Critical Play #2: Two Truths & A Lie
For my critical play, my team and I chose Two Truths & A Lie as a competitor game. There is no consensus on the creator of the game, which I feel attests to its widespread popularity – it is difficult to pinpoint a source of creation. There are no physical artifacts for this game, and the platform is verbal / in-person play primarily. There are online tools that mimic in person game play, but they do not go beyond being there in my opinion, as an intention of the game is fellowship and creating camaraderie and familiarity with the players.
Although quite familiar to most, it is valuable to refresh the core elements of Two Truths & A Lie. The theme is social deduction and building familiarity with fellow players. The intended type of fun is a synergy of fellowship, discovery, and expression, as this is a social game that invites us to express ourselves and our personality while simultaneously discovering more information about who we are with. Since my execution of the gameplay was in-person, there were no graphic design elements. Everyone was familiar with the gameplay mechanics, so there was no need for an online tool to facilitate gameplay. The mechanic of each player giving three statements (composed of two truths and one falsehood) for their peers to guess, creates a dynamic of relatively equitable visibility (opportunity to share information about yourself), which lastly, creates an aesthetic of fellowship and discovery (and a little of challenge and expression).
Two Truths and A Lie is lower stakes and more formal than its peer games, including Paranoia, Mafia, or Truth or Dare (social deduction / intense fellowship games). This goes hand-in-hand with the handling of abuse. Hurtful gameplay is minimized as each player chooses with statements to have their cohort guess from; therefore, the floodgates to more sensitive information are in the hands of each individual player, clearly opposed to truth or dare for example. This allows the scope of the game to include workplaces and more professional settings.
Further Commentary
Playing this game like a designer allowed me to ideate a way to make this game better. Active observing while experiencing is best facilitated as constantly asking myself, “where do I feel a major emotional response”. My most intense emotional reactions were the joy I felt when a peer guessed the falsehood correctly: meaning my self-perception is in alignment with how others perceive me, attesting to self-awareness. Secondly, I felt sadness when someone guessed one I perceived as wildly incorrect or unlike myself.
For example, a meaningful pull-quote from gameplay was “oh my gosh, I didn’t know you knew that about me” with a warm tone.
Therefore, this active reflection reveals that the biggest pain point or highpoint of the game is created from the binary correct or incorrect guessing mechanism of Two Truths and A Lie. However, this is only created from mutual engagement from other players as a multilateral player game, and it is common in gameplay for certain players to be less bought-into game play. Therefore, a way to level up this game is to add a justification element that adds points to a scoreboard. Therefore, we can optimize buy-in through harmless competitive energy (since it helps the fellowship aspect of getting to know each other). This would look like everyone in the circle guessing the lie with a one sentence justification of why they think it is false, and the person whose statements are about choosing the most correct one, earning the winner a point.
I do not want to alter the objective formal element as that is fundamental to the spirit of the game, but creating a new outcome (a clear winner) through the proposed procedure above (specific rule) would be net positive. An additional extension question would be, “how can specific boundaries change game play”? What if the magic circle was a whole room and an answer makes you step forward or back (with the center being a win)?
Appendix
[Bolded content includes formal elements, types of fun, playing like a game designer, and class concepts]
