Exploring Betrayal & Deceit & Secrecy in Interactions

Very Incomplete Intro Thoughts

I’ve been pushing myself to explore a wider range of human emotions, and how our expressiveness changes from childhood to adulthood.

And I’ve been meditating a lot on how strong friendships are formed. Not the businessy kind built on surface interests and reciprocity of favors, but the deeper friendships – people you likely grew up with and spent a lot of time with. And, likely someone you’ve seen a lot of different emotions out of. (And tangentially, someone you’ve experienced boredom with!)

Anyway, this is a long, roundabout way to talk about Mafia (/ Werewolf) – dynamic games that I found extremely bonding in my youth yet rarely play today.

The dynamics of Mafia create a wide range of interaction –

• snarkiness - “If you backstab me our friendship is over”
• disbelief - “I didn’t see that coming!”
• “I knew it all along”
• nervousness - acting as a bad actor
• deceit - YOU LITERALLY HAVE TO LIE TO WIN
• group formation & bullying
• manipulation
• victory
• persuasion

Anyway, I want to explore this further as I believe seeing this wider range of emotions from other people builds strong bonds quickly and establishes a deep level-of-comfort.

Human Experiments

Alas, I didn’t have time to design an entire interaction to exhibit everything I wanted so I focused on interactions that involve betrayal. (Side note: My girlfriend did not like that I was reading several articles about backstabbing.)

Because I’ve thinking a lot about it, I built my interaction around hide-and-seek, a game that almost all of us played when were younger but don’t play as an adult. (Fascinating!)

First, with myself & 3 roommates, we played one round of traditional hide-and-seek. I wanted to re-familiarize everyone with the rules.

### The Rules
1. "Eeny, meeny, miny, moe" to choose a first "It"
2. "It" closes eyes and counts to 100 (we're older and bigger so we need more time to hide)
3. "It" then starts looking. First person found is now "it".

Next, I introduced betrayal.

### Modifications
1. I was "it"
2. I chose someone one of the hiders to be complicit
  - I told them that there goal was to target another person without them finding out
3. As I was seeking, complicit person would find anyway they could to help me target another person.
  - I left this open-ended.
4. I found the target person and made them "it".

Honestly, I don’t know why I thought this would be an interesting game because in practice it wasn’t. But I’ve been a bit stuck about thinking up a better interaction.

But in discussing it after, in theory it was interesting.

Documentation

• Document the event.

Assignment

• Design and run a human-only (no technology) interaction.
  • Be clear about what relationship dynamics you’re exploring: e.g. open-ended, confrontation!
    • Exploring betrayal, or more broadly some sort of secrecy and adversarial. So I wasn’t looking for open confrontation.
  • Be clear about what emotional dynamics you’re exploring: e.g. self-consciousness and validation
    • Column C of (in)visible, which to me expressed self-consciousness from group uncertainty.
• Post-mortem:
  • What did you expect to happen?
    • People to get snarky at each other
    • Suspicion
  • What actually happened?
    • Betrayal dynamic didn’t really work
    • The “traitor” was not really bothered. There wasn’t enough there to be interesting objective-wise for the traitor.
    • The “target” was not suspicious during play. Was a bit miffed afterwards, annoyed because they thought their good hiding spots were ruined.
    • Were they invested?
  • What could you tweak to get a very different outcome?
    • Would this be different with children?
    • Back to the drawing board on this one…