Blog | Archive for October, 2007

Social Dynamics of Werewolves and Lynch Mobs

By alistair | Thursday, October 4th, 2007

For those of you who have never played Werewolf (aka Mafia) before, it’s a game based on blame-storming, finger-pointing, deviousness, manipulation, blatant lying, and do-unto-others-before-they-do-unto-you. Last night’s meetup of the werewolves of london (nothing to do with the rather catchy Warren Zevon song of the same name) was a chance for Peter and I to have a few beers at the massively-atmospheric-if-almost-impossible-to-find Shunt bar, hang out with a motley mix of actors, TV producers, game design researchers and random punters, and flex the old werewolf muscles that haven’t been used since I last did a drama workshop, many moons ago.

The thing about a good game of werewolf is, that you can turn up to a group of random people, most of whom who you’ve never met before, and within five minutes you’ll probably have a pretty strong suspicion about someone. Within ten minutes you’ll probably be defending yourself against a groundless (or is it…?) accusation or gleefully jumping on the bandwagon to lynch someone – anyone – else for no apparent reason, and within fifteen minutes you feel like you’re thinking yourself round an ever-thickening onion built on layers of “I know they said they’re a (whatever) but what if it’s a triple / quadruple / … / dodectuple bluff??”

I found it fascinating to see how the crowd mentality developed. In the very first round, there’s not really any reason for any one person to suspect anyone else, so accusations tend be either entirely arbitrary (in our first game we ended up spinning a bottle, just to get the game moving) or based on nothing more than gut feeling. After all, what makes you think someone is acting suspiciously? Is it the tone of their voice? Their body language? Or do you just flat-out not trust them? On what grounds?

Some interesting patterns I noted -

* those who stuck their neck out by accusing someone early on, tended to get the backlash if their accusation failed – if X accused Y, but Y was acquitted, someone nearly always accused X immediately afterwards, and X usually got lynched. Is this a British thing, to immediately suspect the accuser, presumably on the grounds of “methinks the lady doth protest too much” – or is it a common pattern across the pond as well?
* those who eventually turned out to be werewolves often tended to be the ones who had played it quietly, but not TOO quietly. In the latter stages of the game, as the paranoia starts to kick in, suspicion falls on anyone who has deviated from the norm in any way. Too quiet? Lynch them! Too loud? Too assertive? Lynch them!
* when accusations were being voted upon, it was quite rare for more than two people to stick their hands up immediately. Far more common was for the accuser and seconder to raise their hands, followed by a gap of a couple of seconds while everyone feverishly watches everyone else, waiting to see if the “Lynch them!” bandwagon was going to gain momentum or stop rolling altogether, before deciding whether or not to jump aboard.
* Once momentum was building up in a lynch vote, there’d be a late flood of “yes” votes, as people realised that someone was likely to be lynched, but if they voted “yes” to this person, it wouldn’t be them.
* people last night were also very reticent to claim to be the Healer or Seer. I only heard two people explicitly claim to be either, one of which was Peter. Remember, anyone can say pretty much whatever they like during the daytimes, it doesn’t mean it’s true – but what was also noticeable was that once it had been claimed, a couple of rounds later people seemed to have implicitly accepted their claim, by saying things like “but the Seer said that X was a werewolf, so…” Was this another British middle-class thing, to not want to flat-out lie or accept that your peer group is doing so? Or just a result of people’s short-term memory only going so far, and forgetting that anyone can claim anything they like?
* It’s also interesting, if a little scary, to mentally scale this up to, say, a few hundred people, and a real-world situation, and then disturb yourself by imagining the consequences of paranoia, suspicion, random accusation and mob justice.

Imagine renaming the game to “Salem Witch Hunt”. Or “McCarthyism”.

Or “Terrorist”.

So next time you’re in a “XYZ Project Post-Mortem” meeting, to blamestorm why a project failed or went over-budget, etc – think of Werewolf, and watch, and listen…. but don’t be *too* quiet, right?

We enjoyed it so much that we’re planning an office Werewolf-and-beer session, and I can heartily recommend it – I’d just advise that you don’t invite Derren Brown…

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