Game theorist/designer Jane McGonigal (no relation to McGarnagle) played Werewolf all night at O’Reilly’s FOO Camp 2008. Her secret aim was to test optimal strategies for the popular party game. Werewolf is a simple game of deception. Players are randomly assigned roles as “villagers,” who are trying to root out the werewolves in their midst, and (naturally) “werewolves,” who try to pick off the villagers one by one. If you’ve never played it before, peruse a rules sheet—there’s no learning curve. You might also know the game as Mafia, and the commercial card game Bang! is a variant of the same concept.

Theorists often endeavor to “solve” a game—to determine a strategy for a given game that will prove successful 100% of the time. Last year, for instance, the developers of the checkers-playing computer program Chinook announced that they had solved checkers. Chinook cannot be beaten; the worst any player can do against it is a draw. The checkers solution took decades of work, but not all games are so irascible. The tic-tac-toe solution, for instance, fits on a business card and can be intuited by a grade-schooler. At the other end of the spectrum, chess and go are regarded as unsolvable in practical terms.

McGonigal developed what she thought was a near-optimal strategy for villager play in Werewolf, and she wanted to try it out with her fellow geeks and gamers at FOO Camp. (Developing an optimal strategy for a game isn’t exactly the same as solving it in game theory terms, but for the purpose of this article, it’s close enough.) Her peers reacted violently, and McGonigal’s story is a great case study in the collision of game theory and intuition. The three-act drama that plays out is a typical cycle of reaction to a game “solution.”

1. Someone calls B.S. Despite foreknowledge that McGonigal is a very intelligent person with a deep knowledge of game theory (she’s one of the game world’s leading thinkers, conducting most of her work under the auspices of Avantgame), her peers reject her idea out of hand. McGonigal’s optimal strategy depends on the player in the “seer” role¹ declaring herself at the earliest opportunity, an unorthodox tactic. She was asking players to reveal a key piece of information in a game that seems to rely on playing things close to the vest. Writes McGonigal:

I tried to introduce the other players to the Ultimate Optimal Seer Strategy. It was NOT well received! OMG. They thought I was crazy, crazy wrong. It was SO counter-intuitive. They went through all the arguments: It was too dangerous for a seer to come out in the first round, you couldn’t count on the healer to heal them, the werewolves could be too tricky … and so on. … I was so mad that I scrawled across the whiteboard “THE HEALER NEEDS TO LEARN MATH!!!!!” in the middle of the “night”, and once the healer got picked off, he and I and another dead villager went out in the hall and had a raging argument.

If you’ve ever tried to explain the Monty Hall Problem to a skeptic, you’ll recognize this reaction. Cognitive dissonance, counterintuitive, whatever you call it, passions are inflamed by this type of stuff. People understandably do not enjoy having some know-it-all question their fundamental conception of a game.

2. The experiment. Here is where the game theorist uses her doubters’ passion against them. “Maybe you’re right. Just humor me and try it my way.”

The argument was only settled 5 games later … five games in which we had agreed to test the strategy and saw the villagers win perfect games lasting about 10 minutes each (that’s really short!!!).

3. The buzzkill. This is the part that fascinates me. A good, easy-to-explain optimal strategy will often, in the eyes of the players, “ruin” the game. Like revealing the secret behind a magic trick, it’s just not as much fun anymore.

In fact, after that point, when it was conceded by all that from a game theory perspective this was really ridiculously effective, we had to stop playing with that strategy. It was too boring to be that good of a village!

Werewolf has a strong social/cooperative component to it, as does McGonigal’s optimal strategy, so while I’m a little surprised that these analytical types could put the genie back in the bottle like that, I also see how they managed to pull it off. It’s not like tic-tac-toe, where you couldn’t “play dumb” just to make the game fun again.

I was gratified, though, to read on and learn that McGonigal et al. also went forward by innovating and creating new ways to play the game. (Check out the comments on McGonigal’s post for further rules variations.) In my eyes, this is how it should work. The necessitation of exploration and discovery is the real benefit of game theory and “solving” games. Games were meant to be solved. In the long term, intuiting out the best strategy is the most gratifying part of gameplay anyway. And when solutions arise, I have faith we’ll always come up with new ideas and new games.

To extend the magic parallel, many magicians balked when Penn & Teller did the cups-and-balls trick with clear plastic cups, but the upshot of exposing the dusty old tricks is that magicians are forced to come up with new magic. Likewise, when an inspired game theorist like McGonigal “ruins” a classic game, she’s really just creating a vacuum, an opportunity for innovation (one she and her friends quickly seized). Don’t be afraid to break your games; when they heal, they always end up stronger than before.

(P.S.: Thanks to reliable reader Johnny for the tip.)

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1. The seer is a villager who is allowed to watch as the werewolves decide who to kill. All of the other villagers are required to keep their eyes closed during this “nighttime” stage of the game. ↑