
so maybe we should just kill her. Alright, open your eyes.
The sun has risen. Now we've established that the clearly

(27:53):
superior version of this game is the one with the
werewolf fluff instead of the Mafia fluff. But we've got
it it. It was Mafia before it was Werewolf. It
was definitely Mafia before it was where Wolf. Invented by
a guy named Dimitri david Off. And I've seen nineteen
eighty six in nineteen eighties seven sided I think, I
guess it was just around that period of eighty six

(28:14):
eighty seven in Russia, right, Yeah, Yeah, he was a
teacher in Russia, and I think this adds to that,
maybe the appeal at the mafia uh motif, I don't know. Yeah,
And he invented it as a psychological exercise for his students. Yeah,
So he was a psychology student at the time and
he was teaching high school. And he explains that he
wanted to teach psychology concepts, but thought that this type

(28:37):
of game might be better at teaching some of these
psychology concepts, or at least more appealing to students. Then,
I don't know, say a traditional lecture might be. I
can certainly imagine why classes would have more fun playing
Mafia than they would listening to you talk about the
latest findings on the science of deception exactly now. Wired
interviewed David Off in two thousand ten, and it's it's

(28:59):
a fun article to look up directly, the same one
we mentioned. I'll try to include a link to it
on the landing page for this episode. He insisted on
being interviewed by Wired within the m m O world
of warcraft for starters. Dude, that's even better than saying
I'll only do an interview in second life. Yeah, and
he was. He was extremely dodgy with some of his answers,

(29:21):
so the resulting interview piece spence most of its time
placing him within the context of his Russian upbringing before
moving to the United States. So he was born in
comments Gurowski near the Kazakhstan border, and this was not
too far from the nineteen fifty seven Uh kissed him
nuclear disaster that your Noble explosion, which we've discussed on

(29:44):
the show before, occurred in nineteen eighty six while he
was designing Mafia. He was teaching high school at the time.
As we discussed any tap of game to his students,
And the crazy thing is it kind of just spreads
out from there. Yeah, And one thing I love about
this article is it to Stab Publish, is that he's
about as weird as you would suspect from somebody who

(30:05):
invented this weird social deception virus that infects people's parties
all around the world. Now yeah, uh, Like, I know
I already mentioned video Drome once today, but it makes
me think, you know, a person who says I will
only be interviewed within World of Warcraft is like Brian
Oblivion and video Drome who will only be interviewed on

(30:26):
television on a television. Oh man, there's so much potential
to create a horror franchise about some sort of a
social deception game like this that just spreads, and it
spreads so easily based on just how addictive it is
and the various benefits of play, as we've discussed already.
But but the crazy thing too here is that this

(30:47):
is largely a pre Internet age which is spreading, so
it really doesn't start picking up online until after that's
when it it hits the the u US according to
accounts that that we were reading. And this is where
Andrew Plotkin a k aesarf you might know, missarf Uh.

(31:09):
He he's the one who picked it up in the
US and updated it with the werewolf fluff and then
began distributing it spreading the word of it online. So
he told Wired magazine the following in two thousand and ten.
I was fascinated with the game design. I had never
seen a game with such a pure strategic underpinning, no
mechanics to be strategic about. It was what poker would

(31:32):
be if you didn't play with the deck of cards
but bets solely on other people's bets. It shouldn't have worked,
but it did. I think he's exactly right about that.
Like it's it's kind of hard to understand what's so
appealing about the game until you play it. And I
wonder out there, if you're somebody who's never played this
game before and you're listening and you don't get it,

(31:53):
You're like, what is fun about this? It just sounds boring.
You've got to try it. I suspect your mind will
be changed, or maybe this is an occasion for more
hate mail. And I should point out to that the
game is is so simple that not only is it
a popular physical parlor game like that where people physically

(32:14):
gather into space and play with each other. It also
is played a lot online in online communities because you
don't have to have a spec. As long as you
have a basic social interaction platform, like just a basic
chat room, you can play a Werewolf. Yeah. You really
don't need much much more, as long as you have
some method of of randomizing the roles, which is a

(32:37):
pretty simple programming feat. That's all you need. As long
as you've got some kind of side messaging private messaging service. Yeah,
you can do it now. Another thing I love about
Werewolf is how closely it resembles a couple of key movies,
that one one of which I know that you love
as well. I know where you're going, but hit the
first one first. Okay. So there's a nineteen four film

(33:00):
titled The Beast Must Die. It stars Peter Cushing, a
thirty four year old Michael Gambon Charles Gray seven. Yes, yes,
he played Blowfield. He was Blowfeld and Diamonds Are Forever,
that's right. Yeah, he played the Criminologist and Rocky Horror,
and he also played microft homes on the Jeremy Brett

(33:23):
Granada Sherlock series. I'm sure he was great at that. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
it was great and it was terrific and everything. He
is dry as a bone, yes, man, this is a
very dry British film, as one might expect, and it's
a it's a werewolf Who've done it based in a
large part on the Agatha Christie book and movies, um

(33:44):
and then there were none. So the film climaxes with
a scene in which everyone gathers in a parlor and
they're tested with I think a silver candlestick. They pass
it around to see who's a werewolf. And this is
the only movie that I know of to feature a
werewolf break. This is a brief intermission for the audience

(34:04):
to discuss their theories on who the werewolf is and
then vote on the werewolf before you get the big
reveal in the movie. Now, the really great version of
this would be that the audience vote determines which real
they load into the projector and becomes the werewolf in
the final scene. Yeah, I that was not the case, though.
It was just a chance to discuss what you thought

(34:25):
about about the movie up to that point. But I
feel like we need more werewolf breaks in our films,
even in non werewolf films. Say, for instance, you're watching
Glen Gary Glen Ross the movie. Yeah, okay, there are
no actual werewolves in it, but there I think that
it's constructive to have a point where the audience talks
about who might be a werewolf. Well, there's a there's
a burglary scene, like you could say, pause to discuss film,

(34:47):
and everyone pauses and goes into an extremely profanity lace
discussion about who broke into the office and stole those leads. Now,
another great scene that comes to mind that is very
reminiscent of Werewolf is, of course, the scene in John
Carpenter filmed The Thing. I love it. It's the best
the scenes where you do you're doing the test to

(35:09):
determine who's got thing blood and who's got human blood.
That's right. If you've never seen The Thing, it's one
of the best horror movies ever made, and it's it's
got what's so great about it, apart from just the
music and the cast and all that, is that it's
got these scenes where they're trying to figure out who's
the thing that's right and uh. And in the original

(35:30):
John Carpenter adaptation and not the original film version of it,
obviously Howard hawks. Yeah, And in Carpenter's version, they test
everyone's blood sample one by one, sticking a heated piece
of copper wire in there to see if the blood
acts to defend itself, because the blood would act independent
of the individual, because it's a crazy shape shifting organism, right,

(35:53):
Each part is its own organism and the thing, right,
And so that's the test in that version. However, in
the two thousand eleven remake, which or it's kind of
a remake, it's kind of a prequel. Uh I thought
it was still fun. A lot of a lot of
people kind of ragged on it, but they do an
alternate version of the test and by checking to see
who's who lacks amalgam dental feeling of fillings because the

(36:18):
theory is that the thing can't form inorganic matter or
can't replicate it on getting matter. What So if you
practice good dental hygiene, they're just gonna burn you alive. Yeah,
it's not as satisfying, but but it's still amusing. That's
kind of my that's my general review of the film. Okay,
So if you're still with us and you haven't just
paused the podcast to go play We're Wolf with your friends.

(36:40):
You're probably wondering, what is that stuff we referenced earlier
about We're Wolf showing up in academic literature. Well, We're
Wolf is an interesting game from several standpoints, and one
of those standpoints in in academic research would be game theory, right,
that's right, Yeah, I mean in general, do you see
it popping up in a lot of different academic papers,

(37:00):
A lot of different psychological studies, even AI studies as
well discussed, and a lot of it just comes down
to the fact that this is a simple game that
depends heavily on deception and also social inter interaction and
observational skills good things to model in computers if you
are very sinister and is David Off himself points out,

(37:21):
it's not a game you can master. So yeah, you
can do a certain amount of math in your heads
sort of card counting, I guess, but it's only going
to get you so far, and it's ultimately difficult to
predict who is going to win. Uh, you know, werewolves
are humans, which is this is This is another wonderful
thing about it and another reason why gaming can go
on till one or two in the morning, because you

(37:42):
don't reach that point where everyone's figured it out and
you've you've essentially beat the game, or you've evolved beyond
this game and you need more complex games. The crazy thing,
of course about all of this is that the game
started out as a sort of psychological exercise and he
comes for comes around full circle and becoming a tool
in various psychological experiments, or or a tool used to

(38:03):
generate data sets for psychological experiments. And remember how we
said that you don't need a board, you don't need dice,
you don't need any other materials. You just need that
card the glance at once and then stick in your
pocket or you know, push up under your your butt
while you play. That isn't that's another key advantage here there.
The cards are just initial reference points, so there's really

(38:25):
no reason to break from communication and immersion with other players.
This is especially important for studies that factor in gaze pattern.
So it's in a way, it's it's again it's like
poker without the cards. It's just the pure social experiment, right. Yeah,
you don't have to look at your cards, you don't
have to go examine your character sheet. You're just in
the world. Yeah, like there's a there's a game that

(38:49):
has some similar style to it called Spyfall that came
out a few years back, and it's one of these
that if you're if you're up for the work, you
can create a pin and paper version of it, but
you generally have to buy a set. But it's a
game where there's a lot of fun social interaction, but
you end up referencing sheets a lot to remind yourself,

(39:09):
like what are the possible locations to guests in the
course of play. It's still a fun game, but there
is a distraction uh element to it that is not
present in Werewolf. Okay, so we're going to game theory, psychology,
and artificial intelligence. Let's look at game theory first. How
how does this game figure into game theory? Well, I
guess we just need to define what game theory is
real quick for anyone who's not familiar with it. Uh.

(39:31):
Its origins lie with John von Neuman and Oscar morgen Stern,
and they introduced game theory to the world in with
theory of Games and Economic behavior. So basically, this is
the study of systems that have differential payoffs and different
actors within them that have competing motivations. Right, that's right.

(39:54):
As David k. Levine of the Department of Economics that
u c. L A. Points out, it's an econom mistake
on what psychologist would call the study of social situations.
And you have two branches of game theory broad branches.
You have cooperative and you have non cooperative. I think
these are pretty straightforward. And then you have sub branches
that include decision theory, general equilibrium theory, and mechanism design theory. Now,

(40:18):
if you've seen papers on game theory before, or explanations
of game theory before, one thing you're going to see
a lot of is, for example, tables of payoffs where
you can have axes along a table that show different
kinds of decisions you can make within this system. Whatever
the system is, applies to various you know, vast different

(40:39):
kinds of situations, but different decisions you can make within
the system, and what the probability of different payoffs for
those decisions is. Yeah, they create the creation of, say
a matrix that shows you what the different payoffs are
based on different player decisions. Like the classic example of
this is of course, the the Prisoner's dilemma. Yeah, so

(41:01):
this is a game where it's a very simple version
of a game where you don't know what the other
player is doing, but you can make smarter decisions and
less smart decisions depending on what the potential payoffs and
punishments are for different decisions you could make. Yeah, and
when we say game, it's not a fun parlor game
now the same my werewolf is. But it's just the

(41:22):
mechanics of it are simple and and fairly fairly interesting.
The idea is that you have two prisoners. They each
were brought in because they're suspected of robbing a bank,
and they have money stashed away somewhere, and then the
police are trying to get each one in a separate
room to turn on the other. So, so rat out
your buddy and you'll go free. If neither rats, then

(41:45):
they both got walk free and get their fifty share
of the stolen money fifty percent. What if I want
more percent? Well, then you've got to be willing not
only to rat out your partner, but be darn sure
that they are not going to rat you out, because
they're faced with the same problem exactly. So if you

(42:05):
both rat each other out, then you both go to prison,
and that money just rots in a hole somewhere. But
if you rat them out and they don't rat out you,
then you get to keep all of it and they
rot in a whole somewhere or at least in the penitentiary.
So yeah, depending on what the different types of payoffs are,
there are ways of solving this game. And I guess

(42:27):
in the case where you're comparing money versus jail time,
you would have to sort of render the jail time
in a monetary value or something. But you can work
out probabilities of what your best decision should be given
decision matrices like this. Now, as you can imagine, this
relates to Werewolf, because you have it's a it's a

(42:48):
great opportunity to try and and chart out the motivations
and respective payoffs for both villagers and werewolves. Yeah. Now,
part of the problem with Werewolf, though, is it highly
it depends very much what variables you allow to come
into play, because as you've said, the game is deceptively
simple at its core, but there's all this stuff going

(43:08):
on and it that makes it more complicated than the
simple rules would lead you to believe. Yes, and then
you have, of course, all these social elements you're coming
into play as well, especially in an opening round, like
how do you how do you create a proper probabilities
for Hey, Ramsey has a really long beard and looks
kind of like a werewolf, So we're going to just
blindly accuse him of murdering a villager. Well, I mean,

(43:31):
we would say that in reality, since we know the
cards are distributed at random, that would be basically a
random accusation. But I've seen this that that first round
random accusation pick up a lot of steam because ultimately
there there are no real world stakes to Werewolf. Of course,
the question is do players actually do any better when

(43:52):
they're playing with some kind of strategy than they would
if they were playing randomly. We'll come back to that,
all right. So we're not going to hit you with
a bunch of matrices and equations here, And we also
can't possibly cover every study, every proproposal, every research project
to use Mafia or Werewolf, but we're gonna touch on
some of the interesting studies and it's worth recognizing some

(44:13):
of the recurring features of these studies. So more often
than not, you're going to encounter a very boiled down
version of the Werewolf rules. So no cupids or anything, right, Like,
generally they're gonna be most interested with just villagers and werewolves,
no detectives, no seers or what have you, because let's
face it, those are those are pretty great mechanics, just

(44:34):
right out of the box. Right. And also we mentioned
the social dynamics that come into play, and these again
can be very difficult to model. So you might be wondering,
as a matter of course, generally, who wins when you
play this game you've got werewolves versus villagers. Is there
is there a standard way to predict who wins more often? Well,
there was a probability paper called a Mathematical Model of

(44:56):
the Mafia Game in by PYOTR mcdowah uh, and it
found and this is a big this is a big caveat,
but it found in a simulation where all killings are random,
so nobody has any special information. In each round, the
villagers execute somebody random and the werewolves kill somebody random.
In this version of play quote, it turns out that

(45:19):
a relatively small number of the Mafia members i e.
Proportional to the square root of the total number of
players gives an equal winning chance for both groups. So
if your number of mafia members is about the square
root of the total number of players. It should be
roughly fifty fifty. But the game isn't always that simple,
and maybe the maybe players are better than random chance.

(45:42):
What do you think, Robert, Yeah, I mean, especially when
you factor in all these just additional aspects of the
social dynamics. Uh. So the author here, he has another
quote that I think sums up the difficulties of modeling
the game. He says, quote a dry mathematical model maybe
a backbone of a more complex one, but certainly is
not enough to describe a real game. During course of play,

(46:04):
citizens gain some information, either by discovering another's identity by
themselves or trying to catch messages. Furthermore, voting maybe subject
to some kind of witch hut mentality. Moreover, rarely are
all players the same. Usually they are ones with higher
and lower influence on the others. Right, so some people
are just really good at leading the angry mobs to

(46:26):
drag somebody to the gallows. Uh. Sometimes people do actually
get some kind of useful information in the course of play.
I discovered a section in a book um that goes
into some of these interesting variations on the game and
so so Robert, see if you'll follow me down this path,
I want to see how this comparison to your werewolf experience.

(46:46):
So the American writer Adam gott Nick, you might know
him from good essays in the New Yorker. Yeah stuffs
come up on here before Yeah um. He published a
book in two thousand and eight called Through the Children's Game,
A Home in New York, which is basically a memoir
about life in New York City, especially after nine eleven,
And in one section of the book he talks about

(47:07):
this period where his friends have become addicted to a
variant of Werewolf. Though the version they plays Mafia. You know,
you can't judge them too harshly. They are in New York. Uh,
so that's a touchstone for them. And they play in
groups of fifteen to twenty with three Mafia a narrator
called God one commandante who's the detective character basically the

(47:30):
same as the Seer, and then the rest are villagers.
That's a big game. I like it. So Gotten Ex
played a lot, and he reports that the villagers win
more often than the Mafia. So a minute ago we
saw that mathematically, if if players are doing no better
than random, you should predict about a fifty fifty chance
for each team to win. But Gottenix says the villagers

(47:51):
win more often, and he says that in his experience,
the best starting strategy if you're a villager is simply
to look at everybody's face as and as God commands
you to open your eyes. And basically what you do
is you just look around and you try to get
a feeling for who looks guilty, believe it or not,
he says in his in his experience, this works better

(48:12):
than you would expect, which if he's correct about that,
that would indicate that we do have some kind of
natural guiltiness detection system built in how we recognize other
people's faces. We might get to more about that in
a study we look at in a minute. But as
the game goes on, he says, deductive reasoning becomes more important.
So you look for, say, patterns and who gets killed

(48:34):
after accusing whom, So you might start to notice that
everyone who accuses Alice of being part of the werewolf
mafia tends to get killed the very next night. You
can probably guess what's going on. Then again, they might
just be trying to throw you off the track people
are crafty um got Nick writes that the ostensible pleasure
of the game is in testing how good you are

(48:55):
at lying uh, and how good you are at spotting
lying behavior, and others like this captivating question. You always
wonder how good you are at spotting a liar, because
it's hard to know in real life. Like I was
talking about earlier, real life is full of so much
ambiguity in questions that are never resolved, and trying to
root out the deception of other people. And there's one

(49:16):
excellent section. I just wanted to read a quote from
his book and see if it matches with your experience,
so goth Nick writes, quote, The really fascinating thing about
Mafia is seeing how much pure irrationality lingers in its play,
how little real deduction, and how much sheer panic govern
its conduct. The game quickly breaks down as social groups

(49:37):
will into small circles of belief, which become lynch mobs
of mistrust on the next turn. As these small circles
within the group form and break the emotional authenticity of
the alliances, The felt pleasure of trusting another is startlingly
frightening lee real. I think it's Larry. It must be Larry,

(49:58):
George says to you, filling his eyes with sincere persuasiveness,
leaning forward, confident, conspiring, and you nod with conspiratorial glee. Yes,
it must be Larry, look at him, and for that moment,
the bond between you and George is so intense as
to overshadow your general and complete lack of interest in

(50:18):
George as a person. You and George against the mafia,
But then the quick nightly shadow intrudes, what if George
is the mafia? Yet the proper suspicions, though they rise,
rarely override these instant bonds. The impulse to trust and
go on trusting a confidant is so strong that it
often survives even overwhelming evidence that the confidant is a rat. So, Robert,

(50:43):
you've played a lot. Does this match your experience? Do
you think that that the game really, more than anything else,
hinges on establishing bonds and connections with other players. Um.
I think it is a huge part of it, and
it it gets back to that sort of icebreaker quality
of the game, because I've certainly played it in settings
where I don't know a lot of people and they'll

(51:06):
be like a large portion of the group that is,
you know, another friend group that I'm not privy to.
It's interesting to play in a group like that because
he mentioned connection, the connection that exists during these accusations
in the in the middle of all of this debate,
and it does give you this this amazing chance to
have this really intense connection with somebody that you you

(51:28):
maybe even not even sure what their name is right now.
You just know them as oh, well, they're they're the
they're the the bread baker in the medieval town, and
that's the that's maybe the as much as you know
about their life, but you have this intense connection based
on the game. Um like. By the way, that's another
reason as a as the game master, I like to

(51:49):
dish out the different or not dish them out, but
ask people to choose a role in the medieval village
because it gives you something to refer to. If you
don't know their name yet, you can just say, oh,
if you can't remember, it's Carroll, you can just say.
And then the cobbler of the town, uh is found dead.
You don't have to say care, Uh, well, I've got

(52:10):
an observation along similar lines. Got Nick says another part
of what's great about the game is it eliminates the
need for other conversation and small talk with your neighbors
at a party, he says, quote, instead of telling them
elaborate social lies in an unformed context, you get to
tell them elaborate social lies in a formal one. Yeah. Yeah,

(52:31):
this comes back to just the immersion of the Werewolf
gaming experience, because it is often the case where people
just go they just go all in on it, and
they're not gonna be talking about anything else. They're not
talking about the you know, the day that everyone had,
or or what supper was like. They are just all
in firing along these these these new communicative pathways. Yeah.

(52:55):
One more dynamic, he mentions, is that the game is
actually filled with many games based on existing relationships. Specifically,
he singles out couples that are playing. Each couple tries
to catch the other, the partner in that couple lying,
and focuses primarily on whether they should be suspicious of
their own partner. Does that match your experience? Yeah? Yeah,

(53:18):
I mean, especially in that opening round of play, they
don't have anything else to go on except existing real
world social connections. A lot of times and those those
end up being used and then when people start making accusations, uh,
those shows social dynamics come into play as well. It's
another reason I really like the cupid role because you
get into this like why why does the cupid choose

(53:39):
these two people to be star crossed lovers? You know,
because they're actually a couple. Is it because they were
like teasing each other early in the evening or it's
just hilarious to think of them as lovers to make
them embarrassed. Yeah, yeah, so it add that is a
case where it adds this extra level of of interaction. Uh,
not only with the in game social dynamics, but the

(54:02):
real world social dynamics as well. Right, it's it's like
dad humor, like tell us about your boyfriend exactly. Okay,
we should take a quick break and when we come back,
we're going to talk about the science of deception and
were wolf death by can't do and Beneath was about

(54:31):
a human she should never pretend to be a werewolf?
What does those werewolves triumph? Again? Unfortunately I was the seer.
I knew that she was away. You never got and

(54:55):
I never got to be the werewolves. And the first
thing I was gonna do is declare that I was
the he here and in point out the werewolf. Right,
that would have put a whole different dynamic that we
had not inexperience. That's what I'm saying. You good thing.
We off with your hand at the beginning. You're being

(55:19):
very aggressive like it, and I think you're the Werewolf.
I don't know. How do I think Joe is, because
he's I'm seriously I would say, no, I'm trying. I'm
trying to get a vibe on somebody, and she actually
seems kind of sincere um. I think Robert. I think

(55:41):
maybe Robert. I again, am just look at that devilish
grin on his face. This is the grind of someone
who knows perfectly well that their soul was pure. My
hard work has a scrubbed away whatever minor satanic delight.

(56:03):
Look at this now. Earlier we mentioned a Wired article
from two thousand and ten about the game, and it
addressed this question of the scientific study of deception and
what what psychology can tell us about deception within the
game of Werewolf. According to a gaming psychologist at the

(56:24):
London Metropolitan University named Simon Moore, there's actually not much
diversity in our skill at spotting liars. According to More,
there are not human lie detectors walking among us. Quote,
if you ask someone on the street, are they better
at detecting a liar than a police officer, they'll probably
say no. But a police officer and a general person

(56:46):
both have a fifty percent success rate at detecting liars. Man,
that's that's frustrating. You would hope there would be people
who would be better at it among us. Yeah, I
mean you certainly when you do start using lie as
you become even more self conscious, do you think, oh,
they're going to see right through it? But really they have, Yeah,
exactly so, so that's at first. Though, certain circumstances, according

(57:11):
to More, do tip the balance and change our ability
to get away with lies and also to detect a
lize in others. For example, when you're stressed, it's harder
to get away with lying. Now we all know about
the uh the fallibility of the polygraph tests a true
lie detector test, but there is some truth to the
principle on which the polygraph test is based. It's just

(57:34):
not necessarily as reliable as it is often depicted in fiction,
or maybe even in some people who actually use it.
But the principle it's based on is that lying causes
the stress physiological stress reactions in the body that you know,
messes with your heart rate, it messes with your blood
pressure and stuff like that. Um, and as you get
more stressed, it gets harder and harder to lie. So

(57:58):
this would sort of mean that at the beginning of
the game, lying might be easy when there's not much
pressure on you. As other players get eliminated and the
spotlight narrows on you and the stakes of the game
go up, More predicts that it's going to be harder
and harder for people to get away with lying without
people seeing through their facade. Yeah, because early in the game,

(58:18):
especially if you have a larger group, it's easy to
just sort of set there quietly and decide with this
faction or another. But yeah, it is things. Is things proceed,
you have to be outspoken, uh, otherwise people are going
to be suspicious of your silence, right, And that actually
is a factor in another study I'm going to mention
in a minute now. More also says lots of our

(58:40):
lives are lives of exaggeration. I think we probably know
this from experience. People are more likely to sort of
turn a half truth into a big exaggerated claim than
they are to just blatantly say something that is completely
untrue with no basis in reality. Right, people are more
more likely to fudge than just to make up a

(59:01):
total lie, and so blatant lies like I am not
a werewolf when you know you are are more difficult
than these kinds of exaggerations. But More also says it's
easier to lie about straightforward information than to lie about
your own emotional state. So if you're trying to put
on a show of outrage, like you know, how could
you accuse me of being a ware wolf? After all

(59:23):
of our friendship or whatever, how could you accuse me?
You quickly exhaust yourself, and More says that a person
doing that is going to start to falter at this
deceptive performance. The feigned outrage turns into sort of more
simple objection, or turns into other emotions that are easier
to fake, like aggression, and people will pick up on this.

(59:44):
You start to look like a dirty rat. And this
is given as an explanation for why the villagers actually
win more often than a simple random choice would would predict.
Villagers at some point do start to be able to
notice people lying? And we have some some studies to
back this up. Yeah really, yeah, some some studies that

(01:00:05):
are generally conference proceedings here, So who knows exactly how
correct these claims are. But these are some claimed findings
on how to detect deception that we found related to
the game Werewolf. So one was called are You a Werewolf?
Detecting deceptive roles and outcomes in a Conversational role playing game?

(01:00:25):
And this was presented at a Acoustic Speech and Signal
Processing in the I Tripoli International Conference. And the authors
here created this automated method for detecting players determined to
be liars by analyzing the acoustic properties of their speech patterns.
So I thought that was interesting. Can a computer just
listen to quantitative elements of what happens when somebody speaks

(01:00:50):
and say I caught a liar here? So they tried
to correlate that. They tried to find okay, can we
can we listen with the computer and see does it
detect patterns and lying? And they claimed that it did.
They said their method could successfully predict the lying behavior
better than chance just by listening to acoustic properties. What
does this mean for human players. Well, one simple finding

(01:01:11):
seemed to be that liars speak less, presumably to limit
their risk of making revealing mistakes. This is interesting because
one thing I've I've definitely seen before is you have
a case where someone's a very outspoken werewolf critic. You know,
they're very outspoken. They're they're going to be the lead
detective in finding the murderers in the village. But then

(01:01:33):
they'll come, uh, they'll come a game where there's suddenly
a lot more quiet. They're not making all these acts.
They're not they're not right at the front of the
crowd with the pitch for it. And people notice and
they say, well, John is kind of quiet this round,
suspiciously quiet, as if perhaps he is a werewolf. Yeah,
come on, Cynthia, didn't you have some zeal for werewolf

(01:01:55):
killing in the last game. Yeah, suddenly you've got you've
got soft on the anthropy. Yeah. So that does seem
to be a good tell. People who are trying to
maintain deception offer less information. They just talk less, And
it's pretty easy to see why. This study seems to
confirm that finding. Also, it found that quote the distribution

(01:02:16):
of pitch and energy values are higher for liars. So,
according to the study, if somebody is raising their voice
in pitch and volume, they're slightly more likely to be
a liar. Okay, that's interesting because I know that I
have I sometimes raised my voice when I am I'm
lying about not being a werewolf. Really, yeah, I'll be like, well,

(01:02:38):
how dare you accuse me of that sort of thing? Now,
I'm gonna have to be careful, gonna kept keep it low.
You gotta talk more, and you gotta stay calm. Yeah,
but how do you stay calm about something like this?
Are dying? How could you accuse me of being awarewolf?
Here's the thing, I'm not aware wolf, and the reason
is yeah. And this is where that this is actually
where the fluff becomes nice sort of villager fluff, where

(01:02:58):
you can say, how could I possible be the werewolf?
I am the cobbler. I have to make shoes all night.
If I was running around slaughtering townspeople, then everyone would
be barefoot. Okay, So a couple more. One was a
two thousand and eight paper by Jao and Sung which
was called Cues to Deception in Online Chinese Groups. And

(01:03:21):
this is a sample group of Chinese players playing online.
The authors found that quote deceivers tended to communicate less.
Yet again, so people who talked less are more likely
to be liars. But also quote showed low complexity and
this is in their speech meaning for example, shorter sentences
and shorter words, and then they continue and high diversity,

(01:03:45):
so that means for example, more unique words. So their
analysis found that you want to look for a liar,
look for the one who doesn't talk much. When they
do talk, they might talk in shorter sentences or less
complex words, but use more unique word choice. Interesting. Interesting, Okay,
one more uh, This was paper called Detection of Deception

(01:04:08):
in the Mafia Party Game. Obviously we've got some people
who don't understand the benefits of wherewere And this one
presented another automatic system for lie detection. This time it
was based on facial cues, so the movements of eyebrows,
eyes and mouths on videos. And this one's kind of
hard to explain because it's hard to translate what they
found about facial movement analysis into words here on this

(01:04:31):
podcast in a useful way. But just quickly, some of
their tentative findings apparently showed that I eyebrow and mouth
movements caused by lying might be those more associated with fear, guilt,
or delight, while truthful facial expressions might be those that
you would more closely associate with sadness. Okay, but this
is all with humans, right, humans, and arguably some werewolves.

(01:04:55):
I don't know how the game would change if you
had real werewolves playing among your party friends, but uh
that that would be great if wherewolves were real, we'd
have to get one of these studies and see how
they played. But what we've not looked at so far
is computerized players. That's right, and there there are a
number of cool studies that looked at this. Because another
great way to use were wolf is is if you're

(01:05:16):
studying either lie detecting robots or robots that lie. And
when I say robots, and of course using the fun
version of robots, we're actually talking about uh programs and
or or very soft AI to try and determine patterns
of human behavior. Well, no, actually, so to clarify, I
guess we have looked at a couple of papers that

(01:05:36):
claim to have a method for determining some kind of
automated lie detection. We haven't looked at AI liars yet,
and we haven't, I guess, looked at like robust AI
players that incorporate information about lie detection or that really
try to uh to get in the mind of the liar,
just more like they're detecting correlations and things sorted out

(01:05:59):
by the humans. Anyway, let's let's let's look at some
AI lying Okay, all right, Well, I was looking at
a presentation titled the Great Deceivers, Virtual Agents and Believable Lies,
and this was by the US at all. They'll come
up again, And this was presented at the two thousand
thirteen proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.

(01:06:22):
So they used Werewolf, and they used Werewolf not Mafia,
so thumbs up. They used it to test a two
level theory of mind model for virtual agents. Now theory
of mind, of course, just to refresh, that is our
basic human ability to conceive the mind state of another person. Right,

(01:06:43):
It's absolutely crucial for lying. Right, It's kind of hard
to lie if you can't imagine what somebody else's mental
state is, because in lying, you're trying to make their
mental state not correspond to what you know to be true, Right,
now why would they be doing this. Well, they wanted
to see which version, either a a one level or

(01:07:05):
two level theory of mind model, would would make this
actor seem seem more socially intelligent. A one level or
two level theory of mind model. Okay, so let me
guess what that is. One level theory of mind is
I know what you're thinking, or at least I'm imagining
what you're thinking. Two level would be what I imagine
what you're thinking about what I'm thinking. Yeah, you get

(01:07:28):
into that hole? Would he tell me that this door
leads to the center of the labyrinth? Sort of a situation.
So you're you're modeling someone else's theory of mind in
two level theory of mind. Right, So, so here's a
quote from the paper, just to boil it all down.
Two versions of the Werewolf Agent were implemented. One has
a single level theory of mind, able to represent what

(01:07:49):
victims believe, but not what victims think it or the
other their victims believe. The second has a two level
theory of mind, able to represent what victims think about
what it knows, and in general, what victims think about
the suspicions of others. And then both versions had inference
rules to determine suspects. Now, I would generally imagine that

(01:08:12):
a computer that tries to go two steps down the
rabbit hole would be better at lying and detecting lies, right, Yeah,
And that's that's pretty much what they found. They found
that a two level theory of mind where wolf had
a leg up on single level theory of mind villagers,
and then a follow up test showed that that indeed,

(01:08:35):
the two level theory of mind where wolves were also
perceived as being more intelligent than a single level theory
of mind where wolf. And of course this becomes important
when you're just you're not talking about like how to
build uh an ai that is going around deceiving people
or certainly going around killing people in the night, but
just how to create something that comes off as more human, right,

(01:08:58):
I mean, it does sort of make you think that
some of the same skills that are crucial for deception
and constructing elaborate socialized for the people around us are
the same skills that are good social lubricants and make
us get along well with others. That would be a
depressing finding, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's somewhat true. Yeah,
this sort of thing is ultimately about creating chatbots for

(01:09:22):
the future that feel more human when they're scamming you. Now,
another presentation when we ran across UH from two thousand fourteen,
and this was another I Tripoli International Conference UH presentation,
and this was by Dasuki Katagami at all titled Investigation
of the Effects of Nonverbal Information on Werewolf. Okay, and

(01:09:46):
the wait, is this an AI werewolf or an AI
werewolf detector? Um? It's the purpose of the research, they stated,
was to develop an intelligent agent quote a werewolf, which
is enabled to naturally play where a Wolf with humans.
So it's it's all about machine learning. Their findings were
quote we found that non verbal information in the game

(01:10:08):
of where Wolf has importance to winning or losing the game, which,
you know, it's kind of an overstatement of the obvious,
I guess, but here we see it UH proven out
in this this cool AI werewolf study. Now, people sitting
at home might be thinking, why are we specifically training
computers to be good at killing us in the night

(01:10:30):
and getting away with it? Well, again, it's it's it's
more that these are extreme versions of the skills that
we use every day. You know. It comes down to
that CEO analogy we made earlier. Uh, the average person
is not engaging in in these in such titillating versions
of social interaction, but we're engaging in varying lesser versions

(01:10:53):
of them. Yeah, in the same way that you see, uh,
animals wrestling at play and their children, you know, to
sort of distill some of the main dynamics of physical
struggle for survival. I guess this is sort of an
adult version of wrestling with words and eye contact. Yeah,
it's it's it's that it's that most primal of games,

(01:11:16):
but done at the the abstract level, at the level
of social interaction, rather than just rolling around on the ground.
I'm glad you brought up the children, Joe, because there
was I'm gonna mention real real quick here that there
was an additional study I came across Werewolves, Cheats and
Cultural Sensitivity by limb at All And this was a

(01:11:36):
two thousand fourteen conference paper presented at Autonomous Agents and
Multi Agent Systems. And this one was really cool because
it basically boiled down to having children observed two different
virtual games of Werewolf, so they're not playing there's watching
right there. I think they used the term imaginary friend,
like you're you're not a player, but you're these are
real people supposedly playing and you're observing their game. And

(01:11:58):
they use the version A inversion B have slightly different rules,
so one version seems far more unfair, and so basically
they were using the game is a way to to
just look at cultural sensitivity or insensitivity and attempting to
to model it. Uh, it's it's interesting though they said

(01:12:19):
that it didn't work out all that well. The exercise
actually caused the children to reinforce their view that the
end group is correct and that the outgroup is incorrect,
rather than seeing that there are different ways to go
about it, different ways to play the game. I feel
like that is a common dynamic I've come across multiple times,
is that studies find some attempts to discourage toxic social

(01:12:41):
cognition can often seem to reinforce it. It seems like
something you've come across before. Yeah. Yeah, And of course
it brings us back to Werewolf, because what is Werewolf
but a game that looks at at at toxic social interactions.
It's the only game where you get to have a
vigilante mob that kills some bud every single day. That's right,

(01:13:03):
all right, So there you have it now. Obviously, we
would love to hear from everyone out there. Uh. Certainly
newcomers to the game of Werewolf. If you listen to
this episode and then you go out and try it
for yourself, we would love for you to report back. However,
if you've been playing this game for for years and
years now, we obviously want to hear about about your
favorite additional rules and maybe some even homebrew rules that

(01:13:27):
you've come up with. Let us know about it. Give
us your Werewolf tails or your mafia tales and uh
and and and we'll chat with you about them. Here's
what I want to hear. If you already have a
Werewolf group that plays regularly, if you can find out
a way to incorporate a RoboCop character class in a
way that doesn't break the game and heightens the tension
and makes it even more fun, right in, tell us

(01:13:49):
about it, and we we guarantee we will read that
on the air. All right, Hey, head on over to
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(01:14:12):
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(01:14:34):
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(01:15:10):
he im