Entry tags:
Traitors, Werewolves and the KGB
I finally started watching The Traitors last night - only two years after everyone else, as is my custom. I can definitely see the appeal of the format, cheesy and derivative as the setting and presentation are (the steam train to a Scottish castle, message-carrying owl, etc.). Anyway, the game-theory aspects are compelling. (Have you ever read ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
nightspore's Comeuppance, on the intersection of game theory and narrative? I recommend it.)
I knew that it was based on a format from the Netherlands, where the show is called De Verraders, but when I described it to Moe she said it reminded her of the card game 人狼ゲーム ("Werewolf Game"), where the battle is between villagers and the werewolves in their midst. That in turn seems to have come from an American game, "Are You a Werewolf?" (2001), perhaps via a French game, "Les Loups-garous de Thiercelieux" (2003), although the latter - which somehow won German game of the year - may have been a separate adaptation of the ultimate(?) source of all these games, "Mafia," invented in 1986 by Dimitry Davidoff of the Psychology Department of Moscow State University. In Davidoff's version, we have mafiosi rather than werewolves or traitors, but it's very tempting - given that we are now in the Soviet era - to see them as a transparent stand in for the secret police.
So, The Traitors has a very international history. Perhaps, given the current direction of political travel, rather than pure entertainment, we should think of it as useful training.
nightspore's Comeuppance, on the intersection of game theory and narrative? I recommend it.)I knew that it was based on a format from the Netherlands, where the show is called De Verraders, but when I described it to Moe she said it reminded her of the card game 人狼ゲーム ("Werewolf Game"), where the battle is between villagers and the werewolves in their midst. That in turn seems to have come from an American game, "Are You a Werewolf?" (2001), perhaps via a French game, "Les Loups-garous de Thiercelieux" (2003), although the latter - which somehow won German game of the year - may have been a separate adaptation of the ultimate(?) source of all these games, "Mafia," invented in 1986 by Dimitry Davidoff of the Psychology Department of Moscow State University. In Davidoff's version, we have mafiosi rather than werewolves or traitors, but it's very tempting - given that we are now in the Soviet era - to see them as a transparent stand in for the secret police.
So, The Traitors has a very international history. Perhaps, given the current direction of political travel, rather than pure entertainment, we should think of it as useful training.