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[Sharkey]

This is actually something I've always wanted to see explored more in games. The whole general theme of mistrust and unreliable allies. I've only seen it in a couple examples. The old C64 version of Alien put you in control of a bunch of characters with unique, randomized psychological instabilities, leaving you to figure out which ones were claustrophobic, agoraphobic, or just the damn android that would flip out and kill everyone at the worst possible moment. Defcon and other RTSes with fragile alliances face you with some motherfucker surfacing subs off your coast after you wipe out the poor bastard playing as China. And, sadly, The Thing game completely and utterly failed to make what should have been something brilliant work in any way resembling good.

So... is there any way of, well, not necessarily translating Werewolf into a videogame, but working the central element that makes it so compelling into one? Is there a way of putting a bunch of people together, of whom a smaller number have a contrary agenda to the larger group, and making it work? Would it have to be completely anonymous? Somehow, I think someone who manages to do that in a snappy, attractive, accessible way will walk away with a pot of gold and a fucking unicorn.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rT7AH4JyuNs

Also, have we ever done a The Thing themed game?

Blood tests and flamethrowers. It'll be like the last time I went to the clinic.

[Kazz]

I split this post because I think this entire subject deserves a ton of attention.

A few games have done something similar to Werewolf, where one's true motivations are hidden.  The applications of the treachery/mistrust angle can be done in a billion ways, though, from Diplomacy's rather straightforward model of "everybody just wants to win, but nobody can get anywhere alone" to TF2's Spy mechanic.

The Ship is a decent example of a Werewolfesque design.  In a boat full of players, there is one you must kill, and there is one who must kill you.  As far as you're concerned, nobody else matters.  They aren't so much allies as neutrals, but the witness system requires that murders can not be done in public.  It's all pretty clever, but The Ship had problems and odd design decisions that clouded the brilliance of the game's fundamental conceit.  As Bal pointed out to me, it is a game that requires the players to agree to play it correctly, as it can be just as satisfying to grab a shotgun and start blowing random people away.

The concept requires a certain level of player maturity to get off the ground.  In your average online team-based videogame, 80% of your teammates are either retarded or outright malicious.  It is hard enough to get people to cooperate when you've done everything in your power to bring them together and keep them from griefing.  When they are instructed not to trust each other in the first place, I don't believe that anybody would bother even attempting to communicate before the bullets started flying.  Of course, this is all highly dependent on the game's actual mechanics.

In the absolute best-case scenario (from a maturity standpoint): Let's say you have an online game in which everybody is a normal human, but one player is secretly a vampire with the power to turn others into vampires.  I do not know what would stop all the players from simply getting into a tiny room together.  The vampire couldn't make a move without getting his ass staked.

[Kazz]

Shadows Over Camelot is a board game with a well done traitor mechanic, according to Bal.

[Bal]

In the absolute best-case scenario (from a maturity standpoint): Let's say you have an online game in which everybody is a normal human, but one player is secretly a vampire with the power to turn others into vampires.  I do not know what would stop all the players from simply getting into a tiny room together.  The vampire couldn't make a move without getting his ass staked.

That problem is solved in The Ship with the needs system. For those unaware, in The Ship your character has a variety of needs (eating, drinking, sleeping, hygiene, etc) that must be satisfied constantly, and also fuel one another (eating makes you have to, etc.). This all forces you to constantly be on the hunt for resources to satisfy those needs in addition to seeking your prey, and trying not to become prey yourself. Unfortunately all it really does is punish you for living longer than three minutes. It's best just to kill your prey and jump off the boat.

[Bal]

Shadows Over Camelot is a board game with a well done traitor mechanic, according to Bal.

The thing that really sells the traitor mechanic in that game is that there does not necessarily have to be a traitor. The way the traitor is determined is that each player is given a role card, knight or traitor, and there are more cards than players, with only one traitor card. Generally this means that there is, but it is always possible that there isn't, and the game itself, which is played cooperatively against the board, is hard enough that a smart traitor can go undetected fairly readily.

[Büge]

One of the Risk games, possibly LOTR Risk, had a concept like this. Each player had a card with a specific objective that they tried to achieve, I.E. Control a specific group of zones for a turn, get the ring to Isengard, etc. Nobody knew what each other's objective was, so any alliance you made could just result in everybody losing the game that turn.

Arkham Horror had similar cards too, I think.

[James Edward Smith]

The problem I see with a game like this where the other players are actually players and not just NPCs, is that when 90% of people play videogames where you can kill someone, they kill people ALL OF THE TIME. Blame it on human nature, or blame it on the fact that 90% of all games ever developed make killing shit one way or an other their main mechanic and so people have become too accustomed to killing everything and everyone they see being not only a logical approach to any game, but usually the required one, but whatever the reason is, it happens.

Now I can see a couple of ways to solve this, maybe:

• Forgo multiplayer all together and make more of a sim game where you have a group of people trapped in a survival situation with traitors in their midst. Basically, You have to control your people to gather necessary resources and fight off enemies, but all the while you have to make sure that you never tell one of your people to do something that puts them at risk of being killed by the traitors or everyone being killed by the traitors.
  
• Make it so that killing someone in the game is really hard unless you are one of the boogie men. The traitor(s) can kill people just by walking up behind them and eating their head, but the innocents or traitors who are still in disguise can't really kill each other very easily, it takes a concentrated effort from a large group of them to kill an other player in the game. This could be because of very limited weapons, or no weapons other than one's bare hands, or what have you. The point is, I think that if all you have to do to kill some one is sneak up on them and shoot them in the back, then griefing and retarded play are just going to ruin too many games. Making taking down someone else by yourself next to impossible forces players to have to form some sort of consensus before anyone can become endangered. Maybe you could have one or two gun type weapons in the game, but ammo would be limited and the coming into contact with players holding a gun in a threatening manner would automatically enter you into a grapple with them where both of you had an equal level of control over the gun and it was prone to being dropped during these struggles.

Something else that might help is making it so that innocents receive far more victory points if they don't harm other innocents during the course of a game they win. You would have to make victory points very important, like link them to between game upgrades along the lines of TF2's alternate weapon loadouts only have way more of them available to players and release more and more SUPER COOL ones after the game was out.

[Sharkey]

Well, you know, it doesn't have to be a shootery thing where everyone has shotguns. It seems the best way to keep people from flipping out and killing everyone is to not bother with the possibility of people flipping out and killing everyone. At its bare bones that could mean something like a short, snappy, user friendly werewolf with a gee whiz GUI and maybe little half second cut scenes of the seer scraping a hot wire through a blood sample. Or it could mean something like the acquisition of a single shot pistol requiring a significant amount of effort and/or luck, with the rewards for the proper use of rare power outweighing the chance to shoot a random innocent at the first opportunity and getting a bunch of "fucking idiot" comments on your player profile or whatever.

Thinking out loud here. Also, thinking in probably very limited terms. Specifically, trying to think of what werewolf could gain by transitioning to a videogame proper, rather than what any other genre of multiplayer game might gain by including mistrust as a core element. Two different ways of approaching the proposal, really. Either one might work.

[Saturn]

I seem to recall that "The Thing" video game had something similar.

however it didn't really work because often the guy you just tested for being a thing SUDDENLY TURNS INTO A HORRIBLE MEATBEAST COMPLETELY AT RANDOM even though the test came back as "human" just seconds earlier.

[Sharkey]

Yeah, the whole bit about someone becoming an alien was triggered by invisible waypoints, as opposed to whether or not you left them alone with someone fucked by a buggeryboo. 


Also, speaking of flipping out and getting everyone killed, I miss your COH horseshit, Sat. Good to know you're still around. You're the original Leeroy.

[Kazz]

In Shadows Over Camelot (which I haven't played, but I'd like to), if you're playing in a smaller game, they recommend that nobody looks at their loyalty card until a few turns in.  That is an interesting concept; until you check on your own victory condition, you're one of the guys.  You're literally above suspicion; even you don't know if you're evil.*

Of course, the other side of that coin is that the other players can flip their loyalty cards over and then demand that everybody else do the same.  Obviously that is strictly forbidden, but it's the sort of behavior that one makes impossible in a videogame setting.  I think there is more potential for this concept in a videogame than in other formats for that reason.

I think that removing the potential addition of action elements would be detrimental to the game.  In Sharkey's example of "just werewolf with a spiffy UI," that's all well and good, but a year down the line, the only people playing will be the ones who've developed the Perfect Strategy (and you know there will be one).  Action retains interest and excitement, even in age-old puzzles.

I'm picturing a game set in The Village, here.  All retardation (literal and figurative) aside.


* the trick here being to find the perfect moment to sneak a peek at your loyalty card without anybody noticing

[Sharkey]

sort of behavior that one makes impossible in a videogame setting.

You were with me up til there. That's exactly the kind of thing that's possible in a videogame setting: not informing people of their contrary objective until they're well into working toward the common goal.

Then it's just a matter of slapping that kind of thing into something that already has a common goal. Is that a good idea? I don't really know.

Take, say, Left 4 Dead. If there were a constant and uncertain chance that someone in the group had an interest in undermining their success, would that make it more fun? In that particular case I don't really think so. Are there better ones?

Or is this something better confined to a more intellectual game? I think, at its roots, this isn't something anyone's going to make a formula out of. Certainly not when there are factors like sentiment involved. You can solve the hell out of checkers or tic-tac-toe, but say, bridge or poker? No fucking way. Too much expression and uncertainty. Too much to be gleaned from reaction and just plain emotion. Hell, Guild could propose something perfectly logical and there's a good chance everyone would disregard it just because there's a good chance that he's practicing his retard impression. Hell of a lot to boil down to an algorithm.

[Kazz]

I wrote that paragraph sloppily, I think.  I'm actually talking about two different things.

I meant that in a videogame, it is impossible to reveal your card.  In most games, it's forbidden, but in a videogame it just can't occur.  That specific point doesn't mean all that much; I was trying to make an overall statement about limitation of the metagame.

As far as the Perfect Strategy thing, I mean a set of conventions that has proven to be effective and that everybody learns to follow.  For instance, in Five Man Mafia, everybody reveals their scries right at the beginning.  It isn't in the rules, but we learned quickly that it is the best way to go about things.  When Niku tried the game, he lied about his scry even when he wasn't the Mafia, and things got fucked up as a result.

[Zaratustra]

...

[Royal☭]

I brought this up to Zara a long, long time ago, but I always imagined a sort of co-operative game where players must work together to solve puzzles, but only one person can actually win. 

My original idea was a platformer with a goal of everyone attempting assemble spaceship parts to fly away.  Each player would be given a unique power, like lift, jump, push, pull, etc. and they'd need to use those items in tandem to acquire all the parts.  Once all the parts were gathered, however, only one person would be able to actually activate the spaceship and take off, leaving the remaining players to die in space or whatever.

I haven't given it much thought in a while, as I think I never figured out  successful way to keep the final victory from going to just a random player but instead to someone who is shrewd.

Of course, you could also just take the gameplay of MULE and make that more cooperative, such as all players running different parts of a colony, but each player also has the opportunity to take over and rule everyone else if they play their chips right.

[MadMAxJr]

Fantasy Flight made a board game called 'Orcs' that plays upon this factor greatly.  Best done with four players.  Each player is a horde of orcs.  You all serve the dark lord.  On each round you assemble your armies into marching ranks, of mixed clans to assault the four good-guy strongholds.

What happens is you have troops that reflect rock-paper-scissors and three special trump card troops.  You go in rounds putting two guys down (side by side) with ONE face up, behind whoever else is there.  Now, the dark lord only rewards the strongest clan who partakes in a fight, so before you assault the good guys, starting with the guys in the far back of the march, you can challenge the rank in front of you.  You compare your rock-paper-scissors factors, or if you are the same type, whoever has the higher number.  If you defeat both you can plow through even more guys.  If you both lose one, the non-beaten guys stay to fight.  If you lose both, everybody laughs at you.  I believe the setup is  Wolf Riders > Infantry > Archers > Wolf Riders.  Archers and wolves have values 1 to 3, infantry has values 1 to 4.

There are three trumps.  The Champion, who will automatically win the fight against the good guys.  He doesn't fight fellow troops, and fellow troops cannot drop him.  He counts for zero points in the main fight however.  The Shaman is great.  If receiving a challenge, he diverts that challenge to the next rank up, even if it's the attackers own troops.  If the Shaman is on the attack, he doubles the value of the other unit in his rank. Shaman is zero points in the main fight.  The Scout is never deployed to the table, you announce him and peek at a face down token.  All trumps are once per game.

The game is played in four rounds, and if 3 of the 4 good guy strongholds fall, orcs win, otherwise EVERYBODY LOSES.

So the idea is you knock off a few guys in hopes that he is somewhat below you, but you pray that the collective clan infighting doesn't get to the point where you don't have enough forces to fight the good guys.  The game is kept fresh with a big mess of random event tokens that do varying things each round.

[James Edward Smith]

In the car on the way in the work I was thinking about having the traitor not know that they are the demons, and then they are a demon. Their name would be John of course.

Looking at this thread though, apparently some other people had the same idea. I was thinking of this in more of a story-based single player game type setting, but then I realized that would just be Bioshock and went back to thinking about the construction vehicle puzzler touchscreen game I'm going to prototype at work next week. It may actually end up being some sort of adorable sim game.