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“The Traitors”, a reality TV show, offers a useful economics lesson

154 points by helsinkiandrew 2y ago

helsinkiandrew 2y ago
https://archive.ph/FlcDl https://archive.ph/FlcDl
moritzwarhier 2y ago
There is a social game that was popular here when I was a teen. It was called "Werwolf" and I hated it so much that I stopped participating after one game IIRC (I was very fun at parties). Reading up on it, it drew from the mentioned "Mafia" idea mentioned here. Would have never known, interesting submission.
- Kiro 2y ago
  Still super popular and the whole basis for the game Among Us and many other computers games as well as board games.
  - moritzwarhier 2y ago
    Ah yes, that's the deal with Among us! This one passed me too, but I remember the description sounding somewhat similar. Well, maybe should give the type of game another try. Tastes change and at the age at which my friends played "Werwolf", I was pretty much hating myself and everything around me so maybe I'd enjoy it today :)
    - noirbot 2y ago
      The best versions of these games are set up to provide more contextual information than just "Player B Died Last Night". Classic Werewolf or Mafia, all information is public information, outside of people just talking to each other in whispers. Among Us adds a map and location information - you have to have been near the person who died to kill them, so if someone died in one room, you suspect players who were near that room or can't account for their location. Clocktower or One Night generally add information that only one player gets, such as being able to know if they're seated next to a bad player, which is powerful, but easy to lie about and risky to just admit since it makes you a target for the bad people.
- NoboruWataya 2y ago
  We used to play this on IRC. Was quite fun.
- bootywizard 2y ago
  I've played Mafia several times and enjoy it a lot. However, I have also witnessed friendships completely destroyed in the process. Some people are capable as seeing it as just a game, discard all prior trust or expectations with others during, and then at the end, reset completely back to how it was before, perhaps having learnt something about people in the process. For those who cannot do this, they will experience true pain, broken trust, and leave with friendships fundamentally changed. If this sounds like you, do not play this game!
  - ImHereToVote 2y ago
    [flagged]
- ldoughty 2y ago
  There's a similar pay game called "Blood on the Clocktower". You probably wouldn't like it, but those who like Werewolf or Mafia might want to give it a look.
  - noirbot 2y ago
    I've tried it a few times, but it's so much more complex that it really requires everyone who's playing to care deeply about reasoning through it. There's so little information that's public to everyone, so if even one player with a role that lets them get private information doesn't understand or communicate that well, the whole game can fall apart.
  - 63stack 2y ago
    I don't understand how this game gained so much popularity, because it's impossible to get any kind of reliable information in this game. For example, you have an ability that let's you ask the game master (in private) about whether one person is evil or not (their alliance). The game master is going to give you an answer, BUT it's possible that the answer is not the truth, because: * you are drunk (which you don't know about) * you were poisoned that night (which you don't know about) * the target might be protected in some way (which you don't know about) * some powers literally let the game master decide if they work or not (you will not be told it did not work) Imagine the first few nights of mafia style games, where nobody knows anything, so everybody is just going on hunches and feelings. That's Blood on the clocktower for almost all the nights.
    - jorams 2y ago
      I love it, at least with the right group, because while you basically never get reliable information, you do get a large amount of it. Some will be contradictory, some will match, most will need to be expanded on. You piece together narratives matching the evidence, poke holes in these narratives, offer alternative explanations, determine probabilities that multiple people are both speaking the truth. It's not that nobody knows anything, instead everyone knows something and will need to decide when and what to share with others. You might be able to get someone killed with a random accusation, but you're just as likely to reveal yourself to be a liar to someone in the process.
- xandrius 2y ago
  I used to run weekly Mafia/Werewolf parties: casual 2h nights with almost always 2-3 new folks. For me running it (i.e. Being the "god", the narrrator etc.) is much more fun in such a context, as it's more about storytelling. The main problem is that the game is quite unfun for the first 2-3 days: it's basically impossible to know who's who, so any sneeze, look or being the first one to speak will instantly make you a target of the crowd. There was a guy who just was a chatty guy and always started the conversation and he almost never made it past day 1. Absolutely unfair and unfun. Whenever he wasn't killed on day 1 it was always due to someone standing up to the obvious unfairness and getting themselves killed, while he would get to live 1 extra night. That's why we started adding extra unconventional roles and rules, to make up for this. For example, having a necromancer, who could turn a dead into a ghost who could do an action once. These changes would require to be more than 15 people, as you need to adjust the mafia in response. The format is fun, the basic rules get boring pretty fast, given how newbies tend to play. On the other hand, competitive mafia seems more about ninja communication and discussion, also I think they can also skip a voting.
  - _dark_matter_ 2y ago
    One night ultimate werewolf fixes a lot of this. Many roles, easy narration, and no player termination (everyone plays every round).
    - romanhn 2y ago
      +1 for One Night Ultimate Werewolf. Removing the need for a narrator role and keeping the game short enough that the antagonistic behaviors don't have a chance to develop works wonders. Friend and couple fights after Mafia are real. Werewolf is pretty kid-friendly too.
  - stouset 2y ago
    I’m that guy who’s always killed day one. The worst part is there’s actually nothing you can do about it. Decide to clam up and stop making yourself a target? Super suspicious, he’s the werewolf this time for sure!
patrickhogan1 2y ago
Its a reality TV based Werewolf game
thecleaner 2y ago
What is the economics lesson though ? I figured they were talking about bounded rationality which the article touches upon in the last paragraph. But it would've been nice to get some confirmation within the article itself.
- Tycho 2y ago
  Keynesian beauty contests maybe
e40 2y ago
I tried watching the British version and couldn’t make it more than 10 minutes in. Cringy and dumb, it seemed to me.
yzydserd 2y ago
The worrying observation I make from Traitors is how easily a group of about a dozen people can become so sure of guilt on so little evidence, and time after time of being knowingly wrong. What if anything can we learn from this to understand the jury system and prosecutorial process? Also, I have watched a bunch of series and I have not once noticed anyone click the obvious “hack”: the last person to enter the breakfast room after a kill night is almost always a faithful, because of the TV cliffhanger of viewers hanging on which of two faithful survived. It’s the best truth signal the game gives and I’ve never seen a player mention it. Maybe TV edits the knowledge out.
- solumunus 2y ago
  “Almost always”. If the entries were completely randomised this would still be the case, since the murdered are always faithful and the majority of the remaining are faithful. There could well be some production bias but it’s not the cheat code you’re making it to be. Traitors can and will enter last.
  - jvvw 2y ago
    I don't think they have entered last in the current UK series so far have they?
    - ktallett 2y ago
      It's pretty rare, like any guessing game there are advantages and on the whole traitors entering last as I believe happened less often than the percentage of traitors to faithfuls would allow if it was randomised.
- jvvw 2y ago
  I do wonder how much meta gaming is going on though. As a faithful, given that new traitors are recruited, your goal isn't actually to eliminate a traitor but to survive, ideally knowing who the remaining the traitors are at the end (and making sure they don't end up in a majority at any point too). If you are confident that somebody is a traitor, there is something to be said for keeping them as a traitor so you know who the traitors are at the end. I suspect most of the players are still trying to identify and eliminate traitors though: they do seem genuinely surprised/disappointed when a faithful is banished. It is quite scary how they latch onto tiny things and become convinced. I suspect that as soon as the faithful feel they are being targeted, they feel pressured and act in ways that reinforce everybody's ideas about them. Defensiveness gets interpreted as guilt very easily. It's really hard to know whether this transfers to the jury system. It's hard for there to be an open discussions about how decisions get made by juries because people obviously can't talk about their experiences. To me juries feel like the 'least worst' way to make such decisions and you do need to be unanimous or extremely close to unanimous if the judge gives permission for that. I wondered about the order of entry at breakfast too, but I've read that they film the scene in multiple permutations so they can't just figure it out from that. I don't know if that is accurate that film different permutations, but I find it hard to believe that nobody has cottoned on to the idea that the last couple of people in are faithful.
adriatp 2y ago
seems like among us without tasks
- frabcus 2y ago
  There are tasks in Traitors! They're done in a group with some things that traitors have different incentives for. But yes it makes it more like Among Us than werewolf!
hliyan 2y ago
Haven't seen The Traitors, but recently started watching a Korean Netflix show called The 8 Show and the plot involves some mystery organizer (similar to Squid Game, I suppose) creating a setup that is a microcosmic version of trickle-down economics. I'm currently taking a break from the show because the behavior of the most powerful player in the game was so on point with what we see in reality, it became blood-boiling! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_8_Show https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_8_Show
- golyi 2y ago
  Just wanted to thank you for the reccomendation, the premise looks extremely interesting.
- dadver 2y ago
  While on the subject of Korean (game) shows, I found The Devil's Plan quite enjoyable.
  - theshrike79 2y ago
    The Devil's Plan is in my top5 reality shows easily There was very little extra drama and everyone was super smart and tried to game the game into getting everyone as far as possible. And the metagame with the secrets within secrets was chefskiss perfection
henrebotha 2y ago
Is there a term for the "I know that you know that I know…" thing? It's a fundamental part of fighting game strategy, particularly the aspect called "yomi", i.e. reading the opponent's intentions so as to preemptively counter them.
- _dark_matter_ 2y ago
  This could go on indefinitely ("I know that you know that I know that you know that I know that..."). I always consider this related to the Byzantine Generals problem.
  - henrebotha 2y ago
    Yes and somewhat infamously in the fighting game context, high level players can sometimes psych themselves out completely in the heat of the moment, trying to recursively parse the infinite stack of reads and just completely bluescreening and getting hit by the most obvious option possible.
- dooglius 2y ago
  The term for an infinitely deep chain of that is "common knowledge"
- nothrabannosir 2y ago
  There is a formalization using Modal Logic :) https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-modal/#Games https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-modal/#Games
- gcanyon 2y ago
  Rick vs. Heistotron (starts with an annoying pre-roll, hence the start-at-9-seconds parameter) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyOAxh4Iybg&t=9 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyOAxh4Iybg&t=9
- mjburgess 2y ago
  Theory of mind
- 2y ago
jks 2y ago
This game (under the "Mafia" name) has been popular in Finnish math-contest circles since some time in the 1990s, probably as a Russian import. In large groups there can be many more roles, such as the axe-wielding lone killer, the police chief who gets reliable information from the game master, and the doctor who can rescue a victim if they guess correctly. Lots of fun. Someone mentioned Blood on the Clocktower <https://bloodontheclocktower.com/ https://bloodontheclocktower.com/> which has many more roles and a more complicated game that can take hours. The upside is that you aren't out of the game when you are eliminated. In the other direction, there is a One Night Ultimate Werewolf ruleset <https://www.wargamer.com/one-night-ultimate-werewolf/review https://www.wargamer.com/one-night-ultimate-werewolf/review> that leads to a much faster game because it's not iterated.
- skulk 2y ago
  I also learned about Mafia from participating in math competitions (in the US)! My teachers were Turkish immigrants and they introduced us to the game and we had a blast. it did suck for the person who died on night 1, though.
roenxi 2y ago
Describing John Bercow as a "disgraced British parliamentarian" is underselling him. He is a disgraced speaker! That isn't a minor post. And quite a funny speaker. He bought a little bit too much personality into it but was an intelligent man and a very interesting study into managing a room and giving flavour to proceedings.
kpmah 2y ago
I watch this show, but one of the most annoying things about it is that the traitors are incentivised to murder the smartest, most intuitive players first, leaving people they can manipulate easily. Maybe you could argue the smartest move is to play dumb. This is at its worst in the second Australian season, which is an incredibly frustrating watch.
- hndc 2y ago
  That was one of the most frustrating seasons of any television show I’ve ever watched, right up until the finale—which completely redeemed it for me! What an ending.
- bell-cot 2y ago
  > Maybe you could argue the smartest move is to play dumb. Does playing smart advertise you as smart on a popular TV show, while minimizing the tedious reality-TV drama that you have to go through? The expected winnings aren't all that much. And most (desirable) employers are would rate "smart" as a more desirable trait than to "gullible" or "underhanded".
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
  Similar strategy to Survivor: band together with less capable contestants to target the most capable person at the start.
throwaway984393 2y ago
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helsinkiandrew 2y ago
This 9 minute BBC youtube video of how a 'traitor' got through to the end is a good overview of the show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYaBWiepkNk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYaBWiepkNk
atemerev 2y ago
Played the game (Mafia offshoot with some more complications) with my Swiss friends. The first round was very cringe, and everyone was fully predictable. Then, when people got the taste of it, I’ve seen their eyes glow, as they suddenly understood. Then we had alliances, counter-alliances, regular people adopting the mafia behavior so they won’t be accused this round, layers of trickstery, and all that. Fun times!
dmje 2y ago
We’ve been struck by how there really isn’t a strategy that works for the Faithful. As other people have pointed out, there’s a fairly scary tribalism to the voting, but very very little logic. And I’m not sure anything would actually “work” as a strategy unless you had skills reading body language or in NLP.
- mjburgess 2y ago
  It's not clear to me the behaviour isn't fairly rational. It only seems irrational because the host tells the audience that the faithful are supposed to be finding traitors -- but they arent. Not at all. They're each aiming to win. Eliminating faithful is a necessary and prudent step. Indeed, traitors have almost all of the power -- the ideal strategy as a faithful is to eliminate talented faithful and ally or sus-out for oneself who the traitors are. In this light, any faithful expressing actual out-loud competence is a target for everyone, esp. other faithful. It seem to me a good strategy is to play dumb, pretend to be confused that a competitor-faithful is a traitor, and target them.
  - mef 2y ago
    yup. traitors tend to keep dumb-presenting faithful around because they give the impression of both not being a traitor as well as being unsavvy and easy to manipulate
0898 2y ago
I must say, it's strange watching Traitors after watching Beast Games. It feels slow and lazy. Traitors is one idea padded out with endless cringey "ceremony". (Claudia Winkleman walks down a corridor in a cape! Claudia Winkelman whispers "murder"! People gather and read out names slowly.) In the Mr Beast version, the entire series would be boiled down to one 8 minute segment – and there would be 15 other original ideas besides it.
- mjburgess 2y ago
  That's why God made 1.5x speed. British TV shows have long targeted a extremely aged demographic. Most TV seems to operate as if you're a little senile and aren't really following what's going on, or would be too uncertain and scared by quicker edits and more emotional intensity. That said -- there's little 1.5x doesnt paper over about bad pacing choices.
  - Ylpertnodi 2y ago
    As well as 1.5x, jumping a couple of minutes after a screen goes dark often jumps the 'now you would've watched some adverts on real TV, here's a recapitulation of what you may have missed in the first part (you forgetful bastard)'
    - semanticist 2y ago
      There's no ad breaks on the BBC.
  - valiant55 2y ago
    I have a hard time watching anything for too long at 1.5-2x speed. After a while it feels like my internal monologue is running at the same speed and it's incrediblely distracting.
    - mjburgess 2y ago
      Hmm, mine already is ...
efitz 2y ago
Sounds like “Among Us”
motohagiography 2y ago
They should just call the game Bureaucracy. I used to tell new consultants in govt, "beware the stupid, their powers are hidden, and you can't imagine what they will do to surive." while the article states the show is a finite game, it's a relatively open or infinite game in an institution, and with similar strategies. the underlying mechanism of the game (or quality) the players are optimizing for is actually perfidy. I'd argue the effect of the games even starts to yield a physiognomy after a while, and we percieve it as hidden culture codes, but these are just the effect of strategies over time. this flow of games, incentives, strategies, survivors, and evolved attributes is what makes beauty a moral standard in nature. it's pretty fascinating stuff.
black_13 2y ago
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xyst 2y ago
> … offers a useful economics lesson … > With talk cheap, the only way to find a traitor is to study who is murdered and banished. One way of solving such a game is known as the “perfect Bayesian equilibrium”. Great, more propaganda to push pseudoscientific neoclassical economics and neoliberalism policies. What a load of horse shit. It’s a game. Nothing more. Nothing less. No economic lesson here. Economist is nothing more than a neoclassical, “trickle down economics” propaganda machine.
- rawgabbit 2y ago
  I agree. In a short, finite game with limited number of observations -- observation and logic is of little help. Rationally, when presented with unfair/unwinnable rules, the logical thing is to "cheat" or break the rules. I am interested in what ways players have tried to cheat the game. For example, if I am a faithful, I would mandate that will be no private conversations to minimize the ability of the traitors to communicate and plan. I would enforce a rule that everyone must stay within eyesight of everyone else as much as possible. When people sneak out to have conversations, I would use that as data on who the possible terrorists are.
rawgabbit 2y ago
I didn't understand what the article meant by "The perfect Bayesian equilibrium, according to those who have studied Mafia, is voting randomly according to a pre-set public rule."
mettamage 2y ago
I see a lot of comments about werewolf. The best strategy I found as a civilian is to ignore all rhetoric and simply analyze voting behavior. That is, assuming no one is paying too close attention you analyze voting behavior. I've seen some crazy stuff. I remember one person playing like a complete werewolf but my intuition said he was just a very ignorant civilian. It turns out that I was right. After asking him why he played how he played, he genuinely thought he was making the best moves. It taught me that some people can seem malevolent but ultimately mean really well. It taught me that there are many matches where it's 100% known that someone is the seer, gives the winning piece of information, gets killed off by the werewolfs and the village somehow manages to completely not act (or worse forget) on what the seer said, allowing the werewolfs to win the game. Werewolf has taught me a lot about group dynamics, which is also why I find certain political realities in multiple countries right now not that weird. I've seen weirder behavior with werewolf, albeit on a smaller scale in a fantasy setting with solely highly educated people.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
sopooneo 2y ago
> Some see a university education as an example of this: it costs cleverer and more conscientious types less to get a degree than stupider and lazier ones, allowing employers to distinguish between the two. Wait, how? If two people both have a degree, how does that help distinguish who is stupid?
- porkbrain 2y ago
  on average the "cleverer" ones get the degrees easier, hence there's a higher chance to pick a "cleverer" candidate if selecting by this criterion than when selecting at random
- macleginn 2y ago
  I think they mean it probabilistically: given the cost, a "stupid and lazy" person is less likely to get a degree, so employers can hope that the percentage of such people among university grads will be lower than in the general population.
- huitzitziltzin 2y ago
  Start with “the market for lemons” by George akerlof. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons The case you are confused by is a version of the model there. The relevant material is covered in any intermediate-to-advanced microeconomics textbook.
danpalmer 2y ago
One thing that always sticks out to me watching The Traitors, and which this article finally clarified for me, is that many players treat it as an iterated game, and it's not. It's so common to hear things like "I'll take one for the team", but that's only ever a good move to make in an iterated game, assuming you're not entirely altruistic. There are "sub games" within this and it can apply there certainly, but that's not the only context where you hear players saying things like this (or often, encouraging others to take one for the team). I think it's that these concepts are memes, embedded in our language and behaviour, but that many people don't think through their application to the situation they're actually in. I see this a lot in life, people doing things or advocating for things that "come next in the sequence", without thinking about their context and whether it makes sense in the moment.
- MichaelDickens 2y ago
  It is an iterated game, though. It's socially beneficial for you to be seen behaving altruistically on national television. I think in most cases this is more valuable than whatever prize the TV show offers.
  - danpalmer 2y ago
    In that way it is an iterated game, true, but I'd strongly disagree that it's worth much being seen to be altruistic, and certainly less than the prize of ~£10-20k. Being altruistic might mean something for those who know you, but will be drowned out by how you actually interact with them. Being on the show in any capacity is most of the benefit, and being memorable within that, most likely by being ruthless and not altruistic, is going to achieve the biggest impact.
knallfrosch 2y ago
From my Werewolf experience, translated back into Faithful/Traitor: Most Faithful explain their elaborate theories of what's going on and are quite often right. But it takes just one Traitor's "but what about X, who voted to banish a Faithful?" to completely derail the noobies. Even if the "Seer" calls out the bad guys and gets murdered/banished the next night. Meanwhile, half the players are just socializing, drinking and not paying much attention at all. They're wild cards and seem to vote randomly. The game is a pleasurable experience, but I wouldn't go too deep into theory, you'll be frustrated how people actually play the game.

https://archive.ph/FlcDl https://archive.ph/FlcDl

There is a social game that was popular here when I was a teen. It was called "Werwolf" and I hated it so much that I stopped participating after one game IIRC (I was very fun at parties). Reading up on it, it drew from the mentioned "Mafia" idea mentioned here. Would have never known, interesting submission.

Kiro 2y ago
Still super popular and the whole basis for the game Among Us and many other computers games as well as board games.
- moritzwarhier 2y ago
  Ah yes, that's the deal with Among us! This one passed me too, but I remember the description sounding somewhat similar. Well, maybe should give the type of game another try. Tastes change and at the age at which my friends played "Werwolf", I was pretty much hating myself and everything around me so maybe I'd enjoy it today :)
  - noirbot 2y ago
    The best versions of these games are set up to provide more contextual information than just "Player B Died Last Night". Classic Werewolf or Mafia, all information is public information, outside of people just talking to each other in whispers. Among Us adds a map and location information - you have to have been near the person who died to kill them, so if someone died in one room, you suspect players who were near that room or can't account for their location. Clocktower or One Night generally add information that only one player gets, such as being able to know if they're seated next to a bad player, which is powerful, but easy to lie about and risky to just admit since it makes you a target for the bad people.
NoboruWataya 2y ago
We used to play this on IRC. Was quite fun.
bootywizard 2y ago
I've played Mafia several times and enjoy it a lot. However, I have also witnessed friendships completely destroyed in the process. Some people are capable as seeing it as just a game, discard all prior trust or expectations with others during, and then at the end, reset completely back to how it was before, perhaps having learnt something about people in the process. For those who cannot do this, they will experience true pain, broken trust, and leave with friendships fundamentally changed. If this sounds like you, do not play this game!
- ImHereToVote 2y ago
  [flagged]
ldoughty 2y ago
There's a similar pay game called "Blood on the Clocktower". You probably wouldn't like it, but those who like Werewolf or Mafia might want to give it a look.
- noirbot 2y ago
  I've tried it a few times, but it's so much more complex that it really requires everyone who's playing to care deeply about reasoning through it. There's so little information that's public to everyone, so if even one player with a role that lets them get private information doesn't understand or communicate that well, the whole game can fall apart.
- 63stack 2y ago
  I don't understand how this game gained so much popularity, because it's impossible to get any kind of reliable information in this game. For example, you have an ability that let's you ask the game master (in private) about whether one person is evil or not (their alliance). The game master is going to give you an answer, BUT it's possible that the answer is not the truth, because: * you are drunk (which you don't know about) * you were poisoned that night (which you don't know about) * the target might be protected in some way (which you don't know about) * some powers literally let the game master decide if they work or not (you will not be told it did not work) Imagine the first few nights of mafia style games, where nobody knows anything, so everybody is just going on hunches and feelings. That's Blood on the clocktower for almost all the nights.
  - jorams 2y ago
    I love it, at least with the right group, because while you basically never get reliable information, you do get a large amount of it. Some will be contradictory, some will match, most will need to be expanded on. You piece together narratives matching the evidence, poke holes in these narratives, offer alternative explanations, determine probabilities that multiple people are both speaking the truth. It's not that nobody knows anything, instead everyone knows something and will need to decide when and what to share with others. You might be able to get someone killed with a random accusation, but you're just as likely to reveal yourself to be a liar to someone in the process.
xandrius 2y ago
I used to run weekly Mafia/Werewolf parties: casual 2h nights with almost always 2-3 new folks. For me running it (i.e. Being the "god", the narrrator etc.) is much more fun in such a context, as it's more about storytelling. The main problem is that the game is quite unfun for the first 2-3 days: it's basically impossible to know who's who, so any sneeze, look or being the first one to speak will instantly make you a target of the crowd. There was a guy who just was a chatty guy and always started the conversation and he almost never made it past day 1. Absolutely unfair and unfun. Whenever he wasn't killed on day 1 it was always due to someone standing up to the obvious unfairness and getting themselves killed, while he would get to live 1 extra night. That's why we started adding extra unconventional roles and rules, to make up for this. For example, having a necromancer, who could turn a dead into a ghost who could do an action once. These changes would require to be more than 15 people, as you need to adjust the mafia in response. The format is fun, the basic rules get boring pretty fast, given how newbies tend to play. On the other hand, competitive mafia seems more about ninja communication and discussion, also I think they can also skip a voting.
- _dark_matter_ 2y ago
  One night ultimate werewolf fixes a lot of this. Many roles, easy narration, and no player termination (everyone plays every round).
  - romanhn 2y ago
    +1 for One Night Ultimate Werewolf. Removing the need for a narrator role and keeping the game short enough that the antagonistic behaviors don't have a chance to develop works wonders. Friend and couple fights after Mafia are real. Werewolf is pretty kid-friendly too.
- stouset 2y ago
  I’m that guy who’s always killed day one. The worst part is there’s actually nothing you can do about it. Decide to clam up and stop making yourself a target? Super suspicious, he’s the werewolf this time for sure!

patrickhogan1 2y ago

Its a reality TV based Werewolf game

thecleaner 2y ago

What is the economics lesson though ? I figured they were talking about bounded rationality which the article touches upon in the last paragraph. But it would've been nice to get some confirmation within the article itself.

Tycho 2y ago
Keynesian beauty contests maybe

e40 2y ago

I tried watching the British version and couldn’t make it more than 10 minutes in. Cringy and dumb, it seemed to me.

yzydserd 2y ago

The worrying observation I make from Traitors is how easily a group of about a dozen people can become so sure of guilt on so little evidence, and time after time of being knowingly wrong. What if anything can we learn from this to understand the jury system and prosecutorial process? Also, I have watched a bunch of series and I have not once noticed anyone click the obvious “hack”: the last person to enter the breakfast room after a kill night is almost always a faithful, because of the TV cliffhanger of viewers hanging on which of two faithful survived. It’s the best truth signal the game gives and I’ve never seen a player mention it. Maybe TV edits the knowledge out.

solumunus 2y ago
“Almost always”. If the entries were completely randomised this would still be the case, since the murdered are always faithful and the majority of the remaining are faithful. There could well be some production bias but it’s not the cheat code you’re making it to be. Traitors can and will enter last.
- jvvw 2y ago
  I don't think they have entered last in the current UK series so far have they?
  - ktallett 2y ago
    It's pretty rare, like any guessing game there are advantages and on the whole traitors entering last as I believe happened less often than the percentage of traitors to faithfuls would allow if it was randomised.
jvvw 2y ago
I do wonder how much meta gaming is going on though. As a faithful, given that new traitors are recruited, your goal isn't actually to eliminate a traitor but to survive, ideally knowing who the remaining the traitors are at the end (and making sure they don't end up in a majority at any point too). If you are confident that somebody is a traitor, there is something to be said for keeping them as a traitor so you know who the traitors are at the end. I suspect most of the players are still trying to identify and eliminate traitors though: they do seem genuinely surprised/disappointed when a faithful is banished. It is quite scary how they latch onto tiny things and become convinced. I suspect that as soon as the faithful feel they are being targeted, they feel pressured and act in ways that reinforce everybody's ideas about them. Defensiveness gets interpreted as guilt very easily. It's really hard to know whether this transfers to the jury system. It's hard for there to be an open discussions about how decisions get made by juries because people obviously can't talk about their experiences. To me juries feel like the 'least worst' way to make such decisions and you do need to be unanimous or extremely close to unanimous if the judge gives permission for that. I wondered about the order of entry at breakfast too, but I've read that they film the scene in multiple permutations so they can't just figure it out from that. I don't know if that is accurate that film different permutations, but I find it hard to believe that nobody has cottoned on to the idea that the last couple of people in are faithful.

adriatp 2y ago

seems like among us without tasks

frabcus 2y ago
There are tasks in Traitors! They're done in a group with some things that traitors have different incentives for. But yes it makes it more like Among Us than werewolf!

hliyan 2y ago

Haven't seen The Traitors, but recently started watching a Korean Netflix show called The 8 Show and the plot involves some mystery organizer (similar to Squid Game, I suppose) creating a setup that is a microcosmic version of trickle-down economics. I'm currently taking a break from the show because the behavior of the most powerful player in the game was so on point with what we see in reality, it became blood-boiling! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_8_Show https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_8_Show

golyi 2y ago
Just wanted to thank you for the reccomendation, the premise looks extremely interesting.
dadver 2y ago
While on the subject of Korean (game) shows, I found The Devil's Plan quite enjoyable.
- theshrike79 2y ago
  The Devil's Plan is in my top5 reality shows easily There was very little extra drama and everyone was super smart and tried to game the game into getting everyone as far as possible. And the metagame with the secrets within secrets was chefskiss perfection

henrebotha 2y ago

Is there a term for the "I know that you know that I know…" thing? It's a fundamental part of fighting game strategy, particularly the aspect called "yomi", i.e. reading the opponent's intentions so as to preemptively counter them.

_dark_matter_ 2y ago
This could go on indefinitely ("I know that you know that I know that you know that I know that..."). I always consider this related to the Byzantine Generals problem.
- henrebotha 2y ago
  Yes and somewhat infamously in the fighting game context, high level players can sometimes psych themselves out completely in the heat of the moment, trying to recursively parse the infinite stack of reads and just completely bluescreening and getting hit by the most obvious option possible.
dooglius 2y ago
The term for an infinitely deep chain of that is "common knowledge"
nothrabannosir 2y ago
There is a formalization using Modal Logic :) https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-modal/#Games https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-modal/#Games
gcanyon 2y ago
Rick vs. Heistotron (starts with an annoying pre-roll, hence the start-at-9-seconds parameter) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyOAxh4Iybg&t=9 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyOAxh4Iybg&t=9
mjburgess 2y ago
Theory of mind
2y ago

jks 2y ago

This game (under the "Mafia" name) has been popular in Finnish math-contest circles since some time in the 1990s, probably as a Russian import. In large groups there can be many more roles, such as the axe-wielding lone killer, the police chief who gets reliable information from the game master, and the doctor who can rescue a victim if they guess correctly. Lots of fun. Someone mentioned Blood on the Clocktower <https://bloodontheclocktower.com/ https://bloodontheclocktower.com/> which has many more roles and a more complicated game that can take hours. The upside is that you aren't out of the game when you are eliminated. In the other direction, there is a One Night Ultimate Werewolf ruleset <https://www.wargamer.com/one-night-ultimate-werewolf/review https://www.wargamer.com/one-night-ultimate-werewolf/review> that leads to a much faster game because it's not iterated.

skulk 2y ago
I also learned about Mafia from participating in math competitions (in the US)! My teachers were Turkish immigrants and they introduced us to the game and we had a blast. it did suck for the person who died on night 1, though.

roenxi 2y ago

Describing John Bercow as a "disgraced British parliamentarian" is underselling him. He is a disgraced speaker! That isn't a minor post. And quite a funny speaker. He bought a little bit too much personality into it but was an intelligent man and a very interesting study into managing a room and giving flavour to proceedings.

kpmah 2y ago

I watch this show, but one of the most annoying things about it is that the traitors are incentivised to murder the smartest, most intuitive players first, leaving people they can manipulate easily. Maybe you could argue the smartest move is to play dumb. This is at its worst in the second Australian season, which is an incredibly frustrating watch.

hndc 2y ago
That was one of the most frustrating seasons of any television show I’ve ever watched, right up until the finale—which completely redeemed it for me! What an ending.
bell-cot 2y ago
> Maybe you could argue the smartest move is to play dumb. Does playing smart advertise you as smart on a popular TV show, while minimizing the tedious reality-TV drama that you have to go through? The expected winnings aren't all that much. And most (desirable) employers are would rate "smart" as a more desirable trait than to "gullible" or "underhanded".
insane_dreamer 2y ago
Similar strategy to Survivor: band together with less capable contestants to target the most capable person at the start.

throwaway984393 2y ago

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helsinkiandrew 2y ago

This 9 minute BBC youtube video of how a 'traitor' got through to the end is a good overview of the show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYaBWiepkNk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYaBWiepkNk

atemerev 2y ago

Played the game (Mafia offshoot with some more complications) with my Swiss friends. The first round was very cringe, and everyone was fully predictable. Then, when people got the taste of it, I’ve seen their eyes glow, as they suddenly understood. Then we had alliances, counter-alliances, regular people adopting the mafia behavior so they won’t be accused this round, layers of trickstery, and all that. Fun times!

dmje 2y ago

We’ve been struck by how there really isn’t a strategy that works for the Faithful. As other people have pointed out, there’s a fairly scary tribalism to the voting, but very very little logic. And I’m not sure anything would actually “work” as a strategy unless you had skills reading body language or in NLP.

mjburgess 2y ago
It's not clear to me the behaviour isn't fairly rational. It only seems irrational because the host tells the audience that the faithful are supposed to be finding traitors -- but they arent. Not at all. They're each aiming to win. Eliminating faithful is a necessary and prudent step. Indeed, traitors have almost all of the power -- the ideal strategy as a faithful is to eliminate talented faithful and ally or sus-out for oneself who the traitors are. In this light, any faithful expressing actual out-loud competence is a target for everyone, esp. other faithful. It seem to me a good strategy is to play dumb, pretend to be confused that a competitor-faithful is a traitor, and target them.
- mef 2y ago
  yup. traitors tend to keep dumb-presenting faithful around because they give the impression of both not being a traitor as well as being unsavvy and easy to manipulate

0898 2y ago

I must say, it's strange watching Traitors after watching Beast Games. It feels slow and lazy. Traitors is one idea padded out with endless cringey "ceremony". (Claudia Winkleman walks down a corridor in a cape! Claudia Winkelman whispers "murder"! People gather and read out names slowly.) In the Mr Beast version, the entire series would be boiled down to one 8 minute segment – and there would be 15 other original ideas besides it.

mjburgess 2y ago
That's why God made 1.5x speed. British TV shows have long targeted a extremely aged demographic. Most TV seems to operate as if you're a little senile and aren't really following what's going on, or would be too uncertain and scared by quicker edits and more emotional intensity. That said -- there's little 1.5x doesnt paper over about bad pacing choices.
- Ylpertnodi 2y ago
  As well as 1.5x, jumping a couple of minutes after a screen goes dark often jumps the 'now you would've watched some adverts on real TV, here's a recapitulation of what you may have missed in the first part (you forgetful bastard)'
  - semanticist 2y ago
    There's no ad breaks on the BBC.
- valiant55 2y ago
  I have a hard time watching anything for too long at 1.5-2x speed. After a while it feels like my internal monologue is running at the same speed and it's incrediblely distracting.
  - mjburgess 2y ago
    Hmm, mine already is ...

efitz 2y ago

Sounds like “Among Us”

motohagiography 2y ago

They should just call the game Bureaucracy. I used to tell new consultants in govt, "beware the stupid, their powers are hidden, and you can't imagine what they will do to surive." while the article states the show is a finite game, it's a relatively open or infinite game in an institution, and with similar strategies. the underlying mechanism of the game (or quality) the players are optimizing for is actually perfidy. I'd argue the effect of the games even starts to yield a physiognomy after a while, and we percieve it as hidden culture codes, but these are just the effect of strategies over time. this flow of games, incentives, strategies, survivors, and evolved attributes is what makes beauty a moral standard in nature. it's pretty fascinating stuff.

black_13 2y ago

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xyst 2y ago

> … offers a useful economics lesson … > With talk cheap, the only way to find a traitor is to study who is murdered and banished. One way of solving such a game is known as the “perfect Bayesian equilibrium”. Great, more propaganda to push pseudoscientific neoclassical economics and neoliberalism policies. What a load of horse shit. It’s a game. Nothing more. Nothing less. No economic lesson here. Economist is nothing more than a neoclassical, “trickle down economics” propaganda machine.

rawgabbit 2y ago
I agree. In a short, finite game with limited number of observations -- observation and logic is of little help. Rationally, when presented with unfair/unwinnable rules, the logical thing is to "cheat" or break the rules. I am interested in what ways players have tried to cheat the game. For example, if I am a faithful, I would mandate that will be no private conversations to minimize the ability of the traitors to communicate and plan. I would enforce a rule that everyone must stay within eyesight of everyone else as much as possible. When people sneak out to have conversations, I would use that as data on who the possible terrorists are.

rawgabbit 2y ago

I didn't understand what the article meant by "The perfect Bayesian equilibrium, according to those who have studied Mafia, is voting randomly according to a pre-set public rule."

mettamage 2y ago

I see a lot of comments about werewolf. The best strategy I found as a civilian is to ignore all rhetoric and simply analyze voting behavior. That is, assuming no one is paying too close attention you analyze voting behavior. I've seen some crazy stuff. I remember one person playing like a complete werewolf but my intuition said he was just a very ignorant civilian. It turns out that I was right. After asking him why he played how he played, he genuinely thought he was making the best moves. It taught me that some people can seem malevolent but ultimately mean really well. It taught me that there are many matches where it's 100% known that someone is the seer, gives the winning piece of information, gets killed off by the werewolfs and the village somehow manages to completely not act (or worse forget) on what the seer said, allowing the werewolfs to win the game. Werewolf has taught me a lot about group dynamics, which is also why I find certain political realities in multiple countries right now not that weird. I've seen weirder behavior with werewolf, albeit on a smaller scale in a fantasy setting with solely highly educated people.

deleted 2y ago
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sopooneo 2y ago

> Some see a university education as an example of this: it costs cleverer and more conscientious types less to get a degree than stupider and lazier ones, allowing employers to distinguish between the two. Wait, how? If two people both have a degree, how does that help distinguish who is stupid?

porkbrain 2y ago
on average the "cleverer" ones get the degrees easier, hence there's a higher chance to pick a "cleverer" candidate if selecting by this criterion than when selecting at random
macleginn 2y ago
I think they mean it probabilistically: given the cost, a "stupid and lazy" person is less likely to get a degree, so employers can hope that the percentage of such people among university grads will be lower than in the general population.
huitzitziltzin 2y ago
Start with “the market for lemons” by George akerlof. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons The case you are confused by is a version of the model there. The relevant material is covered in any intermediate-to-advanced microeconomics textbook.

danpalmer 2y ago

One thing that always sticks out to me watching The Traitors, and which this article finally clarified for me, is that many players treat it as an iterated game, and it's not. It's so common to hear things like "I'll take one for the team", but that's only ever a good move to make in an iterated game, assuming you're not entirely altruistic. There are "sub games" within this and it can apply there certainly, but that's not the only context where you hear players saying things like this (or often, encouraging others to take one for the team). I think it's that these concepts are memes, embedded in our language and behaviour, but that many people don't think through their application to the situation they're actually in. I see this a lot in life, people doing things or advocating for things that "come next in the sequence", without thinking about their context and whether it makes sense in the moment.

MichaelDickens 2y ago
It is an iterated game, though. It's socially beneficial for you to be seen behaving altruistically on national television. I think in most cases this is more valuable than whatever prize the TV show offers.
- danpalmer 2y ago
  In that way it is an iterated game, true, but I'd strongly disagree that it's worth much being seen to be altruistic, and certainly less than the prize of ~£10-20k. Being altruistic might mean something for those who know you, but will be drowned out by how you actually interact with them. Being on the show in any capacity is most of the benefit, and being memorable within that, most likely by being ruthless and not altruistic, is going to achieve the biggest impact.

knallfrosch 2y ago

From my Werewolf experience, translated back into Faithful/Traitor: Most Faithful explain their elaborate theories of what's going on and are quite often right. But it takes just one Traitor's "but what about X, who voted to banish a Faithful?" to completely derail the noobies. Even if the "Seer" calls out the bad guys and gets murdered/banished the next night. Meanwhile, half the players are just socializing, drinking and not paying much attention at all. They're wild cards and seem to vote randomly. The game is a pleasurable experience, but I wouldn't go too deep into theory, you'll be frustrated how people actually play the game.