Critical Play — EpicMafia
In order to play an imposter-based game, I played EpicMafia online. In the game of mafia, there are a few players who are silently killing individuals at night and then posing as townspeople during the day. The townspeople are all trying to discover who the mafia are in the game by discovering who amongst them is the imposter. This is similar to my team’s new game of Imposter Charades, in which some characters attempt to blend in and not get caught as imposters.
Like in the similar game of Werewolf, Mafia encourages players to outwit each other. They must try to understand the motives for why the mafia kill certain individuals at night, as it can often be that people who are closest to guessing correctly during the day get murdered. The lack of information also makes this an extremely individual game, as you can never really trust anyone you are playing with.
The game utilizes some benefits of an online atmosphere that make it different from playing Mafia in real life. For example, the mafia get to communicate with one another at night in a chat room, and then vote who to kill — whoever receives the majority of votes is killed. This differs from real life, where mafia must silently choose unanimously who they will kill. Furthermore, the game is able to involve a wide variety of potential roles, as it can explain the roles throughout to the players (so if you aren’t sure at the beginning, you can always reference the material provided to understand a role.)
One interesting graphical component of the game is that some roles can be revealed as true throughout the game, and you see this by the character revealing next to the user’s name. This takes the burden off of the players to remember other roles and also means that there is some objective truth that players can reference, which isn’t always the case.
Additionally, you are allowed to whisper to other players in the game throughout the day, but risk that your whisper be overheard. An example of this occurring can be seen below, where players scream “LEAK” given that the whisper was outed. These graphical components provide a great deal of fun and uncertainty to the game, as you can truly never be certain how your messages will come across.
Finally, after you are eliminated from the game you get to be an omnipresent player, seeing all the decisions and chats made from each room. This keeps the game fun even after you’ve lost!
Unfortunately, Epicmafia does not seem to handle abuse in the moment; however, you can report players and they will receive significant suspensions. Nevertheless, this leaves sigificant room for uncomfortable and unfortunate conversations to take place in such a chat-heavy and anonymous game.
Overall, I thought EpicMafia was a great play and it was very interesting to see how they handle players being revealed and manipulating one another. I could see myself getting easily addicted!
