Journal wk8: mafia
Mafia is basically a competition between truth-telling people and liar. The game is fun because there is information asymmetry. While the mafias know each other, the commoners don’t. The only way to tell is by guessing. And the social fun comes in when people start accusing each other, and giving funny accusing reason, eg.”I accuse you because you accuse me”. Unlike other games, Mafia is still enjoyable even after you get killed. In fact, you get even more fun when you know who are the mafias but seeing the villagers debating on killing innocent people. For the mafias to win, they need to be good liar so no one would suspect them. And for the commoners to win, they need to be good mind reader, or know the players well. Say if a commoner is a good friend of the mafia, s(he) would have noticed some little habits or behaviour of the mafia, hence being able to tell if s(he) is nervous/lying. There is a dramatic fun on revealing the identity of the killed person, to know whether they have killed the right person. Another kind of fun comes in when villagers start killing more innocent people. When more and more innocent people get killed but no mafia is caught, the rest of the group will feel more anxious as the ratio of mafia to innocent population gets higher, and they know if they keep killing innocent, eventually they will lose the game.
If there is a cop role, then a good strategy is as follows. Giving the cop a few rounds for him to inspect few people, then at some point, someone should ask the cop to come out. If the cop is not dead yet, then s(he) should stand up and tell the rest who is suspicious and the villages will get lots of information. But the cop is risking her/his life to it. Of cause the mafias can pretend to be the cop and stand up. In that case, we will have more than one cop, but still you can limit down the number of suspects. This strategy involves corporation between villagers and they must agree not to lie. If one of the villagers lie and pretend to be the cop, then this strategy will break. And I guess a general way of guessing would be put yourself into the mafia’s shoes and guess what they are thinking, that would helps too. (Note: I caught Yin in the tut using this strategy,wakaka~~~)
Mafia can be made an online game, in fact it has been already. I will describe an example of playing mafia using MSN. All players including the moderator should open up a common conversation where everyone will states their accusation and vote in that chat box. The moderator gives each person a role and tell them on a private chat box. Then moderator opens up another common chat box with the mafias, and mafias vote who to kill in that chatbox. And the moderator should open another chat box with the cop,just for inspection. At the beginning of everyday, the moderator will reveal in the large common chat box who is killed by the mafia.
