This article was taken from the March issue of Wired UK magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online
O'Reilly Media is the biggest name in tech publishing, and the men gathered round its boardroom table this July morning in 2008 are typical of the mavens who frequent its Sebastopol, California, HQ. Here is Brian Fitzpatrick, head of engineering at Google Chicago; Rich Gibson, an O'Reilly author and member of the GigaPan panoramic camera project; and Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. Just another networking day in Silicon Valley, then.
Except the workday doesn't begin for hours -- it's 6am, and no one has slept. Fitzpatrick Segwayed into the room three hours ago, and hasn't left. Tempers have frayed, and language has descended into the gutter. Wales is making wild accusations. Fitzpatrick is begging and pleading. Gibson, overwhelmed by the pressure, lets out a scream and starts pelting the others with pretzels. No one is drunk or under any narcotic influence, and yet all three men are moments away from what Fitzpatrick will later describe as "a mindfuck". A year on, Gibson concurs. "It left me with the sense that one of my basic anchors on reality had been ripped loose," he recalls. Wales still talks about the all-nighter with reverent awe:"It was amazing. It was a work of art. It was a thing of beauty."
It was, more specifically, a parlour game.
Werewolf is a game of deception and manipulation*.* It has infected almost every significant tech event around the world, from the informal Foo Camp conferences run by O'Reilly to the music, film and interactive-media crossover of South By Southwest (SXSW). During lunch at San Francisco's giant Game Developers Conference, or in the bars after closing at ETech, games of Werewolf break out spontaneously. Its core premise is simple -- a room is split between villagers and werewolves, and the former aren't aware who are their enemies, determined to eat them. Can the werewolves eat their prey before the villagers identify and lynch the werewolves?
In practice -- perhaps unsurprisingly, given the kind of people playing -- the games played at tech events are rarely that simple.
Groups splinter off according to arcane variations -- someone wants to play with the Slut and the Invalid, someone else with the Vigilante and the Veterinarian, someone else with all four. Rules agreed, the splinter groups reform, spectators gather, and the games begin. And it may be hours before they stop. Although in principle a round of Werewolf can take as little as 30 minutes, epic rounds last for hours - and one round is rarely enough. The next morning, appropriately, you can spot the werewolves by the red rings round their eyes.
Wales, Fitzpatrick, Gibson and their moderator were the last players standing after an all-night Werewolf session that had lured in almost a third of 2008's Foo Camp. Three players remaining meant only one thing: two villagers, one werewolf. It meant the players who knew they were villagers faced a simple challenge: which of the others was the enemy? And yet the argument had raged for hours. "I was sure of only three things," Wales remembers. "One, I was not a werewolf. Two, one of these bastards was an amazing liar. And three, the other guy was a total moron. I just couldn't figure out which was which."
Werewolf is quick and easy to set up, and the basic rules take no more than a minute to explain. It has infected every outpost of the tech community. More than any smart party, it's the most exclusive and productive way to spend an evening at a conference or expo. It's your best bet of finding the most interesting people and of emerging the next morning with a couple of intriguing job offers. Rather than spend a fortune on funky business cards or hours memorising people's blog posts, the most effective way to connect in the tech industry may instead be to kill and eat them.
You might expect to find Werewolf's roots in a 70s tabletop role-playing game or an old, obscure multi-user dungeon. What you find instead is a tale of literary privilege, Soviet idealism and secret nuclear disasters. It draws on parlour games such as Murder in the Dark and Wink Murder -- games that, though entertaining enough, no longer captivate a modern audience. To turn dinner-party murder into a geek staple would take the work of two men-- one Russian, one American -- who decades later have yet to meet.
In 1987, the USSR was starting to change. Mikhail Gorbachev was introducing the perestroika reforms which would ultimately lead to the end of the Cold War. The first treaty between the USSR and the US limiting the proliferation of nuclear weapons was signed. Billy Joel played Leningrad and over-excited fans danced so hard they broke 200 seats. And at Moscow State University a young psychology student, Dimitry Davidoff, was trying to cram two years of college into one while teaching high-school students interested in his subject. It was a timetable that demanded total efficiency, so Davidoff needed to find a way to make the research that he was doing for his term papers palatable to a young audience. The result wasn't (yet) Werewolf; it was a game called Mafia.
Mafia is the game that forms the core element of Werewolf.
Davidoff explains it succinctly as "the uninformed majority versus the informed minority". The basic structure of day phases and night phases, killings and lynchings, is the same but with one main difference. Instead of the killers being given a window of opportunity to co-ordinate their killing -- at night, when their eyes are open and those of the innocent closed -- they need surreptitiously to agree a victim during the opening phase of discussion, when all players are engaged in debate. During the night phase, players then write down the name of a proposed victim.
Innocent players write "Innocent"; Mafia members write down the name of a victim. Only when all the Mafiosi agree on a name do they make a successful kill.
It's a game that is almost entirely about careful wording and hidden subtexts. Wired learns to remember this when attempting to interview its creator. Davidoff -- intelligent and cheery -- delights, perhaps unsurprisingly, in playing conversational games. His first gambit is to refuse to talk to us at all, eschewing phone, email or even instant messaging.
So our first interview takes place inside the virtual sphere of World of Warcraft*,* where Davidoff's dwarf hunter character comes to escort our feeble level-one mage through the start of the game. He's friendly, but it gradually becomes apparent that the lulls and disconnects in the conversation are not caused purely by unruly mob attacks. The simplest question ("Have you always liked games?") is met with a dodge ("Should I answer that?"), before he relents and parts with an affirmative. Efforts to elucidate his current life -- beyond the fact that he moved to the US in 1991 and lives in Boston -- are met with disapproval. "Ah, those standard follow-up questions. I hope you skip them in print." Apologies for being so inevitable are met with a sharp retort. "Not really," he shoots back. "There is nothing inevitable. Big point!" The silence that follows drags on for a full minute. "Look at it this way," he suggests, "now you are kind of playing Mafia against me."
And so it goes on. Ask about Davidoff's childhood, and the only detail he parts with readily is his Rubik's Cube record (around 21 seconds). Even his age requires some prising: ask him how old he is and he says, "In World of Warcraft I would say, 'I am level 11,' and be done with that, but all these real-life connotations make it a strange question." Then he quickly adds -- still without answering the question -- "It's not that I am hiding my age." When pressed for the real number, he still can't resist a jibe. "Well, the real number I'd have to think of, but I know the year of my birth -- 1967. Knowing's not good, though, 'cause it doesn't help you to solve who is Mafia." Even the most general questions --"What were your happiest times as a child?" -- result in a cryptic sidestep: "Nah, I can't answer that. I know too much about memory, happiness and children."
It seems simpler, then, to seek a sense of Davidoff 's life through the emblematic moments of recent Soviet history which bookend it. He was born in Kamensk-Uralsky, an unremarkable, mid-sized town towards the centre of the current border with Kazakhstan. It's a spot less than 150km from the site of the 1957 Kyshtym nuclear disaster -- a blast second only in size to that at Chernobyl -- which killed hundreds and was hushed up by Soviet officials until 1989. The Chernobyl explosion occurred in 1986, while Davidoff was starting the work which would produce Mafia, and Gorbachev was busy trying to block the US Star Wars space weapons programme. And in 1991, just months after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Davidoff made the move to the US -- a country he now calls, with tongue deep in cheek, "the perfect Soviet Union".
Mafia first spread among the children and students whom Davidoff taught to play, but once out in the wild it propagated fast -- far beyond Russia's still-closed borders and across the world. Russian students who had gone abroad for postgraduate work took it with them, embedding it into the clubs and groups they joined. A set of Hungarian Mensa members so loved the game that they set up a special interest group to teach it to other Mensans around the world. Questors, a west London community theatre, integrated Mafia into its improvisation practices in the late 80s; by 1989, it had reached the US, where the children at a Pennsylvania summer camp taught each other the rules by torchlight.
Having infected the student population, Mafia travelled where they travelled. Fred Deakin, one half of the band Lemon Jelly and now head of the Airside design agency, recalls teaching dozens of other travellers as he backpacked around south-east Asia in the late 80s. "I was the most popular guy in Thailand just because, at every hostel I went into, I sat down after a couple of beers and said, 'Does anyone want to play this game?' And people would flock like moths around a flame. It was incredible." Once Mafia reached the Far East, it found the perfect breeding ground in China's late-night clubs. Zachary Mexico, in his book China Underground, details how Mafia addicts now play all night, fuelled by Red Bull and cigarettes. These aren't amiable afterdinner diversions, but commercialised Mafia dens, with electronic scoreboards, pretty young hostesses and techno music blaring out to cover up any movements during the "night" phase of the game.
So why did Mafia spread so fast? Arguably because it answers one of life's most fundamental questions. At its heart, perhaps inevitably for a game created by a psychology student who came of age under a regime that hushed up a massive nuclear disaster for more than 30 years, is the question of whether knowledge is power.
The only advantage the killers have is knowledge: they know each others' identities. With that, they split the world into the empowered minority and the vulnerable majority. Balancing that dynamic is another strength: Mafia's resonance with some of the worst, but most universal, traits of human society. Every culture has had its witch-hunts and pogroms, and anxiety about being caught on the wrong side of persecution is a fear that crosses borders, languages and eras. Mafia, in its abstract, trivial way, lets us play with those fears. That could have been the end of the story.
But in 1997, things changed, when Mafia arrived in New Jersey, where one Martin Eiger was running gaming parties. A friend came along and taught the crowd Mafia. It was a hit, so when Eiger attended the National Puzzlers' League convention later that year, he decided to teach a group of players. It proved just as big a hit; games ran late into the night.
Among the group that night was Andrew Plotkin, a legend among interactive-fiction writers. He still remembers his less-than stellar debut: "I cheerfully announced that I was Mafia, because I didn't know what I was trying to do. I think that ended poorly."
Defeat didn't matter: he was hooked. "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 be if you didn't play with a deck of cards, but bet solely on other people's bets. It shouldn't have worked, but it did." He made his first contribution to changing Mafia forever: he introduced it to a new gizmo he was very enthusiastic about: the World Wide Web.
What catapulted Mafia's popularity was Plotkin's second contribution: werewolves. "I thought the rules were brilliant, but the theme felt arbitrary. Mafia aren't that big a cultural reference. I wanted to find a theme that fit hidden enemies who look normal during the day, but are murderous at night. Werewolves were the obvious choice."
If you want to play Werewolf well, you have to draw on a wide skill-set. First comes memory. It's not always easy -- particularly at 2am -- to remember who accused whom and how everyone voted, but this is crucial for spotting patterns. And you need meticulous observational skills; note someone drumming their fingers or fiddling with their collar, and you have the "evidence" to back up whatever theory you're selling. Then there are concrete observational cues -- who's making eye contact with whom? Has somebody slipped up by saying a werewolf has been lynched, when only a fellow werewolf could know that?
Statistics also play a part. Werewolf is ripe for back-of-the-envelope calculations about the odds, say, of someone correctly identifying werewolves in consecutive rounds without being a werewolf himself. But as the game goes on and the pool of players shrinks, it becomes a very different proposition. At this point an acute memory, an eye for detail and a knack for numbers are only a foundation.
End-game Werewolf is about flair and imagination; oratory; force of personality; performance. For self-confessed geeks, this is often quite a leap; these interpersonal skills are not necessarily those most visible at the kind of events where Werewolf flourishes.
But it's not a paradox for Frank Lantz, Werewolf fan and half the team behind New York games company Area/Code. "I am shocked, shocked!, by your implication that technically minded people might, on average, be lacking in the social-skills department," he says. "But assuming for a second that we are, it makes perfect sense that we'd enjoy a game like this. It sanctions a lot of titillating social behaviour -- flirtation, confrontation, betrayal. Even the way it condones bold eye contact and the frank scrutiny of others' behaviour is hot, specially if you don't get a lot of those things in your regular social diet."
It's this, then, that may explain the particular appeal of Werewolf to the tech crowd. This mix of hard computational skills and a real test of interpersonal aptitude offers the ultimate full-spectrum battlefield. Strength in one field can make up for weaknesses in others, but a masterful player needs both. And that's another paradox: if you impress your peers (and in a conference environment that probably means potential clients and employers) with your aptitude for the game, you're also impressing them with your aptitude for lying, for leading witch-hunts, for distrusting your friends.
But this doesn't mean that the best liar is the best player.
Simon Moore, a psychologist at London Metropolitan University who specialises in gaming, is quick to quash the idea that some people are better at spotting liars than others. "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 both have a 50 per cent success rate." And how well we lie depends on circumstance: "When you've more to lose, you're more stressed about lying, and that makes it easier to detect." Werewolf is a game which asks you to tell lies in some of the hardest circumstances. Falsehoods -- such as proclaiming you're a villager when you're a werewolf -- take a much greater toll than lies of exaggeration, which are notoriously hard to detect. "A lie, as opposed to an exaggeration, will cause a greater physiological response -- so your heart-rate, your blood pressure, your breathing will all increase more if you're lying than just exaggerating," says Moore. The other great challenge is sustaining what he calls "emotional" lies. "If you're trying to feign shock or anger, it's much harder to do over a long period. People accused of something they're trying to hide will start out feigning outrage --
'How dare you ask me that?' But that will start to change to objection rather than shock, as it's psychologically very difficult to mimic emotion. So emotion turns into aggression, as that is one of the easiest things to fake."
The other key circumstantial difference -- and how Davidoff would enjoy this -- is knowledge. We're all equally bad at spotting lies by strangers, all better at spotting lies by people we know.
The more you play, especially with the same people, the better you get at spotting their lies. You may think this is a flaw, but Davidoff is way ahead of you -- it's part of the plan. Good players learn to lie well, but also to get better at spotting others' lies.
At this level the game stops being about memory or strategy, and gets deeper: how you play and the choices you make aren't reflective of the rules, but of your own preoccupations. For Davidoff, this is why (contrary to what most players think) his game isn't about lying. Odds are you'll play a villager much more often than a killer. And he swears that as a villager, your best strategy is to be honest. More confusingly, he swears that this is also the best strategy for those playing werewolves/ Mafia. Asked to elaborate, he responds with classic obliqueness:" Past connections will always lose to future collaborations."
So can he tell if people will be good at Werewolf or Mafia? "No one can. Mafia could be a test for a bunch of psychological theories, because there are almost none which could help you win.
It's about freedom; it's hard to predict who will win. So people don't have the advantages of the past: education, knowledge, rules, experience."
It's a lofty sentiment, although when you walk into a roomful of people playing, it rarely looks as if something lofty is going on.
In the O'Reilly board room that fateful morning, what you'd have seen was three senior tech leaders throwing crisps at each other, all outraged at being accused. It was either a virtuoso display of the hardest kind of lying -- extended, emotional falsehood -- or something more peculiar.
Something peculiar was happening. What the players didn't know was that they'd stopped playing the game, and it had started playing them. Their moderator was games designer Jane McGonigal, and she had stripped the last of the fiction from the game: "We'd exhausted all the modifications," she says. So she dealt a pack that contained only villager cards.
As the game progressed, Fitzpatrick was oblivious. "It seemed it was going pretty well -- like any game when you're a villager. I was convinced Jimmy [Wales] was the werewolf as he was quieter than Rich [Gibson], so I was saying, 'It's Jimmy, I really think we can win this.'" Wales was equally oblivious: "I had absolutely no clue something funny was happening." Gibson was feeling the pressure of the casting vote: "I felt this sense of 'Schrödinger's werewolf', looking first at one and then the other, back and forth. Then I started throwing things. I don't know what I was thinking. It was awesome!"
In the end, the axe fell on Fitzpatrick, and he erupted. "I was so bummed out! I threw my card down and said, 'I'm a fucking villager,' and Rick said, 'What do you mean? I'm a villager.' So I say, 'I told you it was Jimmy,' and we turn to Jimmy and he's just looking at us, and he says, 'What the fuck? I'm a villager!' And then we looked over at Jane who's sitting there with this big grin on her face, and I'm like... there are no words to describe it. It was a mindfuck. I was completely screwed in the head."
So Werewolf has come full circle. What started life as a psychology experiment has once again become a psychology experiment; an exercise in role-play which has more in common with the Stanford prison experiment than Dungeons & Dragons. What Werewolf has to offer is a perfect marriage of statistics and psychology, of mob rule and democracy, reason and emotion. Is it any wonder it's taking over the world?
How to play
Assemble a group of seven or more players, and choose a moderator. The moderator deals cards which designate each player as either a villager or a werewolf. Players do not reveal their cards until the game is over. For groups of seven up, you will need two werewolves; more than 12, three.
The game plays out over a period of "night" and "day" phases, controlled by the moderator. During the "night", all players shut their eyes. The moderator calls on any werewolves present to open their eyes and, using gestures and hand signals, they silently nominate a victim. When "night" ends, all players open their eyes and the moderator announces who has died. This player leaves the game and must not make any further comments, and especially not reveal whether he was a villager or a werewolf.
During the "day", which lasts around 15 minutes, there is nothing to distinguish werewolves from villagers, so players debate between themselves and agree on a person to lynch, in the hope of killing a werewolf. This player then leaves the game and must not make any further comments. The cycle is repeated until either all the werewolves are dead (a villager victory), or the werewolves are equal in number to the remaining villagers (a werewolf victory).
The moderator announces the result, and players are then free to reveal their cards.
Many variants are possible. For some mind-blowingly complex alternatives, see Wired.co.uk's extra materials.
The were-kings: The men who changed the gaming world
Dimitry Davidoff
The creator of Mafia is intensely private -- he agreed to meet Wired only within World of Warcraft. He grew up in an austere Russian town but now lives in Boston with his family and dog. (He describes himself as "self-played" rather than "self-employed" but has never made serious money from Mafia.) Davidoff invented the game as a teaching tool in 1987 while a psychology undergraduate in Moscow; it has since spread across the world. Hasbro considered commercialising it when Davidoff arrived in the US, but thought it "unprotectable". Mafia is now used to treat gambling addicts in China and troubled US teens in Christian summer camps. Davidoff is blasé about such evolutions of his brainchild: "I'm against taking it seriously all the time."
Andrew Plotkin
Better known by the nom de plume Zarf, Plotkin is considered a hero in the field of interactive fiction (IF). His many influential games include Freefall (a 1995 Tetris clone) and the Carnegie Mellon KGB's Capture the Flag with Stuff. He describes himself thus: "Plotkin cannot dance, paint with oils, write novels, fly, compose music, have a birthday party on the Moon, or make a living writing computer games." As the man responsible for reinventing Mafia as Werewolf in 1997, he also introduced the game to the nascent internet. He readily acknowledges the game's darker side. "You have to come up with lies very quickly, of course. I'm an IF designer. I'm used to coming up with lies at leisure, sitting at a keyboard."
Davidoff and Plotkin's interviews were conducted and written by Christina Madden
Murder... and parlour games
Playing a hidden killer in a civilised setting first came to prominence in the 20s, thanks to the Algonquin Round Table. These journalists, actors and wits, led by Dorothy Parker, would gather at writer Alexander Woollcott's grand house to play Murder in the Dark, a game of lights-out where the murderer slips a note into his victim's pocket to inform them of their demise.
This form of ultra-civilised bloodsport dropped out of the spotlight during the middle of the century, but was revived by Stephen Sondheim. His legendary murder parties culminated in his 1973 movie The Last Of Sheila, a dark comedy about a group of characters, James Mason and RaquelWelch among them (and trapped, inevitably, on a luxury yacht), who engage in a parlour game that turns truly murderous.
Those without a yacht, country manor or cadre of film-star friends may have found themselves playing the rather less elaborate Wink Murder.
This article was taken from the March issue of Wired UK magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
