The anonymous accounts were the brainchild of Sigurd, who had been toying with the idea back when he was still a Gameroom moderator some months back. Checking back through my PMs, he initially raised the issue in August of 2010 with the intention of basically, killing off the metagame (the exact definition of which I’ll get to later on). issaikhaan and I, the other two moderators, agreed with the idea’s premise, as we’d all been victims of online typecasting of a sort. Over the next several months, the idea crawled along, with Sigurd liaising with Tosa on how to properly set something like this up.
Things on the anonymous account front really picked up during the late winter/early spring of this year thanks to two separate events: First, we finalized the plans for the upcoming Gameroom Anniversary celebration over the summer and decided that then would be an excellent time to roll out the idea, which would be something very new and (we thought) the players would enjoy. Second was the forum staff restructuring in the aftermath of Tosa’s passing. Sigurd was now a Tech Admin, with access to a lot more of the nuts and bolts that made the forum work and was thus a lot more able to bring the anonymous accounts scheme to fruition. In addition, he was aided by another Tech Admin in TinCow, who had spent time in the Gameroom and was able to help out with the implementation. On the eve of the Anniversary, everything was in place.
Deciding that a test run before the real thing happened was probably for the best, khaan set up a mini game entitled “The Copa Clash” in which for the very first time the players would be posting under anonymous identities. The idea was that the Tech Admins provided the game host, in this case khaan, with a spreadsheet detailing the login information of all of the anonymous accounts, which the host would then send out one-by-one to players along with their role information. The slightly annoying catch, of course, was that the players would have to log out of their usual accounts and into their anonymous accounts in order to post in the thread, and then reverse the process. I was one of the seven players, anxiously seeing how the game would turn out.
All in all, things went okay. There were no technical issues, which was a big relief, and the game ended in a last-minute townie victory. However, in what was a harbinger of things to come in Mafia X, posting activity dropped sharply from the usual levels. Most of the time players would log in, lodge a vote, and that would be it for the round until it came time to vote again. I was a bit uneasy about this, but chalked it up to it only being a mini game (seven total players) and a vanilla one to boot. What else could you say, really?
In Mafia X, there was plenty of reason for optimism. First, it was a much larger game anyway, even without the distinctions of it being the start of the summer-long Anniversary celebration and it being the tenth game in a – and I say this as a fact, not to brag – very popular and well-loved series. Second, I made the sign-ups public, so you actually knew who was playing, unlike Copa, where the players truly went in blind. Third, I figured that if all else failed, the tightness of the endgame, which is traditionally what has made my games memorable, would serve to crank up activity to its usual levels.
So, as I sent out the 36 information PMs, I was closely observing post-count levels (a selfish part of me wanted another 1,000-post game, which, while not meaning as much as it used to, would be my seventh), but also what the anonymous accounts’ impact would be on the metagame.
The metagame in the context of the Gameroom is difficult to define, but my best shot at it is as follows: allowing your past experiences and knowledge of other players to influence your own play during a particular game. In a truly dispassionate game whatsoever, without any metagame, the players make decisions purely on their experiences and motives for that particular game and nothing else. Obviously after five years and counting of Mafia here on the .Org, this has never happened once, not even in Mafia I (because a) nobody knew what the *#%! they were doing in that game anyway, and b) a lot of decisions were made based on experiences in other parts of the forum). Now, without the easy option of voting for Player X just because they were Player X was no longer available. The players would have to do a lot more legwork in order to achieve the same results as before.
From my observations, the reduction (not elimination, as described later) of the metagame by the anonymous accounts swayed the game in a few ways. First, and perhaps least importantly, the foolish, jokey reasons for voting people in the early rounds (“GH used a weird smiley, lynch him!”) were gone. However, they were replaced by foolish, jokey reasons for voting people in the early rounds based off their anonymous account names (“Vote: [for] Pedro” applies here), so we’ll call this one a wash. Second, voters were now unable to equate in-thread behavior with a particular source, so there was no looking for deviations in usual behavior. You could no longer rely on discrepancies like a usual lurker all of a sudden becoming quite active or a notoriously jumpy player suddenly acting a lot more calculating and cerebral. This meant the players had a lot less to rely on, even if it was subverted in some instances when players were able to figure out who was behind their masks. Third, it saved the mafia team a ton of speculation and misery.
As any mafioso alumnus from a vanilla game will tell you, the endgame is always the hardest part of the task. If you make one mistake – say the wrong thing, vote the wrong person, kill off the wrong people – you’re sunk. During the night phase you agonize over your choices, essentially trying to craft a credible narrative that the remaining townies will buy into. As the numbers continue to sink, this becomes nearly impossible to do and I will submit is the main reason why the mafiosi have such a poor survival rate in my games. A big part of the reason for this is the metagame. Say, for a minute, you’re a mafioso (we’ll say you’re already working alone and your partner has been lynched) and you’re doing two nightkills that reduce the town’s numbers from five to three. Your choices are Player A, who’s been a lurker, Player B, who’s been extremely verbose but wrong a lot of the time, Player C, who’s been lynchbait for a few rounds now, Player D, who is targeting you as the lynch for this upcoming round, and Player E, who was the deciding vote on your partner the last round. Sound difficult? That’s the anonymous account, non-metagame version. Now, in the metagame version, add names, posting styles, and histories to all of the players. Suddenly, Player C is a noted veteran who is renowned for slipping out of a sure lynch. Suddenly, Player E has a history of disagreement with Player B and isn’t apt to go along with Player B’s (probably incorrect) lynch choice. Suddenly, Player A is the type to get mad at being offed so late in the game and come out of nowhere with a ridiculously cogent argument against you. Suddenly, Player D is not just coming after you, but is a noted endgame specialist and has saved the town’s butt in similar situations in the past. Suddenly, you just had an experience with Player B in a recent game that could possibly connect you to him if you were to nightkill Player B now. So who do you kill? Picking one target is difficult enough, yet alone two. If your head is spinning right now from all of this, this means I have done my job in describing just how much the metagame can ruin a mafioso’s life.
All of this was more or less nonexistent for CR and Kage this game. They had far less to worry about, while the town’s usual methods of finding reasons to vote for people were significantly reduced. In addition, I think that a lot of people were trying not to be “discovered” for who they really were, which meant brevity was the order of the day for a while. Brevity, of course, being the diligent townie’s worst enemy, since when it comes time to make serious votes, there is far less information to go off of.
(Additionally, I think that trying to hide one’s identity in this game was ultimately meaningless, for two reasons. First of all, just because people now know who you are does not affect your chance of being a mafioso in the slightest. Second of all, it brings the metagame – detrimental to the mafia, as described above – back into play.)
The ultimate result, as we all know, was a Total Mafia Victory for the old-timers, CR and Kage. I’ll detail exactly why I think this was the case in my upcoming commentary, but this essay will conclude by looking at the larger implications. In other words, what have we learned?
Number one, the town has some catching up to do. Vanilla games, especially when uncommon, can serve to expose the player base’s inability to truly find mafiosi without the crutch of detectives, protections, information in the writeup, networks, inter-villain crossfire, pure luck, etc. Now, this had of course been the case for all of my previous vanilla games as well, with the town conducting itself admirably. However, this time I removed a second crutch: the crutch of the metagame, and the town fell on its face. This tells me that in the future, people are going to have to do more/better in-thread detective work if they want to catch the mafia on their own.
Number two, the anonymous accounts prove a long-standing maxim that the more information that is generated (usually), the better it is for the town. Despite tying the record for game length, with a couple of tiebreaker rounds thrown in there, Mafia X came in at just a touch under 1,000 posts. Hopefully in the future, with the ability to switch between your normal account and anonymous account having been made easier thanks to the Tech Admins, activity in anonymous games will approach or equal the level of that in normal games, and we’ll start seeing closer games.
Both of these two items have swayed things significantly in favor of the mafia: the anonymous accounts by providing less information for the townies, and the death of the metagame by giving the mafia less to think about. Now, while the sample size is small, I believe two things: One, that the above is in fact the case. Two, that things are already regressing back to the norm. Despite everything I have mentioned above, the town was still one or two breaks away from winning. Anonymous accounts don’t look to be going away for the future, which means that people will get more comfortable with them. More comfort can only mean more posts and, possibly, a return of the metagame.
Re: Mafia X [Concluded]
Originally Posted by TosaInu
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