Playing Werewolf Taught Me to Lie Like Trump
Werewolf is a game of deception and secrecy; it’s no coincidence that it was invented by a U of Moscow psychology prof during the height of the Cold War. It’s a fun way to pass a night with friends, but if you play as frequently as many of us did during the Werewolf Craze of 2007, it becomes a safe (if unsettling) space to experiment with socially unacceptable behavior. Some games taught me Machiavellian shit I kinda wish I’d never learned, but there is one particular game I’ll always be thankful for, because it taught me to recognize the Werewolf in Trump.
Played seriously, Werewolf becomes a safe (if unsettling) space to experiment with Machiavellian tactics.
It was a late night in Berlin. About fifteen Ruby hackers were sitting in a circle in the middle of a gaudy hotel ballroom, with many more watching from the sidelines. We’d been playing for hours, trying to hone our strategies. The tension was thick — any pretense that this was “all in good fun” has melted away long ago. We were all trying to win, and nothing felt like a bigger win than carrying off a successful werewolf victory: being in the “informed minority” that deceives the larger group into killing their own people.
To prevent this, the villager majority plays the role of inquisitors- closely monitoring what everyone says, and most especially how everyone votes. Being on the wrong side of a single vote (voting to save someone the group thinks is a threat, or voting to kill a presumed-innocent person) is often enough to destroy your reputation as a villager for the rest of the game. The presumption of guilt is so intense that werewolves will often join in a vote to lynch one of their own, rather than face that kind of scrutiny.
So, we were midway through a very intense game, and I was a werewolf. My strategy was to simply “act like a villager”— introduce logic to the discussion, press people on their statements, always trying to uncover who “the real werewolves” were. Unfortunately for me and my team of lycanthropes, however, I was about to make a huge mistake.
A few rounds prior, suspicions were raised about a guy I’ll call Tom. We’d called a vote to kill him, but some folks rose to his defense, and he was narrowly spared. Now, in this round, we learned this was a bad call- Tom was indeed a werewolf, and the villagers were now way behind. Discussion quickly turned to the Tom vote, and without thinking, I proclaimed that I’d been the first to accuse him.
This was careless, and I immediately wished I could swallow my words. Not only had I never accused Tom, I’d actually voted to save him. Here I was, caught in a lie, with fifteen intense hacker-types in a circle staring at me. I was almost certainly next.
…except that I wasn’t. To my surprise, everyone in the group accepted my statement as fact, even repeating it to others later on. It became part of the narrative: Patrick had been the first to doubt Tom, so he’s clearly one of the good guys. I was shocked: this was recent history I was contradicting, and this roomful of inquisitors seemed to have forgotten the past entirely. What the hell was going on here?
It was a troubling realization: the easiest person to lie about is yourself, the easiest story to concoct is your past.
I doubled down on the strategy, in this game and many deception games since. I freely assert that I’ve always been on the right side of whatever issue is at hand, and nearly every time, nobody bats an eye. It was a troubling realization: the easiest person to lie about is yourself, the easiest story to concoct is your past.
I believe Donald Trump stumbled onto this “one weird trick,” early in his career, and has been levelling up his game ever since. No politician is a picture of honesty, but Trump is in a class of his own. He lies fluidly, off the cuff, flowing from topic to topic like an improv comic. And like a master werewolf, he knows he can get away with saying almost anything about his own record. Here’s a quick sample of “Trump on Trump” quotes, with links:
“I’m self-funding my campaign. I’m not taking money.”
“I’m the only one on this stage that said, ‘Do not go into Iraq. Do not attack Iraq.’”
“I don’t know anything about David Duke.”
“I have never gone bankrupt, by the way.”
When you hear Trump speak, notice how he changes the subject, any subject, back to himself. From there, he can play fast and loose with the facts, because he’s able to exploit the credulity we give to anyone when they tell their own story. Over time, as everyone accepts and spreads that story, it becomes “true.”
“More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true.”— Tony Schwartz, ghostwriter of “Art of the Deal”
This isn’t a bug in human nature that Trump is exploiting— it’s just human decency. We should give people the trust and space to define their own identities without fear of being questioned. Who better to tell the story of a person than the person themselves?
Of course, extending this courtesy doesn’t make sense in a deception game, and it doesn’t make sense in the Presidential race. In Werewolf, the village votes and the “night phase” begins. When day breaks, minutes later, it’s often immediately clear that the vote went to the wolves, but another vote can be called for the next night. We don’t get that kind of quick course correction time in our political system, we get four years.
If you want to see what a good, skeptical villager looks like, look no further than Jake Tapper: he asked Trump a tough question about his racist remarks, and he kept asking it, 23 times, until he got a straight answer. Being this aggressive can get you killed in Werewolf, but journalists are protected (at least for now) for this very reason.
I think we can all be better villagers, pressing candidates hard on their words, checking facts and loudly crying wolf on social media. Every lie, every time. It’s in the silence after the lie that it starts to become true.
