Ruse generator series#

Instead of recounting these kinds of betrayals through pre-designed narrated stories, games of ruse, trust, and betrayal incentivize their players вЂ“ and consequently their avatarsВ вЂ“ to betray each other within the confines of a game space. The showвЂ™s premise is that Cylons secretly continue to live amongst the few humans remaining, garnering trust, while waiting to make their final move.

Ruse generator series#

For instance, in the TV series Battlestar Galactica (2003вЂ“2004), the human race is betrayed by a machine that is virtually indistinguishable from a person.

Their depiction of betrayal is magnified by the fact they are adapted from historical events, stories and folk tales, which themselves are understood as depicting betrayal. Unlike novels, theatre or film, these games offer up unscripted moments of play in fictional worlds that communicate ideas (in these cases, ideas about betrayal). Such fictions of betrayal are noteworthy because they are generated bottom-up by players following a rule set. These are all non-digital games that, as a result of deploying rules surrounding trust and ruse, create emergent fictions of betrayal. Examples of these include: Diplomacy (Calhamer 2008) A Game of Thrones (Peterson and Wilson 2003) Werewolf (Davidoff 1986, Plotkin 1997) Battlestar Galactica (Konieczka 2008) and Shadows over Camelot (Cathala and Laget 2005). Such games of player unpredictability have their participants cooperate to reach conflicting goals. However, in this essay, I take a very different tack and explore designed opportunities for ruse as crafted narrative tools.Д«ridge combines trust and ruse, which exist between ally and opponent respectively, but what interest me are games in which trust and ruse intermingle between the same players. Game theorists have studied ruse extensively, particularly with regards to the PrisonerвЂ™s Dilemma, in order to consider optimization and social structure. Ruse and trust are thus socially determined and regulated tacitly by the players, if not explicitly by the rules. Should someone think for too long about making a certain play and then be discovered to have had only one option, that person may be called out and have points deducted from his or her score.

Doing the latter is dubbed вЂњcoffeehousing,вЂќ relating to old-world coffee houses where this behavior was permitted. For instance, whereas it is permissible to play a normally inappropriate card because it will fool oneвЂ™s opponents, one cannot do things like pause to think when no obvious strategy presents itself. In Tournament Bridge, ruses are juxtaposed against this trust and are an important part of play, to the point where certain feints are forbidden. If a player correctly bids Stayman and their partner does not trust them to have remembered what the вЂњtwo clubвЂќ response means, but rather assumes they meant to indicate strength in clubs, miscommunication will occur and cause the downfall of the team. A low-level example of this is the bidding convention known as вЂњStayman,вЂќ where one says вЂњtwo clubsвЂќ in response to a partnerвЂ™s bid of вЂњone no-trumpвЂќ to indicate strength in hearts and spades. You must be confident that oneвЂ™s partner is not (or in some cases is) making mistakes in order to respond to their bids. Trust also plays an important part of Bridge because players are grouped in pairs and asked to communicate to one another solely through an abstract bidding system.