Week 7 - Social Deduction Games

For me, the process of making a social deduction game confuses and intimidates me. Maybe it is because when first learn the games, I am absolutely awful at them. I cannot lie very well nor play mental games with other people in order to get them off my trail. Often times I am not the werewolf and act in such a way that people will assume I am, and as a result, I get cut from the game. I honestly don’t know how people come up with these premises and adapt them to social deduction games; I already know that would be extremely hard for me to do well. The challenge for me lies outside of the playspace as well as in it. Despite all of that, I think the most fun I have during these games is the interactions that take place with the other players. In chapter two of our textbook, they describe direct interactions to be “the player has immediate interaction with objects and the playspace.” (Macklin, Sharp ch. 2)  The players rely on interaction with each other in order to perform deductions to complete their goals. They can also rely on indirect interactions, which are described as interactions “without direct contact by the player or the primary objects they use while playing.” (Macklin, Sharp ch. 2)  Again, taking the “objects” as people because some social deduction games don’t even require objects, paying attention to others’ interactions can help formulate conclusions without doing any work. The way developers come up with unique and interesting ways to form this interaction (whether through actual objects or maybe just people) is definitely key to a social deduction game. If you fail at creating aspects of your game with a sort of balance, not making it too easy nor too hard, the deduction aspect of player interaction becomes less enjoyable. An aspect talked about in chapter 4 is the learning experience of players when playing a game for the first time. Soon, the player develops “...a more specific understanding of your game until they are working off the information from their prior experiences.” With experience, players will gain more skills and be able to participate and trick others better than before. If I absolutely had to make a game, I would make sure there was an underlying story to it like the other games we played. It’s almost like role-playing and that adds a certain fun to it. I like the idea of forming teams but making the “enemy” team have more than just one person to relieve some stress for them. Something like Ultimate Werewolf would be fun, but maybe like western or under the sea version with different roles.