Blood on the Clocktower is a social deduction board game created by The Pandemonium Institute in which players are divided into two teams: good (Townsfolk and Outsiders) and evil (the Demon and his Minions). Each day, the good team shares information in an effort to identify and kill the Demon; each night, the Demon kills a member of the good team. Each player also has a special ability that activates in either the day or night. What separates this game from similar games like Avalon or Mafia is the way that “death” and “killing” work as mechanics. Though dead players can no longer use their abilities, they remain active participants, able to still communicate with other players and help their team win.
Over last weekend, I played Blood on the Clocktower with some undergrad friends of mine who happened to be in town. I was put on the evil team as the Poisoner; each night, the Poisoner secretly neutralizes the ability of one other player. Since it was my first time playing, I didn’t really know what I was supposed to do. I largely shied away from communicating with other players in the daytime for fear of slipping up and revealing my own role, which unfortunately had the adverse effect of making some other players suspicious of me when it came time to nominate players for execution in the daytime rounds. I also had a very hard time utilizing my Minion ability correctly. For the first few nights, I just poisoned players at random, which I have to imagine was not the most cunning way to play.
Then, near the midpoint of the game, I came up with a strategy. In daytime discussions, I started telling people that I was actually the Saint; if the Saint dies by execution in the daytime, the game ends, and the evil team wins. The goal of this was to make the good team hesitant to nominate me for execution, allowing me to operate as the Poisoner during the night. (By this point, I had a better sense of which players had which roles, and therefore which players I should poison.) I had little faith in my ability to actually convince anyone of this, especially with multiple players already dead and everyone on high alert. To my surprise, it worked to tremendous effect, to the extent that the Demon was able to kill enough Townsfolk and Outsiders to bring the evil team to victory.
This experience showed me some aspects of the way I play social games that I might not have previously been aware of. I usually find myself to be a pretty sociable person, even in new situations with new people, but I think that really changed when I didn’t know a lot about the game or my role within it. I became so worried about making a bluffing mistake or letting my team down that I, in a certain way, refrained from fully playing the game. Perhaps that was arguably the smart thing to do, given that Blood on the Clocktower rewards shrewd players with an acute sense of when and when not to divulge information. Still, I found myself a bit surprised by my own shyness. Of course, if I were to play the game again with this improved understanding of its mechanics, I imagine I would be more talkative and more comfortable.
As far as the assigned ethics question goes, I do not think lying always constitutes a wrong action in a game. Especially when it comes to Blood on the Clocktower, Secret Hitler, or Among Us, the act of deception is what makes the game fun in the first place. Imagine, for instance, a game where the Demon and Minions simply surrendered when asked to identify themselves, making no effort to elude suspicion or misdirect the other players. In my view, this would cause the game to dissolve at a fundamental level; and if a certain action is deeply necessary to hold the game together, how could I possibly say that it is wrong?
Moreover, I think the reason why lying to our friends is permissible in a game has to do with that game’s “magic circle”: its ability to transport us from one world to another. The way I personally saw it, I was not lying to my beloved friends; I was a “character,” lying to certain other “characters,” to whom it was directly, objectively advantageous for me to lie, considering the environment we were all inhabiting. I think this is corroborated by the fact that no one had any hard feelings toward me once the game concluded and we all “stepped out” of that other world, just as no one would hold a grudge (in ideal circumstances, anyway) after you threw a Spiny Shell at them in Mario Kart or knocked them off of the stage in Super Smash Bros. It all has to do with the mutual understanding that all actions taken in the game are simply taken to bring about each player’s goals, and therefore not indicative of our real relationships as people outside of the game.
