As I played Secret Hitler, which is a game primarily about lying and trying to get away with it, I think that the main learning point I found was that while lying was part of the game I personally found it quite hard. The hidden-role mechanic discouraged me from communicating naturally because every statement I made was treated as evidence by the other players. Rather than speaking freely, I carefully considered every response, which is not how I normally communicate. This is because when I was chancellor I could either promote the fascist regime to support my team or protect myself and support the liberals. Therefore, it made the game too easy for liberals as they can protect themselves and support their team with the same move. However, I found that with fascists that the decision making was harder than the liberal’s decision and caused some hesitation and therefore made the other players instantly know they were fascists and could potentially be Hitler. I believe that personally I’m not very good at lying and I found this out during this game as I decided to support the fascists over protecting myself and that led to me getting kicked out because they didn’t believe my lie that I only had two factists policy cards to pick from. On the other hand, when I was a liberal there was no suspicion of me at all because I didn’t have to lie or hesitate when I put down the policy cards.
I also found that the game created a decision making imbalance for the 2 sides making it too easy for the liberals to win. However, the decision making for who to kill is more interesting as it allows people to make cases about why they shouldn’t be killed, making the current president struggle to figure out who is fascist and therefore should kill. I found that in terms of my decision making for the game that the time pressure of not hesitating and immediately knowing my game plan was quite hard as I didn’t know previously what cards I would get from the chancellor. This leads to rushed and rash decisions that I wouldn’t normally have with no time/social pressure to make sure I don’t get uncovered. I think that the mechanics of the game made the chancellor have the most pressure compared to everyone else as well making some people never get investigated, however some people if they were always picked to be chancellor had a lot of chances to be placed under scrutiny and if they were fascist, to be detected.
Overall, I think that Secret Hitler, as the different roles are passed around the groups, such as chancellor and president, allowed for me to feel that everyone had a role in the game and could influence it all equally. While there is always a louder and more dominant person who influences the game the most, Secret Hitler, in my opinion, did quite a good job in preventing this with the changing roles. While I was playing the game, I felt that I had not only said who I believe is fascist as a liberal but also I had a chance to try to lie and get out of scrutiny as a fascist.
From a more ethical side, lying is an inherent part of Secret Hitler as people try to escape from scrutiny but is it justified? I believe that bluffing games such as Secret Hitler makes lying ethical. That’s because during the games the players enter a magic circle in which the rules of the exterior world don’t apply and therefore allow the rules to become their new societal rules including making lying ethical and allowed. Therefore this means lying is ethical and therefore is an expected and accepted mechanic.
