random spurious accusations with zero factual backing are usually considered town/vanilla/arthurian moves in werewolf games; irl this breeds chaos and is a classic DARVO tactic.
In my experience this is only true for beginner play (where werewolves are often too shy to say anything), and in advanced play it is a bad guy tactic for the same reasons as IRL. Eg I think in advanced Among Us lobbies it’s an important skill to subtly push an unproductive thread of conversation without making it obvious that you were the one who distracted everybody.
It’s not clear/concrete to me in what ways points 3 and 5 are supposed to invalidate the analogy.
in games, bad guys have a heavy incentive to be uncorrelated (and especially to be seen as being uncorrelated); irl there are very few worlds where regularly agreeing with the now-known-to-be-bad-actors is a positive update on your innocence.
I don’t understand this—it reads to me like you’re saying a similar thing is true for the game and real life? But that goes against your position.
Eg I think in advanced Among Us lobbies it’s an important skill to subtly push an unproductive thread of conversation without making it obvious that you were the one who distracted everybody.
I’m not much of an avid Among Us player, but I suspect this only works in Among Us because of the (much) heavier-than usual time pressures. In the other social deception games I’m aware of, the structural incentives continue to point in the other direction, so the main reason for bad guys to make spurious accusations is for anti-inductive reasons (if everybody knows that spurious accusations are a vanilla tactic, then obviously spurious accusation becomes a good “bad guy” play to fake being good).
I don’t understand this—it reads to me like you’re saying a similar thing is true for the game and real life? But that goes against your position.
Sorry that was awkwardly worded. Here’s a simplified rephrase:
In games, bad guys want to act and look not the same. In real life, if you often agree with known bad folks, most think you’re not good.
Put in a different way, because of the structure of games like Avalon (it’s ~impossible for all the bad guys to not be found out, minions know who each other are, all minions just want their “team” to win so having sacrificial lambs make sense, etc), there are often equilibria where in even slightly advanced play, minions (bad guys) want to be seen as disagreeing with other minions earlier on. So if you find someone disagreeing with minions a lot (in voting history etc), especially in non-decision-relevant ways, this is not much evidence one way or another (and in some cases might even be negative evidence on your goodness). Similarly, if Mildred constantly speaks highly of you, and we later realize that Mildred is a minion, this shouldn’t be a negative update on you (and in some cases is a positive), because minions often have structural reasons to praise/bribe good guys. At higher levels obviously people become aware of this dynamic so there’s some anti-inductive play going on, but still. Frequently the structural incentives prevail.
In real life there’s a bit of this dynamic but the level one model (“birds of a feather flock together”) is more accurate, more of the time.
In my experience this is only true for beginner play (where werewolves are often too shy to say anything), and in advanced play it is a bad guy tactic for the same reasons as IRL. Eg I think in advanced Among Us lobbies it’s an important skill to subtly push an unproductive thread of conversation without making it obvious that you were the one who distracted everybody.
It’s not clear/concrete to me in what ways points 3 and 5 are supposed to invalidate the analogy.
I don’t understand this—it reads to me like you’re saying a similar thing is true for the game and real life? But that goes against your position.
I’m not much of an avid Among Us player, but I suspect this only works in Among Us because of the (much) heavier-than usual time pressures. In the other social deception games I’m aware of, the structural incentives continue to point in the other direction, so the main reason for bad guys to make spurious accusations is for anti-inductive reasons (if everybody knows that spurious accusations are a vanilla tactic, then obviously spurious accusation becomes a good “bad guy” play to fake being good).
Sorry that was awkwardly worded. Here’s a simplified rephrase:
Put in a different way, because of the structure of games like Avalon (it’s ~impossible for all the bad guys to not be found out, minions know who each other are, all minions just want their “team” to win so having sacrificial lambs make sense, etc), there are often equilibria where in even slightly advanced play, minions (bad guys) want to be seen as disagreeing with other minions earlier on. So if you find someone disagreeing with minions a lot (in voting history etc), especially in non-decision-relevant ways, this is not much evidence one way or another (and in some cases might even be negative evidence on your goodness). Similarly, if Mildred constantly speaks highly of you, and we later realize that Mildred is a minion, this shouldn’t be a negative update on you (and in some cases is a positive), because minions often have structural reasons to praise/bribe good guys. At higher levels obviously people become aware of this dynamic so there’s some anti-inductive play going on, but still. Frequently the structural incentives prevail.
In real life there’s a bit of this dynamic but the level one model (“birds of a feather flock together”) is more accurate, more of the time.