Mafia, also known as Werewolf, is a party game created by Dmitry Davidoff in 1986 modelling a conflict between an informed minority, the mafia, and an uninformed majority, the innocents. At the start of the game, each player is secretly assigned a role affiliated with one of these teams. The game has two alternating phases: night, during which the mafia may covertly "murder" an innocent, and day, in which surviving players debate the identities of the mafia and vote to eliminate a suspect. Play continues until all of the mafia have been eliminated or until the mafia outnumbers the innocents.
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History
Dmitry Davidoff (Russian: ???????? ????????, Dmitry Davydov) is generally acknowledged as the game's creator. He dates the first game to spring 1987 at the Psychology Department of Moscow State University, spreading to classrooms, dorms, and summer camps of Moscow University. Wired attributes the creation to Davidoff but dates the first game to 1987, with 1986 being the year in which Davidoff was starting the work which would produce Mafia. He developed the game to combine psychology research with his duties teaching high school students. The game became popular in other Soviet colleges and schools and in the 1990s it began to be played in other parts of Europe and then the United States. By the mid 1990s a version of the game became a Latvian television series (with a parliamentary setting, and played by Latvian celebrities).
Andrew Plotkin gave the rules a werewolf theme in 1997, arguing that the mafia were not that big a cultural reference, and that the werewolf concept fit the idea of a hidden enemy who looked normal during the daytime. Mafia and a variant called Thing have been played at science fiction writers' workshops since 1998, and have become an integral part of the annual Clarion and Viable Paradise workshops. The Werewolf variant of Mafia became widespread at major tech events, including the Game Developers Conference, ETech, Foo Camps, and South By Southwest. In 1998 the Kaliningrad Higher school of the Internal Affairs Ministry published the methodical textbook Nonverbal communications. Developing role-playing games 'Mafia' and 'Murderer' for a course on Visual psychodiagnostics, to teach various methods of reading body language and nonverbal signals. In September 1998 Mafia was introduced to the Graduate College at Princeton University, where a number of variants were developed. The werewolf theme was also incorporated in the French adaption of Mafia, The Werewolves of Millers Hollow.
In August 2000, a user under the alias "mithrandir" of The Grey Labyrinth, a website devoted to puzzles and puzzle solving, ran a game of mafia adapted for play on a forum board. Both The Grey Labyrinth and sister site MafiaScum claim that this was the first game of mafia run on a forum board. From there, mafia has spread to numerous online communities.
In March 2006 Ernest Fedorov was running a Mafia Club in Kiev, using his own patented variation of the rules. The club organizes games, rates players, and awards prizes (including a Sicily trip for their tournament-series champion).
In June 2006 a Rockingham school inquiry was launched after parents complained of the traumatic effects classroom Mafia was having on their fifth-grade children. Davidoff responded to the reports, saying that as a parent who had studied child psychology for 25 years, he felt that the game could "teach kids to distinguish right from wrong", and that the positive message of being honest could overcome the negative effects of an "evil narrator" moderating the game as if it were a scary story.
In late 2013, Michael "Thingyman" Harders founded the Game of Mafia Champions, an invitation-only series in which players from multiple internet communities play in a series of mafia games, culminating in a final game, where the best player of the year is determined. The series was first hosted on Two Plus Two Poker Forums' Puzzles and Other Games section and has since been moved to Mafia Universe.
Mafia was called one of the 50 most historically and culturally significant games published since 1890 by about.com.
Gameplay
In its simplest form, Mafia is played by two teams: the mafia and the innocents. Live games require a moderator who does not participate as a player, and identities are assigned by handing out cards. At the start of the game, every mafioso is given the identities of their teammates, whereas the innocents only receive the number of mafioso in the game, and do not know which players are mafia and which are innocents.
There are two phases: night and day. At night, certain players secretly perform special actions; during day, players discuss and vote to "lynch," or eliminate, one player. These phases alternate with each other until all mafiosi have been eliminated or until the mafia outnumbers the innocents.
Some players may be given roles with special abilities. Common special roles include:
- detective -- an innocent who may learn the team of one player every night;
- doctor -- an innocent who may protect a player from being killed every night;
- barman -- a mafioso who may cancel the effect of another role's ability every night
Andrew Plotkin recommends having exactly two mafiosi, whereas the original Davidoff rules suggest a third of the players (rounding to the nearest whole number) be mafiosi. Davidoff's original game does not include roles with special abilities. In his rules for "Werewolf," Andrew Plotkin recommends that the first phase be day and that there be an odd number of players. These specifications prevent players from being killed before the first day and in most scenarios ensure that the game will end dramatically on a lynching rather than with an anticlimactic murder.
Night
All players close their eyes. The moderator then instructs all members of the mafia to open their eyes and acknowledge their accomplices. The mafia members pick a "victim" by silently gesturing to indicate their target and to show unanimity then close their eyes again.
A similar process occurs for other roles with nightly actions. In the case of the detective, the moderator may indicate the target's innocence or guilt by using gestures such as nodding or head shaking.
Night may be accompanied by players tapping gently to mask sounds made by gesturing.
Day
The moderator instructs players to open their eyes and announces who "died" the previous night. Discussion ensues. At any point, a player may accuse someone of being a mafioso and prompt others to vote to lynch them. If over half of the players do so, the accused person is eliminated and night begins. Otherwise, the phase continues until a lynching occurs.
According to some rules, the role of dead players are revealed; according to others, it is not. In both cases, dead players are not permitted to attempt to influence the remainder of the game.
Because players have more freedom to deliberate, days tend to be longer than nights.
Game theory
Mathematical study
Mafia is a complicated game to model, so most analyses of optimal play have assumed both (a) that there are only townsfolk and mafiosi and (b) that the townsfolk never have a probability of identifying the Mafia that is better than chance. Early treatment of the game concentrated on simulation, while more recent studies have tried to derive closed-form equilibrium solutions for perfect play.
In 2006, the computer scientists Braverman, Etesami and Mossel proved that without detectives and with perfect players the randomized strategy is optimal for both citizens and mafia. When there is a large enough number of players to give both groups similar probability of winning, they showed that the initial number of mafiosi m needs to be proportional to the square root of the total number of players P, that is . With a simulation, they confirmed that 50 mafiosi would have almost a 50% chance to win among 10,000. The Mafia's chance of victory is
which is a good approximation when the right hand side is below 40%. If any detectives are added to the game, Braverman et al. proved that the number of mafiosi must remain at a fixed proportion of the total number of players for their chance of winning to remain constant.
In 2008, Erlin Yao derived specific analytical bounds for the mafia's win probability when there are no detectives.
In a paper from 2010, exact formula for the probability that the mafia wins was found. Moreover, it was shown that the parity of the initial number of players plays an important role. In particular, when the number of mafiosi is fixed and an odd player is added to the game (and ties are resolved by coin flips), the mafia-winning chance do not drop but rise by a factor of approx. (equality in the limit of the infinite number of players).
Results in live play
In live (or videoconference) real-time play, the innocents typically win more often than game theory suggests. Several reasons for this have been advanced:
- The physiological stress of sustained lying degrades the initial ability of mafioso to deceive the innocents, much more than a model of perfect play would predict, especially if the innocents can get the town emotionally involved in the game's outcome:
If you're trying to feign shock or anger, it's much harder to do over a long period. People accused of something they're trying to hide will start out feigning outrage - 'How dare you ask me that?' But that will start to change to objection rather than shock, as it's psychologically very difficult to mimic emotion.
- The information revealed by the mafiosi voting patterns tells against them later in the game. One of the game's fans Max Ventilla, has said that "If the villagers are allowed to keep a pencil and paper, they always win."
- As players get more experienced, their strategic sophistication and ability to spot and use deception increases. They will typically get better at the skills needed for playing innocents faster, being villagers more often than mafiosi.
- The Metagame aspect: Dimma Davidoff has said, Past connections will always lose to future collaborations. When playing several Mafia games with the same people, it's more helpful to be known for honesty than for deceit. Davidoff considers that so important that he thinks the advantages of playing the mafioso role honestly outweigh the disadvantages.
But, the Mafia can win in live play; their best chance of winning occurs when mafioso bond with their innocent neighbours and convince those neighbours to value that bond over dispassionate analysis. The game designers Salen and Zimmerman have written that the deep emergent social game play in Mafia (combined with the fear of elimination) create ideal conditions for this.
Optional roles
These additional roles are named differently in the many versions of Mafia, for thematic flavor, or historical reasons. Also, the same role-name can have differing functions across different versions of the game. What follows is a general list of role types found in Mafia variants; since the specific names vary by milieu it must be non-exhaustive.
Investigative roles
Players with these roles use their own night-phase to discover something about other players. Though the standard game now includes the basic Detective, these roles are optional, and games can exclude them entirely (such as the stool pigeon variant, or Davidoff's original rules).
Investigative roles (standard)
- --Detective, Seer, Commandant, Sheriff, etc.
Investigative roles (less common)
- --Psychic, Wizard, Fortune Teller, Oracle, etc.
Omniscient roles
- --Witness, Child, Little Girl, etc.
Protective roles
- --Guardian Angel, Doctor, Bodyguard, Hero, etc.
Killing roles
- --Vigilante, Hunter, Bomb, Woodcutter, etc.
Alignment roles
- --Miller, Godfather, Alpha Wolf, Wildcard, etc.
Double-agent roles
- --Traitor, Possessed, Undercover Cop, Godfather, etc.
Role manipulators
- --Role-blocker, Bus Driver, Thief, Barman, etc.
Recruitment roles
- --Godfather, Psychiatrist, Piper, Cult Leader, etc.
Association roles
- --Freemasons (Masons), Siblings, Lovers, Police, etc.
Election roles
- --Doublevoter, Priest, Rabble Rouser, Lawyer, etc.
Public roles
- --Mayor, Judge, Sheriff, President, etc.
Handicapped roles
- --Murr, Drunk, Village Idiot, Teenage Werewolf, etc.
Handicapper roles
- --Silencer, Dentist, Prostitute, etc.
Post-mortem roles
- --Dark Background, Priest, Medium, Coroner, etc.
Reanimation roles
- --Reviver, Governor, Martyr, Witch, etc.
Rule-immune Roles
- --Bulletproof, Oracle, Elder, etc.
Special roles
- --Baker, Village Idiot, Cobbler, etc.
Self-team roles
- --Alien, Angel, White Wolf, etc.
Complicated roles
Additional variations exist, sometimes with even more specialized or complicated abilities. There are many special roles, and many moderators design novel roles for each game. Some commercial variants ship with blank cards to allow this customization.
Variations
The naming of various roles, factions, and other elements of play is theme-dependent and has limitless variation. Common alternative themes restyle the mafia as werewolves, cultists, assassins, or witches, with other roles being renamed appropriately.
Over the years, players have created Mafia variants that include additional rules. Some of these are listed here.
Variations on the win conditions
If there are as many mafiosi as innocents in the day-phase then a mafia victory is declared immediately, under the original Mafia rules. Other variants suspend this rule, and only declare the game after every member of one faction has been eliminated: this makes the game easier to explain, and to run.
Election variants
Nominees for lynching may be allowed to make a speech in their own defense. Usually, each player must vote, can only vote once and cannot vote for themselves. But some variants have a more complicated process of selecting players to be executed. Davidoff's original 'Mafia' allowed multiple day-time executions (per day), each needing only a plurality to action.
Voting variants abound, but any lynching usually requires an absolute majority of the electorate, or votes cast. So the voting is usually not by secret ballot for multiple candidates with the highest vote count eliminated; it is more usual for the voting to be openly resolved either by:
- A nomination or series of elections structured to ultimately offer a choice between two candidates, or
- An option to lynch (or not lynch) one suspect (with a new suspect produced if the last one survives the vote).
Tied votes
Deadlocked elections can be resolved by lot or by killing the player with the scapegoat special role.
The special case of one mafioso and one innocent remaining can be decided randomly or be ruled a Mafia win--this is more usual in live play.
Optional lynch variant
The Innocents can choose not to kill anybody during the day. Although commonly unsure of Mafia identities, the Innocents are more likely to randomly kill a mafioso than are the Mafia (at night). Therefore, not lynching anyone (even at random) will typically favor the Mafia.
However, when the number of survivors is even, No Kill may help the Innocents; for example, when three Innocents and one mafioso remain - generally called MYLO, or Mislynch and Lose due to the innocents' loss upon a lynch of their own - voting for No Lynch gives a 1/3 chance of killing the mafioso the next day, rather than a 1/4 chance today (assuming random lynching).
Mafia killing methods
Some variants require all Mafia members to choose the same victim independently for a kill to succeed. This can be achieved in the following ways:
- By waking the Mafia members up separately.
- By calling out the names of all surviving players and requiring surviving mafiosi to raise their hands when the name of the victim is called out. In this variant, the mafiosi only "wake up" (open their eyes) at the very beginning of the game when they identify each other. This variant also allows other roles to take their actions by simply raising their hands when their target's name is called out.
- By having them write their kills. Under this variant, Innocent players write the word 'honest' on a piece of paper; Mafia members write the name of a player for elimination. If all the mafia notes have the same name on them, that player is considered killed by the Mafia.
In some online versions of the game, a particular player (the Godfather or a designated mafioso) must send in the kill.
Another variant requires the night-time vote to be secret and unanimous, but allows multiple players to be added to the execution queue to ensure unanimity.
Multiple families
Multiple, independent groups of mafia or werewolves act and win independently, giving faster game-play and the potential for cross-fire between the factions.
Attributes
In this variant, players are given two cards: the first contains their role, the second an attribute. Attributes were originally derived from roles that could apply to both Mafia and Innocent alignments such as Bulletproof (cannot be killed at night), Mayor (has two votes in the lynch), and Siamese Twins (more commonly known as Siblings or Lovers).
Quantum Werewolf
This variant was developed by Steven Irrgang and used for a puzzle in the 2008 CISRA Puzzle Competition. He later published more formal rules so that it could be a fully playable variant. The difference from a standard game of Mafia is that players are not initially assigned roles, but rather on each day are given the probabilities describing the game's current quantum state. Each player with a non-zero probability of being a seer or a werewolf performs the appropriate night actions (which may not be effective if it is later determined that the player did not have that role). When a player is killed, the wave function collapses and the players are given updated probabilities.
Train Mafia
Traditional Mafia re-envisioned and heavily modified by the Copenhagen Game Collective to be played in a subway metro. In this variation, players who are 'lynched' are kicked off the train (at the next stop), and must wait in shame for the following train - a kind of 'afterlife' train - to join a second, interwoven game.
Invisible City: Rebels vs. Spies
A location-based mobile gaming variant for Android, designed for city center play. The two factions are: the Rebels, the majority; and the Spies, the informed minority. The rule-set replaces expulsions with scoring by round. Each player is assigned an individual mission each round. Some missions are critical and if one of those fails, the round goes to the Spies, but only one player knows which missions are critical.
One Night Ultimate Werewolf
In this standalone game published by Bezier Games, players only "sleep" and close their eyes for a single night at the beginning of the game. They then have a single day of discussion, with a single lynching. No players are eliminated as the game progresses. There is no moderator, so everyone gets to participate as a member of the town or village. When playing this game, three more role cards are used than the number of players; when everyone is randomly dealt out their card the three extra ones placed in the middle of the table. To begin the game one of the players, with eyes closed, will act as the "caller" on the single starting night, going through the nighttime roles once: Werewolves and Masons (if in play) will identify each other, the Seer will examine one player's card or two of the middle cards, the Robber will steal another player's role card and replace it with their own, the Troublemaker will blindly swap two players' role cards, the Insomniac wakes up to check if their role card has been swapped, etc. The game ends on a single lynching vote, with the villagers winning if a single werewolf is caught, and the werewolves winning if no werewolves are killed. This game can be played with as few as three players. Play time can be as quick as five minutes per game
Online play
Mafia can also be played online. Games can be played on IRC channels, where a bot assumes the role of a game moderator and the interaction of players is conducted via textual communication. Being that IRC is cumbersome and not a widespread way of communication, these Mafia games are restricted to limited number of people. Since 2008, many other Mafia game sites were formed. These sites are attempts at reproducing the live Mafia games, and the duration and the mechanics of the games are about the same as when the game is played traditionally.
Playing mafia-like games online opens a possibility long lasting games, such as the ones on forums. In such games, one day in real life usually corresponds to one day within the game. So players log in each morning to see who was killed during the night phase.
The online games have several advantages. There is no need to gather many people in the same room, so organizing and playing a game of Mafia is faster and more convenient. Removing the human moderator and the need for players to close their eyes removes the possibility of accidental reveals of information. Online play also allows role mechanics which would be too cumbersome to use in a physical version of the game.
A drawback of online play is the lack of direct face-to-face communication, which many consider the most important aspect of Mafia. Some sites organize Mafia games with web cams, so that the face-to-face communication is preserved. The long lasting online mafia games that are usually played via online forums do not necessarily have this drawback. It is merely a correlation that people who communicate via forums usually do not know each other in real life.
In a traditional Mafia game, all of the players are in one room. There is no way to communicate with another player in private. With online games, this is not the case. Many Mafia game forums and game sites have rules that mandate that only one channel of communication must be used for all game related discussion. Thus forbidding the use of alternative channels for discussing the game. These rules are obviously only declarative as there is no way of enforcing them efficiently. It is especially difficult to enforce such prohibiting rules during long games on players that communicate with each other in person in real life. All forums support different kind of game setups, so it is feasible to organize a forum game without the restrictions on private messaging.
Private communication problem comes to light especially in trying to prevent "dead" players from participating in the game. Most online games consider this a breach of rules. Since, in general case, this breach of rules cannot be proven, the gameplay of most sites depends heavily on players' honesty and integrity.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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