Internet Mafia History

[radwulf]

There probably won't be enough discussion on this subject to warrant a new topic, but I didn't know where else to ask these questions.

My question is addressed to mith: was Bulletin Board Mafia played for the first time on GL? Also, the Princeton group webpage refers to IRC mafia (but that link is dead)... is that the first known instance of mafia being played on the Internet?

[Antrax]

AFAIK, mith invented online mafia, and the first game was played over the GL. Princeton are a bunch of geeks and should never be regarded with anything more than a dismissive snort.
Antrax

[Neo]

Mith is like a sort of mafia eJesus......or something 8)

[mith]

Ooh, new title!

Yes, as far as I know, the first BB Mafia game was played starting on August 20, 2000 on the GL. Players were Alfie, Chuck, Courk, CzarJ, firemeboy, HyToFry, Internet Stranger, Luna, mole, Quailman, Sofis, The Master (Sofis and The Master were the Mafia).

I also started the first game on brunchma, May 8, 2001. Since the first game on the GL, I think I've counted 62 games on the GL (counting the sign-up-stage 48 and 50), 9 (I think) on brunchma (counting the sign-up-stage 5 and SM 3), and 10 on here (counting the sign-up-stage DP 2 and Theme 3). Not bad for a couple years.

[rOver]

The first internet mafia, called gyilkosos game I know of was played on the discussion board of internetto.hu then, the biggest internet portal in Hungay, back in june 1998. The original RL game was adapted to the internet by a user called Skizoid. All in all some 50 games were played on internetto.hu and its successor index.hu, the last one so far in january this year. The rules evovled from the RL rules used in Hungary (1 detective, usually 2 maffia members who cooperate and townsfolks) and eventually included curses for maffia members and complex rules governing the detectives abilities.
You can still find these games in the archives of the index.hu forums, via the search engine at http://www.index.hu/forum/. That is if you speak Hungarian
Anyway this was my first post here. Hope to play some good games, but I'm afraid my English might not be good enough.

[Internet Stranger]

Well, what about the Romanians?

http://pub40.ezboard.com/bromanianmafiagames

[Turiya]

For some reason r0ver's post reminded me of Chekov in Star Trek. "Of course, [insert whatever here] was invented in Russia."

[rOver]

Well, I didn 't claim it was invented there. That's where I first saw it. And it happens to be the earliest date in the thread. So far.
Intrestingly however, there is a Mensa group in Hungary who claimed to have invented the original game back in '86. But there's no way I can tell if it's true or not.

[radwulf]

Whoa, IS, how did you find that link? That, btw, is the site I started a couple of months ago for my Romanian friends.

[Luna]

It's one of the first links on Google when you put in "mafia game", radwulf.

I'm intrigued by the idea that some other board has been off inventing online mafia before we thought of it (how dare they! ) ... It'd be interesting to see how similar their version turned out, cause I think ours has evolved quite a lot since the first game, to the point where it's really not the same game as RL Mafia anymore.

[rOver]

It was usually played with 1 cop 2 mafiosi 7 townsperson. All types of communication allowed. Email, ICQ, even telephone. Days usually last 2-3 RL days, at the end the player with the most votes gets lynched.The plyers' roles are not revealed upon their death. Votes are usually sent to the moderator in email, mafiosi send their victim's name, cop sends suspect's. So night is basically a post by the moderator on who got lynched and killed, and how. Also if one of the deceased had a final will that's made public too. Mafiosi have to attack the same person, for a kill.
Mafiosi do not know each other at the start of the game, however if one of them tries to kill the other, or they attack the same person, they are revealed to each other. If however the cop was watching one of them, both are revealed to him or her. Also if one of the maffiosi does not try to kill anyone, something he can do once in the game, the cop will find him innocent. When the mafiosi kill someone, they get a curse, something they have to post. Since most games have a strong role playing element, it could be something about the victim like one of the mafiosi has to repeatedly express a strong dislike to cats, if the victim had a cat. (That's an easy one to find) But it can be something entirely different, eg. once I had to write at least 3 6 words sentenceswith words of 1, 4, 2, 8, 5 and 7 letters. (in this order) The decimals of 1/7. There was something about the number 7 I can't quite remember. It was difficult enough to find sentences, which were like this, but even then they didn't sound too relevant to the discussion.

[Luna]

hm, that actually sounds really interesting, especially the mafia "curses"... you should start a Hungarian Mafia game up or something.

[rOver]

It will be some time before I moderate a game For now I'll just play some games and generally try to survive

[jesternl]

but I'm afraid my English might not be good enough.

Don't worry about that r0ver.. there's lots of non native eglish speakers here..
As a matter of fact, tehre's lots of Americans that are worse then you are, at least in their typing...
And welcome

[Neo]

Whte meaning are you speaking about their?

[rOver]

Thanks jesternl. And I'm in Mini 5 already, so I guess I got over my linguistic concerns.