For this assignment, I chose to play The Resistance. I have played a lot of Coup before, which is by the same people and set in the same universe as this game, so I knew I was in for a good time. This is a bluffing game, one of my personal favorite types of games. I love bluffing games because I am an actor, and they appeal to my enjoyment of acting and drama. I think I also love bluffing games because, very often, they involve some aspect of “figuring things out”. I really enjoy trying to figure things out for myself, but I equally enjoy talking about my thought process and trying to convince others that my intuitions are correct. I enjoy these things no matter what side I’m on. If I’m Resistance, I love trying to predict who is a Spy. If I’m a Spy, I love trying to figure out who I have fooled and who may be suspicious of me, and changing my behavior (and votes) accordingly. If I’m Resistance, I love trying to convince the other members that I know who the spies are. If I’m a Spy, of course, I love trying to convince everyone else that I’m not a Spy, and in fact, some other people are. That last one is my favorite part of bluffing games, but it’s probably also the most frustrating part to be on the receiving end of. I guess you could call it “false accusations”. If you’re a Spy, or the equivalent ‘bad side’, there’s nothing more fun than convincing everyone else that some poor innocent friend of yours is actually a Spy while they grow increasingly exasperated and protest (“guys, I swear, I’m not! I’m seriously not!” which of course only ever makes people more suspicious of them). It’s the same fun of watching your friend get voted out in Among Us while you were the alien the whole time. A bit of schadenfreude, maybe, combined with the glee of becoming closer to winning. On the flipside, there’s nothing more frustrating than having fingers pointed at you when you legitimately haven’t done anything wrong, or even remotely suspicious (or when, yes, something suspicious has happened in your vicinity, but it was clearly the doing of the actual Spy). I am not a very aggressive person in real life, but I’ve often found that I become quite aggressive in bluffing games, especially when I’m under the lens of suspicion (and whether it’s warranted or not). You have to be willing to defend yourself. In playing The Resistance, I found that it’s most often the passive players, those who are unwilling or unable to adequately defend themselves, who wind up unfairly targeted. This is the best strategy as a Spy. Identify the people who are not going to push back enough (or will do so poorly) on being accused, set them up for failure, and then point the finger right away, before anyone can make sense of what happened. The Resistance is awesome at the second part in particular, and moreso than other games I’ve played in this genre, because Spies are able to sink a mission in a way that is inherently public (the Failure card gets turned over so everyone can see that someone on the mission was a spy) but still untraceable to any particular person. Additionally, the element of a rotating leader adds a lot to the strategy. If one spy plants the seed early on about who to target, and the other spy picks up on it, when they are the leader, they can assemble the team such that their co-conspirator and the easy target are both on it. It’s easy too, if you’re the leader, to pick the team based on who you want to sink, but by having the person picking the members be separate from the person pointing the finger, you just obscure the relation a little bit more. Most people can draw a connection with one degree of separation (“hey, you picked the team, and now you’re accusing someone you put on the team, maybe you’re the spy”) but not so much two degrees of separation. Despite being a terrible liar in real life, I love bluffing games, perhaps because the lying is really only second to the strategy; the viability of your lie is most often not determined by your actual performance (though of course that’s part of it), but instead by how well you can back up the claims you’re making with “evidence” (fabricated or not) about another player’s behavior. So, in a sense, games like this are really more about reasoning, deduction, and making a case based on the merits moreso than they are about lying or performing. Maybe I should be a lawyer? I particularly enjoyed The Resistance because it adds enough layers of play (rotating leader, choosing a team, voting on team members, the ability to lie or tell the truth in either role) to be complex without being complicated. That is, it gives you a lot to chew on if you’re Resistance, or a lot of different methods of trickery at your disposal if you’re a Spy, and that’s whence I derive my fun.
Ethical question: “In general, we tend to view lying as morally wrong, but many games incorporate lying, bluffing, etc. as a core mechanic. 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?”
While it is true that, in general, we view lying as morally wrong, few people are truly Kantians when it comes to morality. That is, most people don’t truly believe (even if they claim to believe) that all moral rules are universal and apply regardless of circumstance. I’ll give you the classic example. Your friend James knocks on your door and, when you open it, frantically enters your Mirrielees apartment, quickly slamming and locking the door behind him. Before you can get the chance to ask him what’s got him so shaken up, you get another (very loud) knock on your door. You look through the peephole and see a large, bearded man wielding a shotgun (nevermind how he got in…). He says “I’m looking for a man named James. When I find him, I’m going to kill him. Is he in your apartment?”. Is lying to James’s pursuer morally wrong in this case? The answer (unless you’re Kant) is obviously no. Why is that? It’s because we all intuitively believe that the moral circumstances of an action matter as much, if not more, than the contents of the action itself. You lie (morally bad) to the man to prevent him from killing (morally very bad) James. So, the net morality of your action, under the circumstances, is actually quite positive. Now, let’s look at lying in a game. Yes, you lie (morally bad), but what are the circumstances?
- You have to lie to play the game correctly. So, your action is actually in service of progressing the game and having fun with your friends (morally good)
- You were assigned to be the person who lied by the game itself (in most bluffing games, this is randomly decided at the start of the round), so it isn’t like you’ve chosen to do this
- Everyone else has, by virtue of playing, agreed that lying will happen, and that it’s okay, so it isn’t like you’re violating some shared understanding of the circumstances
As we can see, it’s not a wrong action at all. You’re doing it in circumstances that permit and even require it, and in which everyone has agreed that it’s actually a good thing to do (your friends would have no fun if you said ‘actually guys, I can’t lie to you because I’m a Kantian, I am the Spy this round’).
