Wired UK has done a wonderfully deep story on the popularity and history of Werewolf/Mafia.
Werewolf is a game of deception and manipulation. It has infected almost every significant tech event around the world, from the informal Foo Camp conferences run by O’Reilly to the music, film and interactive-media crossover of South By Southwest (SXSW). During lunch at San Francisco’s giant Game Developers Conference, or in the bars after closing at ETech, games of Werewolf break out spontaneously. Its core premise is simple — a room is split between villagers and werewolves, and the former aren’t aware who are their enemies, determined to eat them. Can the werewolves eat their prey before the villagers identify and lynch the werewolves?
In practice — perhaps unsurprisingly, given the kind of people playing — the games played at tech events are rarely that simple. Groups splinter off according to arcane variations — someone wants to play with the Slut and the Invalid, someone else with the Vigilante and the Veterinarian, someone else with all four. Rules agreed, the splinter groups reform, spectators gather, and the games begin. And it may be hours before they stop. Although in principle a round of Werewolf can take as little as 30 minutes, epic rounds last for hours – and one round is rarely enough. The next morning, appropriately, you can spot the werewolves by the red rings round their eyes.
Wales, Fitzpatrick, Gibson and their moderator were the last players standing after an all-night Werewolf session that had lured in almost a third of 2008′s Foo Camp. Three players remaining meant only one thing: two villagers, one werewolf. It meant the players who knew they were villagers faced a simple challenge: which of the others was the enemy? And yet the argument had raged for hours. “I was sure of only three things,” Wales remembers. “One, I was not a werewolf. Two, one of these bastards was an amazing liar. And three, the other guy was a total moron. I just couldn’t figure out which was which.”
Read the full article here: Werewolf: How a parlour game became a tech phenomenon.
Warning, one of the quotes in the story is NSFW.
