Week 6

I think the genre of social deduction games is all about manipulation. It’s main goal is usually to lie to your friends and deal with the consequences of that to try to move the game in your favor. In a large majority of the ones I’ve seen and played consist of a larger majority group and a smaller traitor group trying to derail the main objective of the main team. The genre is usually meant on manipulating the expectations of the fellow players to get your way or usually lying (https://youtu.be/QUbeYwcOy8k?t=5). (A quick aside, I can’t seem to pull up the readings I will ask for help in a email tomorrow, but I was procrastinating since I have had other responsibilities so I will go off memory for the design elements I apologize if I get them wrong) the main elements of social deduction games is investigation, to determine how you are being manipulated by other players to try to get their way. This plays well into Macklin and sharps 6 elements of design where it gives a goal rules and objectives. It makes it work quite well for the simple reason that it gives a lot of freedom to different playstyles since it’s rules have a clear objective but it leaves how to achieve those objectives open ended giving rise to a lot of creativity. It is hard to police or give rules to how humans interact with each other, but that is the fun of social deduction games since you can play and use previous knowledge on how to handle people to help you win or you could be on the opposite end where you can use these games to help you get used to social interaction. To play one of these games is to find out how much trust issues you have, and in order to win the more the merrier in my book. The way to play these games is usually to trust only yourself and what you can see, and use that information to manipulate others into doing what you want. In most social deduction games I’ve seen I have noticed there is usually an imbalance on either sides difficulty. Usually it is the side of less people that have an easier time of winning because their win condition is usually easier to achieve in my humble opinion.