A Game of Werewolf

bell is ringing. Something terrible has happened. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, 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

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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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. 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.

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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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

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 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

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 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

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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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

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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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

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 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.

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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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

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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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, 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 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 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, 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 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. 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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.

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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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

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, 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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

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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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.

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 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? 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 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 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 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

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

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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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,

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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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

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 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, 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 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 about it, and we we guarantee we will read that on the air. All right, Hey, head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That is where

you will find the landing page for this episode. We'll find all the past episodes, and you'll find links out to our various social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, and Instagram. And hey over on Facebook, that's where we have a group, the Facebook group Stuffed Toboll Your Mind Discussion module. Hop in there. That's a great place to have longer form discussions with other listeners and with the hosts.

And if you want to get in touch with us directly as always the old fashioned way, the version that might be used by some medieval villagers conferring about how to kill a werewolf in their midst. You can email us at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com? But I thought he im