The game I’ve been playing these past few days is Spyfall, which is a very interesting game.
The rules of this game are very simple. At the beginning of each round, we will assign a card to each person. There are two types of cards, most of which are cards that display location and a card that only displays “SPY”. Players will automatically classify their factions based on the cards they receive: Spy and others. After classification, the game officially begins. Within 8 minutes, players need to ask each other questions, and the person being asked must answer before continuing to ask the next person. However, it should be noted that the person being asked cannot ask the person who just asked back.
The winning and losing conditions of the game are divided into three types:
1.Accusation
Any player can initiate a vote at any time, and if other players unanimously believe that the player is a spy, then the person being voted must display their card. If the person who displays the card is a spy, then others win; if not, then the spy wins. It should be noted that if there is no unanimous agreement to vote, that player cannot initiate another vote.
2.Spy’s Declaration
If a spy thinks they already know the location, they can choose to show their spy card and say the location. If it’s right, the spy wins; if not, others win.
3.Timer Runs Out
If no one completes the first two winning processes within 8 minutes, everyone needs to be forced to designate one person. If not everyone points out that one person or the person designated by everyone is not a spy, then the spy wins directly. If everyone designates the same person as a spy, then the others win.
In the process of playing this game, I felt a sense of contradiction: I need to tell others that I am not a spy, but I cannot tell them what is on my card. It can be said that this game requires me to participate and continuously output content through mandatory questioning and time limits. It effectively highlights my silent characteristic when playing Bluffing games: I don’t know how to say or how not to expose myself. This is actually the role I play in group activities: listening, occasionally discussing or asking questions, and then assisting in completing tasks. It can be said that the mechanism of this game itself is an extremely contradictory requirement, which not only requires players to disguise their expressions as spies, but also requires players to prove that they are not spies.
So, returning to the two core mechanisms of this game itself: questioning and voting, I think I understand how this game really affects us. The questioning mechanism forces us to constantly output content and prevent spy players from hearing effective information, which brings a sense of urgency and an environmental label: speaking too much or too little is a sign of being a “spy”. At the same time, the voting mechanism reinforces this dilemma: the more you say, the more likely the spy is to identify you and use it to win. But if you say too little effective information, you will be identified as a spy because that spy can be considered unclear about how much effective information is.
By combining these two game mechanics, players need to lie or deliberately hide their characters. This is why such games often require discussions on ethics and morality. Whenever we need to lie, we need to think about a 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? My answer is that lying itself is allowed in games, or rather, this type of game mechanism itself encourages players to lie. I think the uniqueness of games lies in the fact that they create an environment that requires almost no cost: whether you lie or not, you can use games as a starting point for your actions. It is precisely because there is a starting point that can be used to escape that many behaviors that are usually subject to ethical and moral constraints can be allowed. So, the reason why games allow lying is because the game creates a space for players to do almost anything at zero cost through game rules during gameplay.
