I chose to play Spyfall, which is a social deduction game meant for a group of 3-8 in which everyone is given a role with one person receiving the role of “spy” who the rest of the group attempts to find. This game was originally published by Hobby World, and has various analog and digital formats now. The target audience for the game is listed as people aged 13+ and is widely considered to be a casual party game.
The game is played as follows: everyone in the group is shown a location for which their roles are people that would be at the location, except the spy whose objective is to figure out the location before being found out to be the spy. The objective of the rest of the group is to agree on who the spy is before the spy guesses the location correctly. The rules are fairly simple, but after playing it, I found that the game is largely about communication in addition to deduction. Certain variations of the game have different locations, sometimes following a certain theme or slightly different mechanics such as multiple spies.
I realized through playing the game that I have a very reserved communication style. I didn’t ask direct or obvious questions in fear of giving away too much information and instead asked easy or guessable questions and paid attention to the reactions and accumulation of responses from the other people in the group. I found this strategy to be generally effective, although sometimes I was falsely accused of being the spy because of how ambiguous some of my questions and responses were. As I continued to play, I began considering how my communication would be interpreted by the others in the group rather than just thinking about what I wanted to communicate.
I thought the mechanics of Spyfall were interesting. Each player has slightly different information but all of the players, including the spy, have the same objective which is to appear believable. With this design, all of the questions asked in the game need to be chosen to not reveal too much about yourself while acquiring the information needed for the specific player’s objective. A lot of the information comes from tone, reactions, and communication choices rather than focusing on a very logical deduction. There is a big focus on conversation compared to other deduction games such as Among Us since there aren’t other mechanics to gather information from, which places a greater emphasis on group communication.
The structure and mechanics of the game, especially the turn by turn interrogation and group voting of spies, naturally brings out interesting group dynamics where some players likely take more initiative or take more charge of interrogation/deduction and some players play safely or passively while simply observing. I find that I fall into the second category, and in my experience it seems like most of the people I play with have a similar style. From what I observed, if the entire group consisted of too many very direct people, the spy would often win because too much information would usually be revealed quickly, whereas if the entire group consisted of too many very passive players, the spy would often win slowly due to false accusations or being able to stay unaccused for long enough to gather information. I noticed that the group would tend to improve over time, implicitly balancing this mechanism and learning each other’s styles, and over time with the same group it became harder for the spy to win. Additionally, the rules of the game that the game continues until an agreed accusation or selected guess from the spy is made require decision making skills for each player. Each person seemed to realize they had to manage and track everyone else’s impressions of them and make decisions of accusation or guessing based on their current states. It was common for impressions of the same person to vary among the rest of the group, which made this an interesting task handled differently by each person. I found that in many rounds, there were people unusually suspicious of specific people, sometimes falsely too. For example occasionally there would be strong accusations followed by the rest of the group saying “that answer made perfect sense to me”, or “I understand what they meant” which resulted in exciting discussions where the group had to be mindful of not revealing a ton of information in their justifications while still understanding each other before making a decision. Additionally, the spies eventually realized that if they had too many suspicions of them already that it would be optimal to just make a guess, and the other people eventually realized that once the location became obvious that it would just be optimal to finalize their strongest accusation.
I do not personally think that the type of lying done in Spyfall is necessarily unethical because the premise of the game in itself is that one player is heavily incentivised to lie intentionally thus it is completely expected behavior. This is different from lying otherwise since this form of lying does not necessarily affect any real sense of trust among a group outside the setting of playing the game. I noticed that while playing the game, people would occasionally, mostly jokingly, make statements along the lines of “I trusted you!”, or “you got us!” during surprising reveals, but I do not view lying contained to the scope of a game that is voluntarily being played to be an ethically wrong action such as a betrayal or moral shortcoming. I view this type of lying to be something closer to acting given the narrative of the game, where each player is literally trying to play a part in the storyline of being a spy/normal person at a location among a group, which I do not think is wrong at all when this premise is already completely disclosed.
