Inhuman Conditions is a two-player interrogation and roleplaying game designed by Tommy Maranges and Cory O’Brien, with illustrations by Mackenzie Schubert. The game targets players who enjoy roleplaying, from strangers to close friends, though enjoyment depends on personality and connection between participants.
Inhuman Conditions creates a tension between immersion and playfulness that reveals how player expectations shape gameplay experiences. While designed as a interrogation scenario, the game often transforms into a humorous social experience that challenges. When playing Inhuman Conditions, my partner and I unintentionally “jokeified” the experience rather than creating the chilling interrogation atmosphere the game intended. This stemmed from our conditioning from other social/party games that multiplayer card games should be light-hearted and filled with laughter.
For example, when my friend received the “cannibal” background, our interaction became comical rather than tense:
Me: “What hopes do you have for your best friend?”
Friend: “I hope my friend smells good.”
Me: “What daily actions do you take to help bring about that hope?”
Friend: “I would catch and raise them in my 100-square-kilometer house for 30 years until they grow.”
I couldn’t help laughing (which was my mistake—I should have realized that the Investigator is also an important role to play) and had no idea that her identity was actually a violent robot with limitations including having to mention a specific number greater than 20 four times. I chose to believe she was human—taking for granted that humans have greater freedom to joke around, a predisposition I need to work on.
Cooperative vs. Competitive?
Based on the game mechanism, there is an aspect where two players work against the game itself—which happens when the Suspect is human, in which case players need to work together to prove humanity so both the Suspect and Investigator win. However, if the Suspect is a robot, the game becomes more of a zero-sum player-versus-player game like Crazy 8s, which my game partner and I were much more familiar with and subconsciously defaulted to.
We knew the rules but ignored their implications due to cultural influences (prizing individual wins) and personality (enjoying drama—having both win seemed boring). I noticed a tendency to focus more on “how robot this Suspect sounds” rather than “how human this Suspect sounds.” If I thought the suspect didn’t sound like a robot, I simply regarded them as human without considering if they actually demonstrated human qualities. This is something I need to be careful about when playing/designing game.
Counterintuitive Difficulty Levels
After another round where I played as a Suspect (patient robot) and was caught by my friend, we discussed how—based on our personalities, approaches, and how my friend knew me—it actually seemed easier for violent robots to blend in than patient robots. Patient robots have vaguer rules than the specific actions/tasks that violent robots must perform, and since patient robots’ limitations are violation-based rather than completion-based, patient robot players (like me) may place more attention on obeying the rules than fulfilling the task. This creates a persona that’s more one-dimensional.
I was playing as a conspiracy theorist with a patient robot limitation, and I simply portrayed myself as an ego-boosting, stereotypical conspiracy theorist, which my friend said gave me away. Yet in the round where I played as a violent robot, I won because the action/task-based limitation didn’t require me to consistently be conscious of not violating a vague rule, which actually freed more of my brain power to create a creative persona/background that wasn’t caught by the Investigator. This result was counterintuitive to our expectations.
Easier Start?
I feel the game could be improved in several ways. As first-time players, my friend and I found the process of reading and understanding the rulebook too lengthy, especially the part about confirming the code. While some might find this a great way to simulate the interrogation procedure, we spent excessive time trying to figure out this part before getting to the fun roleplaying aspect.
During this process, we both looked at the human/robot cards and understood that the human’s code maze is harder than the robot’s calibration guide. Even before the investigation, this played a significant factor in determining how likely someone was a robot based on questions like “So, what’s the third letter after A?” This somewhat broke the game experience, and I personally didn’t like it that much. After two rounds, we decided to skip the code calibration part altogether. There could be a better, more obvious way to confirm that both players have prompt/catalyzer PDFs for the same module, such as simply labeling the module name somewhere.
Ethics Discussion: Lying in Games
“Does lying as 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?”
We had a deep discussion about this topic and concluded that in this specific context, lying doesn’t constitute a very wrong action. Honestly being a cannibal in the game seemed more severe than lying, yet we didn’t find the roleplaying troublesome or ethically concerning.
We considered this phenomenon from multiple perspectives:
1. Game Mechanics: Lying is the fundamental mechanism of how you win the game. When lying is the key objective, it’s almost as if the surrounding society (in this case, the game environment) is promoting this action. The social pressure, suspicion, and supervision create a context where the usual rule that “you shouldn’t lie” no longer applies.
2. The Magic Circle: We understand that our actions don’t cause actual damage to other players in real life. The lying doesn’t have actual consequences, and we don’t inflict mental damage on each other. Lying becomes acceptable as long as we don’t have harmful intentions behind it, and the magic circle helps establish this boundary. Once we step out of this circle, we become human again—not investigators or robots.
Due to blog post length, I decide to add additional comment here:
Ethical concerns arise only when both parties don’t understand either the magic circle or the boundary between reality and fiction. We discussed the Stanford Prison Experiment and how it made participants mentally unstable despite a certain type of magic circle existing in that experiment. The consequence was that players blurred the line between the roles they played and their real identities through prolonged periods of pretending and pressure from the game designer (in that case, professors) to act in certain ways.
In such cases, the social pressure penetrates the magical circle, and a supposedly safe place becomes dangerous as the social impact and the role in the game start to blur with real identity, creating a two-way influence. Previously, it had been one-way: players use their own life experiences to create and interpret a role in a game, with the roles having limited impact on reality. Once this transformation becomes inverted and the game impacts real life, it becomes very dangerous and sensitive.
A notorious example is the Blue Whale Challenge, a social network phenomenon that impacted multiple countries, where teenagers who hadn’t yet developed mature self-identity were involved in obeying certain tasks that gradually deteriorated their mental health and led to suicide. Another explanatory example is BDSM—it can be safe if boundaries are clearly defined, but when emotions arise and lead to blurry lines between reality and the magic circle (or when the entire world and society become a magic circle), the roleplay during the game blurs with self-identity, potentially causing damage and compulsive thoughts that raise ethical concerns.
Overall, I feel that boundary-setting is the most important aspect that makes games a safe place to express, learn, and experiment with something completely different from real life in a harmless way. Inhuman Conditions provides this opportunity within its interrogation framework, even if players like us might subvert its intended atmosphere with humor and playfulness.