Mafia and Community. History and research about the party game.
My name is Pavel and I am a big fan of the Mafia party game, also known as Werewolves and with many other names and variations. I have played it for 10 years and conducted this research to honor the Mafia community I belong to and to understand the game differently. This is the part of my Master’s Thesis “Power Interplay in Mafia Games”. In this article I discuss the roots of the game, why it is interesting for research, and what the Mafia Community in Latvia is. Hope you enjoy.
Mafia Description
Mafia is a popular game (Arneson, 2017) also known as Werewolves, Night in Palermo or Assassins.
The game developed by Dmitry Davidoff in 1987 at the Psychology Department of Moscow State University, a student and a psychology teacher at the tie. In his letter to Andrew Plotkin (Plotkin, 2010), Dmitry said that the whole approach of the game he was creating grew out of the Lev Vygotsky psychology school and the Tunings’ Test. Dmitry said that forcing players to accept errors was one of his primary concerns. He stated that he was still finding new things in the Mafia and that it was surprisingly heuristic.
Mafia has several characteristics:
- It can be played with a varying number of players;
- The rules of the game are simple to learn;
- The game does not require equipment;
- It is reliant on player interaction.
The Mafia is a dynamic, partial information, group game. In Mafia, the minority of players (Mafia) hide a critical piece of information (Mafia knows the identity of their fellows), while the majority of the players (Citizens) try to find these players. In that sense, the Mafia game models a conflict between an informed minority and uninformed majority, thus creating an information asymmetry (2018) in the imaginary setting (the City). Kevin Slavin, in the Cnet article “Why do young techies want to be werewolves?” (Mccarthy, 2009), named Mafia “a game with an interplay between information and social dynamics.”
Mafia is considered a party game (2018) where interpersonal communication and interaction between players is vital for winning the game. In Mafia, the players determine the other’s role through the content of their utterance and gestures filled with ambiguity and through the mathematical thinking. “Are you the Mafia?” is a typical question asked by players to each other during the game. It is a typical emotional provocation in Mafia games, but also is a start for understanding and building arguments and social interactions around the players and their reasoning.
Although often defined as a party game, Mafia doesn’t always fit this description, particularly when play becomes very tense. It is hard to provide an accurate description of Mafia, as it has different settings with different rules of play depending on the community. Players can play Mafia games at parties in a casual and relaxed environment, organizing the games by themselves, or in the Mafia Clubs where the strict rules apply, and these range from semi-casual games to professional tournaments. There are also existing internet Mafia games available via webcam, or as texts in forum games. Many variations of this game exist, with different roles and abilities, settings and balance. The game is always changing and developing with the help of the various communities. However, the standard pattern for most of the game rules is that the Mafia Game has several rounds of play and every round progresses in a certain way. The other common attribute is that the objective for both the Mafia and the Citizens is to eliminate the opponent’s group (each other).
The game contains psychology, collaboration, deception, communication, observation, expression, emotion, judgment ability, mathematical and logical thinking. It creates dynamics involving immersion, social and mastery orientation modes (Gauntlett, Ackermann, Whitebread, Wolbers, & Weckstrom, 2011) as part of the play.
Erlin Yao described Mafia as an “experiment in human psychology and mass hysteria” (Yao, 2008)
“Mafia's resonance is with some of the worst, but most universal, traits of human society. Every culture has had its witch-hunts and pogroms, and anxiety about being caught on the wrong side of persecution is a fear that crosses borders, languages and eras. Mafia, in its abstract, trivial way, lets us play with those fears.” (c) by Wired (Robertson, 2010)
Why is Mafia Interesting for Research?
People are very complex creatures. As humans, we do not think or express our thoughts in the same way, we do not experience the same emotions, and we play differently. Mafia has many similarities with real-life games. We create different coalitions where information between the groups is partial. Some examples could include workers and managers, students and teachers, various stakeholders. Each could belong to different coalitions; each could have their personal share of interest and amount of the information. The features of how different stakeholders accumulate information, relate to each other, belong to the various coalitions, make decisions and take actions in real-life games are similar to the Mafia games.
The Mafia is a complex, incomplete information game. The essence of Mafia gameplay is an interaction between people, where the players have different types of information, styles of communication, and features of functionality. In connection with the knowledge and information distribution within the game settings and the game’s psychological complexity, Mafia became a subject for many scholars to research and teach.
Some researchers used Mafia for Artificial Intelligence Research (Tanaka, 2014; Demyanov, 2015; Kobayashi, 2014; Raiman, 2011) and machine learning (Katagami, 2014), while some worked with it for mathematical modeling research understanding multiplayer games and balancing (Xiong, 2017; Migdał, 2010; Braverman, 2008). Some were interested in the psychological complexity it involves (Chittaranjan, 2010; Zhou, 2008; Xia, 2007). Some considered the game as an opportunity to explore the incomplete information games’ field (Harsanyi, 1994). In addition to that, the Mafia game was applied as a test for some video conferencing setups (Batcheller, 2007) and for studying conversational dynamics in general (Oertel, 2013).
Mafia has a definite academic meaning for psychology, social science, and learning. Dmitry Davidoff initially developed the Mafia as part of his psychology research. In 1998, the Kaliningrad Higher School of the Internal Affairs Ministry published the methodical textbook called “Nonverbal Communications” (Petrov, 1998). The school developed lectures around “Mafia” and “Murder” games as part of the course on Visual Psychodiagnostics. Peter Markulis created Mafia-inspired prototypes to teach organizational behavior and, in particular, for the students’ understanding of how the grouping of people — where the insiders’ decisions and access to information privileges — affects those of the outside members of an organization (Markulis, 2016).
The Mafia is used a lot as a team building game in companies where the understanding of behavior in teams is of importance for organizational management.
The Russian article named “The Mafia is Immortal” (Lisicin, 2005) says in their headline:
“Who is ready to vote for CEO elimination? The unanimous decision!” “Mafia” conquers Russian corporate world, but it could benefit the businesses.
The understanding of behavior in teams that can be either cooperative or competitive is of vital importance for organizational management. (McGrath, 1984) In Mafia coaching, the ability to understand individual behavior and to estimate when people may be suspicious of others is essential for “preventing the breakdown of trust within teams or other social relationships” (Chittaranjan, 2010).
The Mafia game is a great learning experience. An excellent example of how the Mafia game could be an “eye-opener” for some people is described in the “Werewolf: How a parlour game became a tech phenomenon” (Robertson, 2010) article:
“I am shocked, shocked! by your implication that technically minded people might, on average, be lacking in the social skills department," he says. "But assuming for a second that we are, it makes perfect sense that we'd enjoy a game like this. It sanctions a lot of titillating social behavior -- flirtation, confrontation, betrayal. Even the way it condones bold eye contact and the frank scrutiny of others' behavior is hot, especially if you don't get a lot of those things in your regular social diet.”
As my player experience suggests, this is quite a typical reaction of new Mafia players, who attempt to find analogies with real-life games.
The Community of Mafia (Latvia)
For the last nine years, I have been an active member of the Latvian Mafia game community. In Riga, we have a veriety of active clubs currently playing games every second day of the week. We see Mafia as a social and intellectual game where the players can develop a lot of skills and relax in a good company. By “relaxing” (n.d.) I mean resting from work or engaging in an enjoyable activity to become less anxious. However, I wouldn’t consider the Mafia game to ease tension, as some of the club games become very intense as competitive ones.
References
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