Journal Wk8: Mafia

What makes mafia work?

The tension, the unknown, everyone starts on equal ground in relation to others but everyone knows something different. People having to disprove others and prove their own innocence without having any evidence to show. In fact i think the game has a bias towards more charismatic players.

What is good strategy?

I’ve found if you keep consistent in terms of your behaviour while you are a citizen it sets up an easier round for when you are mafia. If you speak commonly but not overly frequently you can get away with less notice than if you talk too much or talk too little.

There are actually already a few mafia games (or variations of) online, provided players have different roles and theres is a large element of the unkown and keeping the main mechanics an online version of mafia would be more or less the same however you would lack some of the “tells” you might notice from seeing the faces of your fellow players. Having said that, poker seems to work online and people can type word of accusation or defense, it’s just that players would find alot more inferred meanings from the talk.

Design Idea Wk8: A social game

I realise that i’ve fallen behind in the posts… anyhow..

It is a bit hard to design a game based on facebook considering i’ve never used facebook but i think a game that utilizes one of the main social networking features of making friends would be an interesting idea. You can challenge a friend to a race and given a period of time, say one week you make as many non-mutual friends as possible and the one who makes the most friends wins! Graphically this could be visualized via two columns, each with an avatar and as the number increases so does the height of the column. I would imagine this would be simple enough that you can even host the live results into your user home page or “wall” as a plugin.