Final presentation

Instruction of the game

Our group is planning to split the class into two groups and play a few rounds of a game called Mafia as part of our presentation tomorrow. In case you have never played or need a refresher, it'd be great if you read the rules so we don't have to take time explaining it tomorrow:

Basically, there are three roles you may take on: Townsperson, Mafia, or Inspector

Before we begin the game, we will pass out cards: whoever gets a King will be a member of the Mafia, whoever gets a Joker will be an Inspector, and the rest will be townspeople.

In our game, we will have 3 mafia and 1 inspector.

Then, night falls and everyone must close their eyes. When directed, the 3 Mafia open their eyes and decide who to kill. They must agree on who to kill by pointing until they all agree.

The then close their eyes. The inspector is instructed to open his/her eyes and is allowed to point to one person who he/she thinks is a member of the Mafia. The Moderator will nod or shake his/her head accordingly.

Day comes and everyone opens their eyes. The Moderator announces who has been killed and then all of the live players must talk and decide who they think the Mafia is. Once the group agrees by a majority vote, the player they vote is part of the Mafia is out of the game.

The townspeople win if all the Mafia are cast out of the game. The Mafia win if they succeed in killing all the other players.

Write-up of the presentation

By making everyone to play the game called Mafia, our group was trying to make everyone to think of how people change information when they are supposed to judge if someone in their group is lying to them or not and how they would decode the information. I role in the presentation was leading one group of people to play the game. What I noticed during the game playing was that everyone judges others differently. Sometimes, two groups of people decode one’s behavior completely differently. I guess it just explicitly showed us that one given type of information could be decoded differently by different people.