Once upon a time, I looked my friend in the eye and promised with full sincerity I would never betray or abandon him, only to immediately stab him in the back. This, of course, happened while playing The Resistance. In The Resistance, loyal resistance members want missions to pass, and the spies are willing to do or say anything to make them fail. Playing The Resistance critically revealed how the two roles in the game, loyal or spy, can shift my communication style from defensive to deceptive as my social goals change.
The mechanics of the Resistance are fairly simple. The game has 5 missions, and each round a leader proposes a team to send on the current mission. The entire table then votes on whether to send the team on the given mission. If the vote fails, a new leader is assigned and a new team proposed. Eventually, a team will be sent on the mission. Loyal members of the resistance must vote to pass every mission, but spies can choose to vote to fail a mission, and one “fail” vote is all it takes for a mission to fail. The goal of the loyal resistance members is to pass 3 missions, the goal of the spies is to prevent that. The game is played with these simple rules, but the majority of the game occurs in the social dynamics created by these rules.
As a loyal resistance member, you can aid the chance of missions passing by determining who the spies are and convincing the others of your loyalty. Loyal players start with no information, so they can only determine the loyalty of others by others’ actions in the game, the outcomes of missions, and their vibes. The game does a good job of revealing information slowly while still keeping some uncertainty in play.
During one game as a loyal player, I was placed on the team for the first mission, a two-person mission, and it failed. Immediately, given my loyalty, I knew the other player on that mission was a spy. Everyone else at the table, however, could only determine with certainty that the spy was one of the two of us. Anticipating this, the spy acted shocked and tried to shift suspicions onto me. In this moment I became assertive and defensive over my innocence. I was talking louder, I felt agitated over having just been framed, and I was confrontational towards my accuser and those who were convinced by their lie. Certainly assertiveness is not the only possible and probable response to a false accusation, but it was one I shifted to as a defense mechanism. The interaction revealed how, for us humans, the threat of decreased social-status can be as impactful as a physical threat. When I felt like I might lose everyone’s trust while also letting a spy sneakily gain their trust in exchange, the shift in communication style was an automatic, almost fight-or-flight response.
When playing as a spy, the social burden is flipped compared to the loyal player. The burden of the loyal player is discernment, but as a spy you start with full knowledge of who’s a spy and who is loyal. The burden for the spy is to win enough people’s trust to get voted onto teams, and ultimately vote to fail 3 missions. While as a loyal player I ruminated over other’s actions for signs of suspicion. When forced to deceive I found myself in the mirror image mindstate. I ruminated on how every other player might interpret my actions. This rumination quickly became recursive, “If I do this, they’ll think that, but they might think I did it to make them think that…”. Recursive thinking led me to one of my best plays as a spy, where I failed the first mission with two spies on it, threw the other spy under the bus, and eventually gained a loyal player’s trust for the rest of the game. Their advocacy for me in later rounds led to a successful spy win. The resistance either gives you the challenge of social deception or discernment depending on your role, and each of these challenges transforms the way you show up socially.
Ethics Question: Does lying as a part of a game constitute a wrong action? If not, what is so special about games that they permit us to lie to our friends?
Lying in a game does not constitute a moral wrong. To see how lying in a game is different than in real life, we must view games as teachers. Imagine someone who had never lied before, and who assumed no one out there ever lied. Or maybe they assumed that people might tell a white lie here or there, but not much more than that. Playing a game like the resistance would force this person to tell a complete lie, one that completely denies reality in service of their own goals, directly towards the person who would be negatively impacted. This may reveal something about human nature to this person. You can lie about anything, claim or deny anything. You can do so to your own advantage. If you play the resistance enough, you’ll learn that it’s possible to improve one’s lying technique and get quite comfortable and convincing while lying. The Resistance does not condone lying in daily life, but it teaches what is possible with lies and how far others might be willing to take a lie. This is useful learning.
