From Mafia to Among Us: Can social deduction evolve as online multiplayer?
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As a veteran Mafia player who’s lost brain cells in college playing the game and as an aspiring game designer launching my first game on Kickstarter, I want to share my two cents on the emergence of online multiplayer games that are taking the genre to a new place. What follows is a summary of our research and thought process for building Republic of Jungle, a game that started as a prototype for our own game nights and eventually grew to a project we quit our jobs for. I’ve been a fan of the genre for years, and I have spent more than a year staring at the walls of my home office thinking about this stuff, while apparently everyone else was playing Among Us. Trust me... I’m a simple townie. An indie developer trying to share what I've learned with no agenda...
Mafia was originally designed as an academic psychological experiment in Russia in the late ‘80s, but it got quickly picked up by college students who played it in summer camps and dorm rooms. In a few years, it spread to the rest of Europe and to North America, where it was marketed as Werewolf. Its organic growth to global fame in the pre-internet era is a testament to the potency of the core game idea: can an informed secret minority manipulate the uninformed majority? Can an organized mob of traitors lead a collaborative group to its demise?
