Werewolf invades Silicon Valley
There’s an interesting article on CNet this morning about how the party game Werewolf (also known as Mafia) is quite popular among Silicon Valley tech folk lately (the article traces it to 2007 or so). It’s been popular among game designers for much longer than that, of course — I think the industry interest in it may have crested a few years ago, actually.
The thing that piques my interest in the article, though, is the suggestion that the game’s themes may be why it resonates so strongly in the go-go-go Silicon Valley culture. You see, Werewolf is a game in which you have a group of people lying to the other players.
Fundamentally, Werewolf is about deception by a minority, and about the ways in which manipulation happens. Villagers lose when they fail to act rationally, fail to cooperate to a sufficient degree, and fail at institutional memory.
“If you think about what the fundamental skills in play in something like Werewolf are, they have to do with persuasion and communication. For entrepreneurs in particular, this is kind of a lot of the currency of their everyday lives,” Slavin said. “Bringing the types of interactions that are most typical in those scenarios…and turning them into something useless, something that only has social currency instead of live-or-die consequences for the company, is (fun) in the same way that it’s fun to bankrupt your friends in Monopoly, not in real life.”
“Those are incredibly important lessons for an entrepreneur,” Ventilla said. “You’re constantly reminded of just how much you need to do until you’re really top-notch at those things.”
— Why do young techies want to be werewolves? | The Social – CNET News.
I suppose this is healthy or not for the entrepreneur (and Silicon Valley as whole!) depending on whether they prefer to play as a villager or as a werewolf…
19 Responses to “Werewolf invades Silicon Valley”
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Interesting! The only time I have seen this game is in UO we have a guild that run a Werewolf a couple times a month from thier player town.
When you discover a friend or business associate playing this game, take out your silver handled walking stick and beat their computer into lots of tiny pieces.
Then drop their business. People who believe this is the way to get ahead should become acquainted with what happens to wolves in the wild and pea-brains who think lieing is the way to get ahead: extinction or being forced to live in a nature preserve where we show off how the lower forms of life once spawned.
These are the people that make Dick Cheney possible. Definitely drop their business.
@Len Saw you made a similar comment on the original article and curious (genuinely, not judgmentally) as to why you’re so vehement about the game. I can understand hostility to the implication that the game is a model for how to conduct real-life business. But it’s not. It’s play. A game of wits. Like poker without cards.
Heh, len, I wouldn’t ascribe that level of malignancy to the game itself. After all, poker is also a game about lying. 🙂
I played a variation of this game once, some years ago. Lying to other players is only half of the story; the other half is learning to identify the liars and working by group consensus to eliminate them from the game — arguably the more important skill.
I don’t think it breeds unscrupulous business types any more than paintball breeds paramilitaries or LARP breeds orcs. I can enjoy Risk without endorsing global conquest, and Monopoly without desiring to bankrupt my friends and family in real life.
Sometimes a game is just a game.
Pokers “not” a game;)
pass that beer./
Because the article claims it does precisely that and then glorifies it based on the marvelousness of emergent behavior. It is symptomatic of a culture in decline: Silly Valley.
Squash them before they leave a ring around the gene pool. I’ll get to the poker players as soon as they pay the five bucks they owe me.
It’s not even that the game is just a game, as much as the skills it’s teaching are really just tools, and it doesn’t make much of a statement about how those tools should be used in different contexts. The decision to use the skills Werewolf helps develop in a way that violates ethics or morality is the decision of the person, not of the game. It’s pretty obvious that there are lots of good ways to apply the villager’s skill set, but there are valid ethical ways to apply the skill set the werewolves learn as well; duplicity and keeping something hidden and secret is not intrinsically a bad thing, especially if doing so prevents good people from being harmed by bad people.
If we reframed the skin of the game so that the villagers were actually the morally reprehensible ones attempting genocide on the werewolves, who were merely defending themselves, the game would have a different moral center without changing the actual play dynamic.
Have you played the ‘advanced’ versions with event cards and so on?
We played at a LAN recently. There are male- and female-specific events. Needless to say, the events were a little skewed because of the split… 😛
Creepy.
Not sure I’d say Poker is a game about lying. When people talk about a poker face, it means that you are not giving away any information. That’s hardly the same thing as lying. When you first start to play poker it seems to be about luck, later about guessing what information other people have given away (aka Tells). For most of us, the real lesson of poker is that sometimes you should fold. That’s not easy, as we want to win every time and never back down and who knows, maybe a pair of twos will win the pot. It’s when we fail to fold that we start telling fibs.
[…] Raph’s Website » Werewolf invades Silicon Valley (tags: games gameplay) […]
To bluff is to deliberately misrepresent truth. That’s lying—deception.
More subtly, once you know your own tells you can feed false information to other players without saying a word 🙂
@eorlin: There is a game called Sexist Pig. When played, players are treated as second class citizens and subject to verbal sexual abuse by other players, both men and women. The object of the game is to endure this abuse long enough to get-a-date card from one of abuse elders. After that, the abusive elder has to defend the winner from abuse by others but may continue to abuse the date. If the date succeeds in sleeping with the abuser (getting the Sleepover card), then he/she is declared the winner.
Sort of degrading, but hey, it’s just a game. No one really sleeps with anyone… at least during the game, but it teaches two very valuable lessons for winning in business in the Valley: endure anything and only have intimate relationships with people powerful enough to help you advance your career. It’s a lot like Werewolf because you work with others who lie about your position of authority, salary, marital status etc.
The objects of games very much matter. We can sit here all day and kibitz about what is learned from games, but the facts are in: if you spend all night playing poker, you are in a much better frame of mind skill wise to lie to your spouse about where you spent the night.
Werewolf is creepy.
Len, you sound like Jack Thompson. Lets go ban all those violent videogames that are played by millions of people and haven’t caused any rise in violent crimes.
Humans lie as a matter of course, for a plethora of reasons. To save somebody from hurt, to save yourself embarrasment, or just for the hell of it.
Saying that there is any kind of a link between playing a game for fun and then equating it to making it more likely you would lie to your spouse about a non-specific event is ridiculous, verging on the edge of complete and utter idiocy.
No J, it is a matter of choosing who I wish to do business with based on their perceptions of what should be good business practices.
And if you want to call that idiocy, I’m fine with that. You are hiding behind a screen monkiker so if I call you a coward, I guess that is acceptable because people who can’t say what they say without hiding have something to hide.
And as a general rule, such people are untrustworthy.
len, frame of mind skill wise? Having a skill has nothing to do with frame of mind. Application and ability are not the same thing. At all. There are moral uses for the skills poker and werewolf both teach, but beyond that there’s nothing in either game that would in any way lower a person’s moral standards. Playing Werewolf does not speak whatsoever to whether the player will or will not act in a dishonest fashion in business dealings, only that if they’re good at it that they’ll be able to do so more convincingly. The husband who plays a lot of poker may have the ability to lie convincingly to his wife, but that doesn’t mean he actually will. Playing the game, developing the skill set that allows effective use of deception, does not remove the element of choice in that decision. And honestly, the decision not to be dishonest is that much more valuable if the ability to do so convincingly is strong; as Twain said: “I am different from Washington; I have a higher, grander standard of principle. Washington could not lie. I can lie, but I won’t.”
You’re effectively prejudging an entire class of people based on what games they play without looking at how they actually act in the broader scope of things. There’s no rational basis for doing that; the one does not necessarily lead to the other.
They might not be absolutely linked, but I’d second his opinion that there is influence or potential. No need to be so dichotomous with the possibilities that it either has zero effect or always has the same result.
What always leaves me shaking my head on this subject is how quick some of the same people that pipe up about the positive impacts games can have will shout down any suggestion that they can result in negative ones. You can’t have it both ways.