In chapters 6 and 7 of his book, Fisher mostly talks about trust: how it’s established, maintained, broken, and reforged.

He starts off with an anecdote of him laying down his coat over a puddle in the street, offering women to walk over it and save their boots and clothes from the dirty water. To his surprise—and our mirth—none of the women took up his offer. This shook him as the results were in stark contrast to the time when Sir Raleigh offered the same to Queen Elizabeth and she obliged. Perhaps the times were way different now, or perhaps Fisher wasn’t exactly Sir Raleigh and the women not exactly Queen Elizabeths. (Or maybe Fisher’s coat was too ugly for their steps, but don’t quote me on that) Whatever the reason, he proves the point that random trust is a scarcity nowadays, and quite rightfully so. He goes on to mention some ways in which trust may be earned. The truth still remains, however: for someone to initiate a trustworthy relationship, they have to put themselves out there first and that can be a risky job for most people, which in part explains why trust is so scarce anyway.

In the group game of Mafia (or any of its variants), the dynamics of trust are duly tested. People are forced to question their intuition—which is also their primary guide in the game—against everyone else’s. Who do you suspect? Who do you side with? It’s the constant atmosphere of mistrust and trickery that makes the game exciting. One may fall back upon the methods that Fisher mentioned for gaining trust and try to notice who is employing those. Even in that case, however, one is still forced to question whether that is a genuine attempt to gain trust or a mere ‘safe trust-gaining measure’ to feign vulnerability and establish trust. Smart Werewolves/Mafia often use this technique. Conversely, this forces the player to question everything even more. I found myself in this exact position when we played the card-game variant of Mafia in class on Monday. While it would have made sense to trust whoever was being the most vocal and ‘vulnerable’ with their approach towards the game, I also caught myself doubting their sincerity. What if that was their plan all along, to gain trust and then become the most trustworthy, innocent werewolf of all—one that is immortal thanks to the amount of trust all of the townspeople place in them. On the other hand, I also found myself trusting the people who stayed extremely quiet throughout the game for two closely-bonded reasons, even though the townspeople were quick to catch out the quiet people and wrongfully lynch them for their lack of participation. My first reason not to do so was because I realized that a person’s participation level doesn’t really have a correspondence to their likelihood of being a werewolf. Secondly, if you factor in the possibility of a smart werewolf adopting either behavior to avoid suspicion, it voids the whole logic anyway. All in all, there are so many factors in play during this exciting game of trust that it truly makes it fun and engaging.

Similarly, there is a multiplayer video game called ‘Deceit’ in which a group of players is placed into a building floor. For maximum effect, everyone is connected through voice communication. The game proceeds by randomly ‘infecting’ a third of the group and essentially creating 2 teams; the catch, however, is that nobody knows which team anyone else is on. While the uninfected players have to work towards objectives and get out of the building, the infected players must sabotage their enemies’ work and occasionally drink blood from blood bags to power themselves up. The uninfected players do have a sensor in case they wish to confront someone and check their identity though. Every now and then, blackouts occur during which the infected players transform into their terror forms (essentially man-eating zombies) and chase uninfected players in the dark. In this way, the whole game is designed to create suspicion and test the players’ principles of trust. One could be running around with a friend for 20 minutes doing objectives while the ‘uninfected friend’ could also be drinking blood bags behind their back. Soon as the blackout hits, they turn on their uninfected mate and devour them. The whole fun of the game lies in that moment where the misguided person is having their face gnawed and realizes how foolish they were with their choice of a trustworthy friend. Furthermore, the principles of co-operation from Chapter 7 are also tested in the game as players mostly flock together in larger groups so they can easily monitor everyone’s activities and reduce the risk of potential infected cheaters in the mix. The Infected Sensor comes into play as well because it only has limited uses and hence can only be used in important cases. An interesting possibility that arises from this is one of the very principles Fisher talks about in his book: an infected person may go up to their uninfected groupie—whose suspicion of the infected person might be increasing at the moment—and offer to be tested by the sensor. This is a high risk, high reward strategy because if the uninfected groupie calls their bluff, the infected person is outed. If not, however, the bond of trust is deeply established because of the infected person’s effort to put themselves out there and initiate a trust bond. Everyone only gets one chance in this game though so the tit for tat techniques of PAVLOV and TIT FOR TAT are unable to come into play as they are re-iterative strategies that learn from previous failures and continue from that. Nonetheless, Deceit is a well-designed game that really demonstrates how quickly people are able to lose and gain trust, regardless of previous bonds of friendship.