Actually, this statement hit me really uncomfortably close to home.In post 1371, Frogsterking wrote:I view both of these posts as the long and anguished cries of an injured wolf, filling our afternoon sky.
Part of the reason I play Mafia is to get more understanding of real life interactions. If you're worried about people trying to intentionally deceive you, or want practice at defending yourself when you're falsely accused, or want to see how effective various techniques are for persuading someone of something false, it would be really unethical to do that sort of thing in a real-life situation, or about something that matters. Mafia gives us an opportunity to try out this sort of thing in a controlled environment, where we're all (or should be) playing to win, but nothing bad happens if we lose. So Mafia is, in a way, a model of the real world.
Frogsterking's statement above reminded me of a behaviour all too commonly seen in real life (especially in the case of politics): people who decide that they have such-and-such a view on some particular issue, then try their best to rationalise it, cherry-picking evidence that they think favours it, even to the extent of coming up with long and bizarre conspiracy theories when they can't justify their statement in a simpler way. When you confront these people with evidence that their view may be wrong, they tend to deflect it, or weigh a tiny bit of evidence in their favour up against a huge amount against and claim theirs is larger. When you undermine part of their reasoning, they'll insist that the rest is still correct, even though its premises may have been undermined. If you disprove the entirety of their logic, they'll eventually just say that they're ignoring you and that they're right regardless (especially if they see you as "opposed" to them). I don't know of any effective techniques for actually getting these people to change their mind, or even to start reasoning in good faith to help you come to a decision if you're undecided or there's conflicting evidence. ("You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themself into.")
So in effect, the conditions are here for Mafia to show us something that could really improve real life; this sort of "stubborn, unpersuadable voter" behaviour is almost certainly caused by the exact same thing that causes a townie to get into the sort of illogical, unreasoned tunnel that Frogster is in at the moment. That means that if we can figure out a way to stop a player tunneling (short of something absolutely undeniable, like a flip), the same technique would probably be really valuable in real life, maybe fixing many of the world's major problems by allowing opposite sides of the political spectrum to sit down and actually come to a joint conclusion rather than just butting heads endlessly. That's something that would be more important than any Mafia game.
As such: does anyone know of a way to talk players out of a tunnel? I've tried and failed in the past; even attempting it as confirmed town (so that my motives couldn't be questioned), I couldn't get anywhere (and lost that game because the last two townies were deathtunnelling each other and scum nightkilled me). Some way to accomplish this would be really valuable, both in terms of helping towns that are stuck in Mafia games, and more importantly, with ramifications for real-world interactions too.
