For this critical play analysis, I chose to play Spyfall. Designed by Alexandr Ushan and published by Hobby World, it bills itself as a party game for apparently most age groups. It’s hosted on the spyfall.app website platform, where everyone can connect to a party group and play face-to-face with the website functioning as the facilitator and role-assigner. Through Spyfall’s emphasis on face to face play and the potential for informal rules, it emphasizes the interpersonal interaction between players, allowing emergent strategies personalized for each group to evolve over time.
Spyfall is, according to the rules outlined on the website, intended to be played face to face, either virtually or in person. This is a common element in social deduction or hidden role games – other games such as Mafia or Secret Hitler similarly expect such an environment. This element of procedures and context inherent in the formalization of the game is, I believe, necessary in many ways to the genre. In many cases, it is much easier to tell if someone is lying to you when you can use all of the social tools of facial expression, body language, and tone of voice at your disposal. Without some of these aspects of interaction, such as in a voice call or over chat, players must work with less knowledge to make their decisions, which could lead them to feel like they’re just guessing, creating an overall less enjoyable experience. Further, a chat-based version of the game would not work well under the conditions of urgency that are created by the limited resource of time. The timer, present during the interrogation phase of the game, emphasizes the need to ask useful questions of each other to gain more insight each turn.
An image of the time limit imposed during the interrogation phase.
The informal and somewhat lenient nature of the rules also prioritizes the social element of the game and an understanding of your fellow players. The official website of the game, spyfall.app, explains that the question or interrogation stage of gameplay should go in a specific order, with each player being able to ask one question of another player before that player answers and asks someone else their own question; interestingly, however, the website listed on the course webpage to play the same game seemed to be a mirror. This site gave no rules or restrictions on the interrogation stage, only noting that these questions should be more descriptive than ones that would only elicit “yes/no” responses. As we used the platform specified on the course website, I observed that in the games I played the interrogation stage was handled organically, in which each player asked whoever they wanted a question. Despite the lack of explicit rules in this regard, we found that each player spent roughly the same amount of time asking and answering questions in the beginning, with more focused interrogation as other players became more sure of their theory on who the spy is. We also allowed multiple players to answer the same questions, using these responses to compare and contrast.
These looser restrictions allowed a more natural dynamic between players to emerge, as well as several key strategies for if one was playing as the spy or a normal player. For example, a spy at the beginning of the game has no contextual clues as to what the secret location is. In this case, a prudent choice would be to lay low and listen to the questions and responses from other players or, alternatively, be proactive in asking questions that would be particularly useful to them to reveal the location. The choice here might be very dependent on the familiarity of players with one another, as well as the above mentioned social interaction and deductive reasoning to be gleaned from face to face interaction. The group can then, due to the informal ruleset, organically move towards certain lines of suspicion and share space and the responsibility to ask meaningful questions. A stricter set of procedures formalized by the game developer might hinder this freedom, and in this way I believe there is a critique to be made on the original design as opposed to the more freeform one I played.
In conclusion, the analysis of Spyfall reveals not only the intricacies of its gameplay mechanics but also the importance of interpersonal interaction and emergent strategies within the social deduction genre. The emphasis on face-to-face play, whether virtual or in person, underscores the significance of nonverbal cues and social dynamics in discerning truth from deception. The game’s informal rules allow for a more natural and fluid experience, fostering a collaborative environment where players can adapt their strategies based on their understanding of one another. This flexibility enables the emergence of diverse gameplay tactics, whether one is playing as a spy or a regular player, and encourages active participation and engagement among all participants. While a stricter set of procedures may offer a more structured approach, the freedom afforded by Spyfall‘s informal ruleset promotes evolving strategies and learning your party group well, rather than gaming the system itself.
