Newbie 1758 - Symmetry (Game Over)

[Psyche]

helllo

[Psyche]

Hi guys, I'm your IC. Inexperience Challenged is a faux-politically correct term on mafiascum.net for experienced players ("IC"s) who sign up for Newbie Games to represent the site and its meta. I've been on the site for more than a few years, so I have a good sense of what the site and its meta is, even if I personally am not a prototypical example of it.

A little about myself: I'm a college student who passionately studies psychology and is trying to become a scientist someday. I spend my free time watching TV, playing video games like LoL and Overwatch, being around people, biking, and - most importantly to me, performing or studying science. I've done some studies pertinent to how mafia is played here, and I might bring them up if any of their results turn out to be topical.

There are a few standards I'm held to while I have this role:
-

Good attitude

. I shouldn't be rude, unhelpful, or inattentive.
-

Never flake/be replaced, or even lurk

. I should make an effort to post in the game, and post regularly.
-

Don't self-vote/hammer

. If any of you don't know why self-voting/hammering is always a bad idea, the simple explanation is that every player in this game has a win condition that's threatened considerably when a member of their team is lynched.
-

Teach about game theory , glossary

. The links included just now can serve as a partial window into those things, but it's my job to go the next level and be ready to answer any questions you have about how the site as a whole generally thinks about this game. Be aware, though, that "the site" is probably only marginally better at this game than you are, if that, and that it's easy to overlearn from these theory pages and make bad decisions. Instead of acting based on what a theory page says, try hard to think through the unique situation you find yourself in, appreciate its nuances and opportunities, and act based on that.
-

Treat the game like a normal game

. I probably won't be doing this, because I just don't have an IC-like air in most of my normal games. You guys will make me be a better me. Leave it to the SEs to act like this is normal. Speaking of which, SEs should probably introduce themselves, too!
-

Explain everything as much as I can

. Literally everything. Unprompted. That I can.
-

Be ethical.

I'm going to follow the rules. I'm going to try to make sure you follow the rules. But beyond that, I won't try to win in the wrong way (ex with some sort of scorched earth approach that makes this game unfun for everyone), and I'm going to try to keep you from doing that too.

I'm not some mafia-playing paragon. I don't have all the time in the world to play this game and explain everything that comes up. But I will use the time and skill I have to make you guys' first game as edifying and fun as possible. Some final notes:

Mafia is a really fun, really tough game! When you play it face-to-face it's quite a bit easier. When you play it with people you know, it's quite a bit easier. If you're some sort of wizard (we do get those), then it's quite a bit easier. But barring all of that, this game is tough and you just have to accept it. You're going to have to go out on a limb. You're going to have to take risks. You're going to have to rely on your gut. And at the same time, you're going to have to try and make sense. Because if you don't make sense, you're going to find it hard to reach a consensus on anything, and even if you do you're probably deciding who to lynch at random - which is another way of saying that you're probably deciding to lynch a townie. Do that too often, and you lose. Unless you're scum.

So to some extent the town lives and dies by the quality of its cases, and more fundamentally on the behaviors that they latch onto and decide to call "town tells" and "scum tells". Few people on this site have perfectly congruent ideas about what counts as a scummy post, or a townie post. Your opponents will try to anticipate how you'll interpret their behavior, shifting their habits to match more competitively with your own. And your allies, well - they will confuse and disappoint you a lot. Sometimes it will be sort of their faults. Sometimes it will be yours. Sometimes the mafia are in the background pulling strings. But usually, it's a mix of all three that make a bad lynch happen. So...watch out?

Another thing that inevitably happens is conflict and anger. When someone gets chosen to be lynched, they're likely to take it personally. And even when someone isn't getting lynched, there are tons of reasons people might get, well, pissed off. Someone might feel like they aren't being treated with the proper amount of respect. Someone might be angry that the rest of the town doesn't agree with their theory about who's scum. I could go on and on.

It's important to remember that this is just a game. Imagine the games you used to play when you were younger with balls and running and whatever. Whether you win or lose, whether you suck at it or not, whether you think that dude over there is being a complete idiot in your opinion - none of that comes close to mattering as much as whether you and the people you've chosen to play with are able to enjoy the game. Sure, it can't all be fun. Someone has to lose. Someone even has to get lynched on Day 1. You guys need to take it all in stride, while still trying your hardest to win. That determines whether playing a game as absurd as Mafia has been worth your time.

So, keep that in mind.

[Psyche]

THE RANDOM VOTING STAGE

So at the start of a game on mafia scum, you'll probably see a lot of people voting people for no or really bad reasons! Why don't they stop? The best answer to that question is simply that there's nothing better to do. The thread is empty of a lot of posts about the game, so no one can really say much at all that's substantive about it. If people handled this situation by not saying anything at all about the game, then "this situation" would just persists for page after page until the Day is over!

So instead, we have a random voting stage. Or session. I'm never sure what the S stands for. The idea is to take something trivial and just ride with it using your vote. Ideally, you'd try to make the serious accusation that you can possibly make at the moment. At first, this might be something absurd, like "his name is Fugitive!". But eventually it might be, "He seems to acting a bit too...chill" or "That dude is buddying!" or "She seems to be lurking in the shadows". However serious these accusations are, their backing with votes gives punch to them, and they might provoke discussion and those discussions might provoke new accusations or new discussions. Somehow by page 5 the thread is no longer empty of posts about the game and everyone will stop voting for people for bad reasons.

The RVS is a really effective method to make content generate out of nothing, so learn feel comfortable with it happening.

[Psyche]

You're allowed to talk about other games, as long as they are finished. This is often used to give evidence for a player's meta, or how that player tends to play.

Finished means lynched, NK'ed

Completed means game complete, one side got their win condition iirc

Yeah?

Alright, so what i've learned is that to analyze scum you need to watch for contradictions in their statements right?

I've always wanted to make a longer theory post about how to find scum based on this book I read about emotion, but that'd take too much time to do exactly right now.

But basically, it's not that simple. It

is

important to look for inconsistencies/contradictions in users posts, and in fact you should interpret this instruction broadly. Rather that just examining contradictions between announced claims and beliefs, also look for deeper contradictions - between what users are posting and what you know about them (for example, look at how someone noticed a contradiction between your confusion about RVS and your experience with this game), between the things they're saying and how it seems they

feel

, and so forth.

The most important and broadminded sort of contradiction to look out for is a contradiction between

everything you know about the user

and the proposition that

they are town

(or scum, if you're looking to rule potential lynches out!). Contradictions that don't amount to contradictions with the idea that someone is town/scum essentially don't matter in mafia. It'll be up to you (and every town here) to decide if a detected contradiction matters or not.

A problem you'll face often in this game is that townies say wrongheaded things and even contradict themselves a lot. Similarly, people assigned as mafia only rarely contradict themselves in clearly meaningful ways (ie 'scumslip'). So you'll have to be careful and really searching at the same time. And eventually, before the Day is over, you'll have to make a call based on noisy, unreliably information.

[Psyche]

don't talk about ongoing games outside its thread
ever, anywhere
you might get banned if you do

[Psyche]

Ah it's still going on, we should probably stop talking about it.

Hi human sequencer. I'd like you to explain any possible scum motivation for my vote at all. Random voting with no explanation, then giving what looks like a false reason, why would a scum do that? There's no logic or basis in that push and it's clearly not going anywhere. Jackel is just trying to pressure me so idc but you trying to build a wagon makes you look bad as fuck to me, you're jumping on the opportunity to lynch a townie wayy too quickly if you're scum and not just noob.

Unvote
VOTE: human sequencer

is this sincere reasoning or low-information "not much i can say so i'll say this" reasoning?
in other words, when you say "bad as fuck", do you mean it? do you think sequencer is likely scum for the reasons you described?

[Psyche]

@Psyche a couple questions about overall game stuff. I've played f2f a couple times but I feel like online its so easy for scum to emulate town perfectly people really shouldn't be doing better than random chance. Do you have any really clear examples of scumslips from your past games possibly that can help me see what I should be looking for?

Not that I can find easily. Playing mafia is hard. Every time I've done a study to identify scumtells (ie detectable behaviors related with being scum), I've gotten null results, though I haven't been able to do serious studies beyond word choice analysis. It's also really hard to design a study to determine if anyone's better than chance at finding scum due to power roles and the collaborative nature of the game. Town in general lose well-balanced games than win, so at the very least it seems clear that it's much easier to do well as scum than it is to do well as town. I don't think it's

so

easy for scum to emulate town, especially if town aggressively pressure them in the right way, but I haven't pinned down a clear method for doing that reliably. Part of what makes mafia fun for me is how hard it is (when you're town).

More optimistically, there's one case where it's really hard for scum to emulate town - when it's against their best interests. Scum need to get town lynched while avoiding their own and their own teammates deaths as well. Bussing (voting for and lynching a scum teammate) is a strategy lots of scum try, especially when it seems inevitable that a teammate will die anyway, but even then I suspect it's possible to find scum by examining the time course, vigor, and rigor of their positions/votes over the course of a Day and game. A word for a form of this is "Vote Count Analysis", and in my experience it really works; I advise searching for it in the MD subforum. The problem is that no one has specified an algorithm for performing VCA that's been shown to actually work (in part because there's a lot of subjectivity to it), and I haven't had the time/method to do my own research to test the idea. But I

do

think because of this idea that scum must sometimes act like scum in order to further their interests that it's possible for people to do better than random chance in text-based games.

[Psyche]

When I played in the past I found I got overly defensive when people accused me of being mafia. Do you have any good suggestions for how a townie (like me ) should react when others are trying to build a wagon on them?

Standard suggestion given when people ask this is to first identify and address the motive/justification for the votes as quickly as possible. People tend to tie their votes to accusations or readings of your play; you can try to refute those, and if you do it convincingly (requires good rhetoric!), then people will stop voting for you. But even while you're spending time managing the wagon on you, it's advised to also be paying attention to your main job as town: finding and pushing the lynches of scum. Often, besides being what will ultimately keep town from getting lynched, doing that has a lot of rhetorical value for you: if you're convincingly looking for and even finding scum, then that's more reason not to think you're scum yourself.

[Psyche]

VOTE: Sobolev Space

One scum down.

RVS is over. You don't look very interested in finding scum if your votes don't actually show effort to advance discussion and/or get scum lynched.

For that reason,

vote Loopdan

[Psyche]

unvote

missed last post

probably have more of a townread than not from sobolev's questions, though asking them is an easy scum tactic

[Psyche]

actually, I'll give it a null
"townie (like me ;) )" comes off as weirdly conspiratorial, and other parts of the post sort of faux patronizing

[Psyche]

its not a scum slip but it's the sketchiest thing anyone has said so far

[Psyche]

oh, and in case anyone is looking at me weird, i have this avatar because i lost a bet

[Psyche]

Like, I understand the basis, but really I know I'm town but none of the rest of you do, so for the sake of argument saying if im townie allows you to answer without technically tring him.

more of a gut level than a literal thing

[Psyche]

not really much pressure if you promise to retract a vote as soon as it starts to matter

[Psyche]

hellfire, maybe instead of looking for scum, you can try to develop townreads and then apply the process of elimination to decide who to vote
or, instead of looking for decisive contradictions, you just regularly update us on things you've found interesting about different and whether it can be interpreted as a scum vs town move

[Psyche]

do they look like they're trying to find and lynch scum

[Psyche]

do they look like they're trying to find and lynch scum

But how would i know that?

You said that i should try to town read people instead of scum lynching

But..
how do i know they

this is confusing

how would i know that they are trying to hunt scum? What if they are scum?

you read their fucking posts

[Psyche]

like you act it's this huge puzzle but this is really basic stuff
you read posts, take an educated guess, and that's it

[Psyche]

like you act it's this huge puzzle but this is really basic stuff
you read posts, take an educated guess, and that's it

some people are bad at it, others are good
just try! you'll get better with experience!

[Psyche]

i say yall and i live the carcass of a dead horse

[Psyche]

really diffident

[Psyche]

really diffident
policy lynches are bad; it's better to lynch scum

[Psyche]

I can see what you mean, but you really should try to articulate or at least guess out loud why content "pings" you if you want your vote to move discussion forward.

[Psyche]

read this post as a not-at-all-patronizing nod of approval

[Psyche]

I think policy lynching and similar bad habits are part of

why

Day 1 in Newbie games results in so many mislynched town.

[Psyche]

sry, it's just six pages

[Psyche]

have you played mafia somewhere else joshz

[Psyche]

it takes so much time to give advice that i end up not having time for the investigative stuff

[Psyche]

When you're pushy like that it creates reactance.

[Psyche]

Daya's pbpa of Joshz doesn't really seem to have much substance. He's fallen into a newbie trap where he searches posts for congruence with buzzwords like "OMGUS" and "hypocrisy" instead of more actively trying to consider how his posts suggest he has a scum win condition rather than a town one.

- OMGUS isn't a real scumtell. It's just not. It's just a tendency people have to be suspicious of the people suspecting them, especially when they're town. The reason it happens is because people can't fathom that other people could read them so inaccurately; they find the alternative explanation that the person is only

pretending

to suspect them more probable. I did a short study on accusations of OMGUS and found that they don't really predict scumhood at all, even when you control for

town

accusations of OMGUS. I haven't published those results in MD since they seemed sort of obvious, but I've had to make this point in Newbies really often, so maybe I should.

- Scum have just as much incentive to avoid hypocrisy as town. In fact, they often pay excruciating attention to the consistency within their posting history, since their chief/most salient concern in a game is to avoid being lynched. Instead of reasoning about whether a post is hypocritical, you should ask yourself whether a post suggests his win condition is not to find and lynch scum but instead to survive until the town is eliminated.

- Deciding to lynch players according to how "annoying" or "unhelpful" they are might seem like the next best thing to lynching players according to their likelihood of being scum, but oftentimes it directly conflicts with the latter. After all, scum are more concerned with the form rather than the function of their posts, and generally have an easier time being agreeable and helpful to players. In fact, there's a buzzword for it - buddying. I'd say most D1s end with the most annoying person being lynched. Comparatively few D1s end with

scum

getting lynched. Mafia often use VIs like Josh as scapegoats to engineer mislynches. We probably shouldn't fall for that.

Maybe Josh is scum, but my reading of him is as a town VI. He doesn't really know how to play, and that leads him to make mistakes, but the emotional content of his posts seems pretty sincere. I believe him when he spitefully calls the people voting him fucking morons for trying to get him lynched. He probably really believes the town is making a dumb mistake right now.

[Psyche]

mod should probably warn josh or worse for his ableist language

[Psyche]

I'm a slothful and careful guy who has trouble developing confident reads because my research and game experience has taught me that most reads are shit. I don't like voting for people without really believing they're scum. I don't like saying things about players that I'm not certain has substance. I used to be the sort of person who makes flawed, overwrought posts like Daya's 173, but I just don't have the taste for it anymore. I know this is a bad habit, but I've never been able to shake it; I'm just not a perfect player. Still, maybe you won't see me take clear, detailed stances as often as I perhaps should, but when I do, I promise I'll put a lot of effort into them.

[Psyche]

There are a couple of SEs here who have been assisting with advice.

theirs hasn't been nearly as effortful/substantive

[Psyche]

ok im back