What makes a great town player?
This is a question you might sometimes ask yourself, or a question you might see discussed around here fairly often. Playing town is hard, and so people like to discuss what would ideally be the best quality in a town player. If we wanted to be surface level, we would say something among the lines of:
"It's simple, good town players nail down the scums in any given game!"
While this is obviously true, the road to get there is very hard. People need to sit down and process an enormous amount of information and somehow find the scum in what could be an extremely long series of posts that can be interpreted in a thousand ways. Everyone has been confused in a game before. Everyone has tunneled their mind off on reads that turned out to be wrong before. Everyone has lost their mind trying to make sense of interactions that just raise many question marks in their brains before. Everyone has been frustrated at some people who they deem to be playing "incorrectly", at which point you have to ask yourself if you're talking to a fellow town member who is not playing optimally, or just scum. There is a very real possibility that you overthink a game so hard reading some posts over and over that you eventually confuse yourself out of the very simple answers that lie within the game. All of that doesn't even acknowledge the skill of the scum players present in the game, who can potentially throw a lot of red herrings around in an attempt to confuse you even more. I find the game of mafia as a town player to be a maddening endeavor, a paranoia inducing experience where the more a game goes on, the more I lose a sense of what is right and what is wrong, and that right there might be what for me is personally the hardest thing for me as a town player, and potentially my biggest weakness.
And to me this is where the basic answer to the above question comes from:
a great town player can trust others
.
This isn't a particularly novel view. A few mafia view articles have discussed the importance of establishing trust with other players in the game. Trusting others makes the paranoid "what if" scenarios go out of your head. Trusting others makes it easier to have a clearer view on people's posts. Trusting others is reassuring, and calming for the mind, and thus cultivates a sane state of mind to play a game like this. And this is why mafia as a game is stressful, because trusting others is extremely hard, especially if you happen to be the kind of person that already has trust issues outside of the game. Players will do things that toy with your trust. People will lie, even as town despite common good play practices advising against it (Lim All Liars). People will do ridiculously scummy things. People will make posts that are completely nonsensical. People will somehow manage to grab the townread you have established on them, and tear it apart by doing something that doesn't inspire trust. People are vastly unpredictable, and we tend to distrust things we do not inherently understand. I think that a big part of paranoia (and potentially what we find to be scummy in games) tends to inherently come from the inability to understand the state of mind of someone else, and that can be due to a lot of factors that I listed above.
Enter
the Mindmeld
The Mindmeld
A mindmeld is what essentially happens when someone says something that resonates with you so much there is a part of you that believes you share the exact same train of thought. You feel as though they have just typed something you had in your mind this whole time. This is not to be confused with agreeing. Agreeing with someone is a rather common occurrence in a mafia game. Agreeing with someone is what I would describe as a logical experience. Two players can look at the same thing and come to the same logical conclusion, therefore agreeing with each other. The problem with mere agreement is that it indicates absolutely nothing about the alignment of the player you agree with. It will happen that you find yourself agreeing with town and scum players alike about a various array of topics. Logical agreement is something I wouldn't consider worthy of trust.
In contrast, a Mindmeld is an
emotional experience
. Have you ever seen these romantic movies where one of the members of the couple manages to finish the other person's sentences, and so that person feels intensely like they understand each other on a soul level? Have you ever watched a review of something, where the reviewer says something that resonates so profoundly with you that you almost wanted to scream "YES!" at your screen? That
is a mindmeld. That kind of reaction might not even be triggered by anything that is inherently game related. It might be something that, from a logical perspective, is completely inconsequential. It might be how someone types something out, it might be a shared emotional state of mind that deeply resonates with how you feel at the moment, it might even be a joke. It doesn't matter because we perceive some kind of inherent truth to these words that we identify with. A mindmeld makes us feel very good, vindicated, reassured, and from what I experienced, it's just impossible for me to not comment on it, because of how strongly I feel inside when such a thing happens. In contrast to simply agreeing with someone, for me, a mindmeld is a very strong sign that someone is town. In fact I would say it is the strongest way to ever establish a townread, and should be trusted over anything else that has happened in the game. I consider it to be the most reassuring experience there is.You might ask yourself why that is, and the answer to that is very simple. If you resonate with something this strongly, that means that what was typed out has some sort of inherent truth to you inside it. It's something you completely understand, relate to and feel inside of you. In order for that to be achieved, someone must somehow see the world similarly to you and have the same way to not only process information, but also
a very relatable way to express it
. These moments where you feel a mindmeld is happening is nothing more than the manifestation of feeling like someone is just like you, and in a game of mafia, in the vast majority of cases, that just means someone is town. In truth, it is actually very hard for scums to generate this kind of reaction in town players. They do not share the same background. They do not share the same goals. They do not share the same mindset nor the same thought process. It is extremely hard for a scum player to conjure up that sort of feeling when those differences exist. For a scum to generate this kind of reaction in a townie, they'd have to understand that person so well they inexplicably find the exact words to say to earn that kind of response, which involves a great deal of social intelligence and is also just pure luck, as a mindmeld is something that largely happens by accident.The town utopia is essentially to construct a strong mindmeld with the other town members in the game and become a town hivemind of sorts, where every single townie understand each other, relate to each other, and can finally trust each other. That is the dream.
A mindmeld is not only something that allows you to easily recognize other townies in the game. It's also an extremely great threat to scum. If townies actually manage to establish that level of trust and rapport, it is incredibly hard for scum to navigate the game. If you've ever played a game where townies have established a strong block between themselves, you know how that feels like. Two townies mindmelding with each other is probably the most devastating thing that can ever happen for a scum player, as it is simply a level of trust that no amount of paranoia can possibly break, and in a game where the most effective scum tool of all is paranoia? It's simply game losing. For that reason, if such a mindmeld was to occur between two townies, it is likely that scum will attempt to break it, and thus potentially put a big neon sign on their head that they are in fact scum. The only effective way to combat such a thing is for other townies to be suspicious of two players that inexplicably started townreading each other in such a strong way. That tends to happen quite a lot, because, again, these townies cannot relate to these two people, and that especially happens if those people happen to scumread someone in the mindmeld transaction.
Of course, the caveat of the mindmeld is that it often is a one-way feeling, that is to say that if a townie mindmelds with another townie, it doesn't mean that the latter will necessarily start trusting the former. A big obstacle to overcome really is the paranoia that you are being pocketed by a scum player. Someone making this kind of post towards your slot can be a great source of paranoia. However I find that to be a great mistake and something to potentially explore.
There is one thing that is fairly certain to me:
a player expressing that they mindmeld with someone has very little chances of actually being scum
. As I said before, to me, a mindmeld is essentially an emotional experience. What is important to note is that this experience is actually impossible to be felt by scum. A scum will absolutely never look at a townie and ever think "wow, we are mindmelding!!!" That just simply never happens. Only a townie would ever look at a post and feel something so strong inside they feel the need to come in thread to say "wow I am mindmelding so hard with X, they must be town." Sure, a scum player can fake this sort of post and they have reasons to do so, such as faking reads, pocketing someone, etc. But the essence of a mindmeld makes it so that the emotion on display will inherently be fake. It is very easy for scum players to say they townread someone, but it is much harder for a scum player to not only establish a townread, but also fake the emotional experience that comes with a mindmeld. It's also much less likely that a scum player will make this sort of post even if they are willing to attempt such a thing, because scums are inherently anxious about appearing as irrational. A mindmeld will inevitably be questioned by the rest of the town, and it puts scum in a situation where they have to basically rationalize the irrational. There is simply more risk for a scum player to post this kind of thing because of the attention it can garner, whereas town will most likely post this kind of thing with earnest intention, simply because they feel so strongly about it. As such, players expressing a mindmeld have much bigger chances to be town, and if they aren't, it must be because the emotional aspect of it comes across as fake, and doesn't come from an honest town player. Mindmelding in general tends to also be fairly uncommon. It is something that cannot be generated out of thin air, and the components that go into it have to do a lot more than in-game content and has components like personality coming into play. The rarer occurrence of it makes it so that when a player expresses such an emotion, it is most likely to be true, in my mind.What I would define as "fake" here really is a matter of opinion, and it might depend from player to player, as emotional reactions are largely a personality thing, but I feel as if the intensity of the emotional reaction is a key component of it. Mindmelding is a very strong emotion. As such it is very likely that someone saying they mindmeld with someone will say so in a very emotive manner, as opposed to a very composed manner. I understand that a lot of people on this site do not put much importance on tonality, as it can easily mislead and is a very volatile component, but in a case like this, I feel fairly confident in saying that this is a very good way of determining if a player truly is sincere when they say they mindmeld with someone. A lot of emotions can easily be faked (such as anger, which is why AtE is a very common scumtell). This one easily falls in the category of "hard to fake". A scum player can easily source their anger from various sources ("caught for the wrong reason" is a very easy source of anger), but they can hardly generate an emotion they will never actually feel. That is the key difference here. This is very important to understand, because mindmelding can actually cause a sort of domino effect in a game, where a mindmeld potentially spreads enough that everyone in the game believes that these two players that have just mindmelded and now trust each other are actually town. Having that sort of situation happen greatly increases the chances of town winning from that point forward.
Summary
To finish this post, I will reiterate what I think is the most important:
- Mindmelds are one of the strongest ways to trust someone to be town.
- Trust your own mindmelds. If you mindmeld with someone, it is extremely likely they are town, because the source of the mindmeld has to come from some inherent townie truth that you both share.
- Scum players have great interest in breaking mindmelds, as they create game losing situations for scums.
- Mindmelds can only be honestly felt by a townie. If someone brings it up, the chances that they are town is increased, so long as you perceive the emotion behind that to be genuine.
![:]](./images/smilies/icon_smiling.png "Cheerful Smile"){kind=icon}
And I think proving any of this would involve things like surveys and analyzing the responses you get from those, instead of the approach I tried to take earlier. This is actually very hard to prove and I'm mostly basing it on my own experience. It might very well be possible that a lot of people don't feel as strongly as I do when this thing happens to them.
