Post by Judge Sam on Aug 9, 2009 3:50:49 GMT -5
Iris asked me in the question thread:
Where did you get the idea for all the voting twists? 
They were one of my favorite parts of this game.
And I really want to talk about it all! In the "from Spies 5 to Spies 6 thread" I talked a little bit about where the idea came from. I had a lot of ideas for theme rounds and I decided to combine them all into one game. I also looked through this big Wikipedia block for other ideas. On my first pass before Spies 5 I started with:
Council of Five I used in Spies 5. When I started up Spies 6 development the second time (out of like four) I was at:
-[not used]
-Forum Mafia
-Trusted Weighted Votes
-[not used]
-Range / Approval Voting (you vote everyone in the game 0 or 1 pt, or you vote everyone in the game 0-4 points)
I felt it was important starting out to define the basic voting pattern. Obviously you need to clarify what the default vote is before switching it up! I looked at what I had for the default voting and why a lot. I decided I liked everything about it as is!
Next, I had to decide what criteria makes for an interesting new voting system. As written in my notebook, what makes a good voting change?
So I considered a lot, and ending up throwing out lots of voting systems from wikipedia out when reading them. I would read about each, think about how it could apply to mafia, and read about how it can be manipulated. (Every voting system can be manipulated in some way and has some negative drawback thing about it - that's actually a proven mathematical theory!) It was very interesting to do but very boring to talk about.
I'll talk about how each voting system came to be in their individual voting essays but let's look at a few that didn't work out:
Okay so eventually I got it down to the six I liked. Now I gotta find out where to put these six! It all came out so smoothly with alternating episodes and good voting systems but getting them in those spots was a headache haha.
I tried a bunch of different ways. First I decided what acceptable #s of voters each voting shift would be okay with. Like if you tried to do Consensus with 25 people, obviously that wouldn't work lol. I drew a picture of a line that was like:
IRV: 25 to 11 people
Forum: 21 to 17 people
Stock: 21 to 13 people
Consensus: 17 to 13 people
Borda: 17 to 9 people
+/-: 17 to 7 people
As you can see that's not much range. Which is why for awhile I had some crazy episode # setups smooshing a bunch at the center. Like having them in Episodes 2,4,5,7,8,10 or 2,4,6,8,9,11. Tried out a bunch but finally playing with those numbers I got like a 'set order' they had to go in to work right. It was like a logic puzzle haha, if one system went in someone else's slot the whole thing would be mixed up.
Finally I saw that +/- could go Episode 2 because they'd be teams of 14-16 (mental block on that one for a bit thinking it was 29) which then put IRV second and the rest fit in. I was pretty sure on having 3 and 7 the Weeks so they fit around those.
So yeah then they went in and I noticed the alternating episode thing worked well so I went with that. One thing though, is that for Forum Mafia and Consensus, my TWO FAVORITE OF ALL TIME voting shifts haha, I had been wanting to do those for like two years. To some extent, all of Spies 6 was built around those two main events. It's what I had been looking forward to see play out since day negative 600 (literally). I was extremely eager to see how those would play out and prepared tons for it.
For that reason, if a Spy said "yep, I'm a Spy!" the episode before Consensus Exile, then I would push that back an episode. I had no qualms with that and had planned to do that, keeping an eye on the game when those two events came up. Every game has times where it's like 20-1 against one guy and I wasn't going to let bad luck ruin a twist when I could just push it back one episode with no problems.
"Well Sam," you say, "that's exactly what happened with forum mafia! VERBATIM!" I know I was sad about that.
It sucked. I was so looking forward to it. Maybe I shouldn't have gone forward with it. I thought about it a little but honestly I didn't expect the major anti-Iris thing to hit so quickly. 
I mean of course I didn't know that Iris would make a terrible fake claim. But even the day after that in that episode, I still decided to go forward with it because I thought for sure she'd still have A DAY or two to defend herself during the Episode. =P Even if the talk was all about her it'd still be fun to do in a forum mafia setting with the voting period lasting FOR ONE DAY AT LEAST. =P =P =P
So that really sucked that you guys didn't even hold off for 12 hours and deprived yourselves of all that joy. Bummer. But I can't even guess what will happen 24 hours in advance in this game lol it's so crazy so I don't know how guessing would have worked out.
Besides, that was my second favorite, I was determined to hold back Consensus until I had a good situation. That's why I was more than willing to postpone the game as long as I needed to find a time where it would work. It was like pulling all my hair out trying to just find a time where 11 of you could be online. ;_; So much planning!
And then lousy loser Amelia and sketchy Khaled couldn't be there, major lame-o clown Boris left early cause he's an ass, Roxy was cool beans because he was on vacation. And I think Mirela couldn't make it which is fine Mirela was awesome. But it still worked out super-great anyway! I'm actually kinda glad everyone was "almost decided" on Rey could you imagine how long that would have went if people were divided 50/50 on someone??? lol.
Yeah so I was super happy about that and you can't have everything perfect haha that's not normal.
So yeah, that's the voting twist from start to finish, minus the actual details of the six voting shifts! A lot were a headache and I'll relive the pain in their own mini-essays which I'll write when that episode rolls around. I like writing these things!
They were one of my favorite parts of this game. And I really want to talk about it all! In the "from Spies 5 to Spies 6 thread" I talked a little bit about where the idea came from. I had a lot of ideas for theme rounds and I decided to combine them all into one game. I also looked through this big Wikipedia block for other ideas. On my first pass before Spies 5 I started with:
-[not used]
-Forum Mafia Round
-Consensus Voting System
-Trusted Weighted Votes (my name for stockholders, the wording just means that votes are weighted at different vote #'s based on trust of others)
-Run off Voting
-Preferential Voting
-Borda count
-IRV, reverse IRV
-Council of Five
-[not used]
Council of Five I used in Spies 5. When I started up Spies 6 development the second time (out of like four) I was at:
-[not used]
-Forum Mafia
-Trusted Weighted Votes
-[not used]
-Range / Approval Voting (you vote everyone in the game 0 or 1 pt, or you vote everyone in the game 0-4 points)
I felt it was important starting out to define the basic voting pattern. Obviously you need to clarify what the default vote is before switching it up! I looked at what I had for the default voting and why a lot. I decided I liked everything about it as is!
Next, I had to decide what criteria makes for an interesting new voting system. As written in my notebook, what makes a good voting change?
- Easily understandable: needs to be grasped quickly and not overly complicated.
- Easily manipulatable: needs to be able to be used and abused to anyone's advantage
- Needs to be different: shouldn't boil down to essentially the same thing as a normal vote
So I considered a lot, and ending up throwing out lots of voting systems from wikipedia out when reading them. I would read about each, think about how it could apply to mafia, and read about how it can be manipulated. (Every voting system can be manipulated in some way and has some negative drawback thing about it - that's actually a proven mathematical theory!) It was very interesting to do but very boring to talk about.
I'll talk about how each voting system came to be in their individual voting essays but let's look at a few that didn't work out:
Range Voting - In Range Voting you list all players and give them a number between 0 and 4. With Range voting, the correct strategy is to give everyone either a 4 or a 0. Which basically boils it down to:
Approval Voting - In approval voting you list all players and give them a 0 or a 1. Add up the numbers. Hmm... I can't recall why I threw this one out. Maybe you can think about how approval voting would work in a mafia setting as homework and tell me why it would or wouldn't work out. Due Tuesday!
[upon reviewing this, I remember why! It was too similar to another voting twist on my list, so I crossed out this one. But then I ended up not using that one.]
Coombs - Coombs is very similar to IRV Instant Runoff Voting. You make your lists. Then rather than kicking out people who got no votes like in IRV, you instead start kicking out people who are at the very bottom of the most lists (the people least want to vote for).
I eliminated this one because it was too similar to IRV, more complicated, and would result in the Exile choice being a "not-vote." Meaning instead of voting for who you want gone, it ends up voting a bunch of times for the people you don't want gone. (kinda, but I thought it gave too much power to "not-Exiling" certain big suspects and then landing on someone weird.)
Schulz - Lots of people think Schulze method is the absolute mathematically best way of voting. Developed in 1997 and also called pairwise voting, it contains the least drawbacks and the most advantages, and all you have to do to vote is make a list your preferences!
The problem?
lmao, just click that wikipedia link by schulz and scroll down it's pretty funny. So that's outta here!
Okay so eventually I got it down to the six I liked. Now I gotta find out where to put these six! It all came out so smoothly with alternating episodes and good voting systems but getting them in those spots was a headache haha.
I tried a bunch of different ways. First I decided what acceptable #s of voters each voting shift would be okay with. Like if you tried to do Consensus with 25 people, obviously that wouldn't work lol. I drew a picture of a line that was like:
IRV: 25 to 11 people
Forum: 21 to 17 people
Stock: 21 to 13 people
Consensus: 17 to 13 people
Borda: 17 to 9 people
+/-: 17 to 7 people
As you can see that's not much range. Which is why for awhile I had some crazy episode # setups smooshing a bunch at the center. Like having them in Episodes 2,4,5,7,8,10 or 2,4,6,8,9,11. Tried out a bunch but finally playing with those numbers I got like a 'set order' they had to go in to work right. It was like a logic puzzle haha, if one system went in someone else's slot the whole thing would be mixed up.
Finally I saw that +/- could go Episode 2 because they'd be teams of 14-16 (mental block on that one for a bit thinking it was 29) which then put IRV second and the rest fit in. I was pretty sure on having 3 and 7 the Weeks so they fit around those.
So yeah then they went in and I noticed the alternating episode thing worked well so I went with that. One thing though, is that for Forum Mafia and Consensus, my TWO FAVORITE OF ALL TIME voting shifts haha, I had been wanting to do those for like two years. To some extent, all of Spies 6 was built around those two main events. It's what I had been looking forward to see play out since day negative 600 (literally). I was extremely eager to see how those would play out and prepared tons for it.
For that reason, if a Spy said "yep, I'm a Spy!" the episode before Consensus Exile, then I would push that back an episode. I had no qualms with that and had planned to do that, keeping an eye on the game when those two events came up. Every game has times where it's like 20-1 against one guy and I wasn't going to let bad luck ruin a twist when I could just push it back one episode with no problems.
"Well Sam," you say, "that's exactly what happened with forum mafia! VERBATIM!" I know I was sad about that.
It sucked. I was so looking forward to it. Maybe I shouldn't have gone forward with it. I thought about it a little but honestly I didn't expect the major anti-Iris thing to hit so quickly. I mean of course I didn't know that Iris would make a terrible fake claim. But even the day after that in that episode, I still decided to go forward with it because I thought for sure she'd still have A DAY or two to defend herself during the Episode. =P Even if the talk was all about her it'd still be fun to do in a forum mafia setting with the voting period lasting FOR ONE DAY AT LEAST. =P =P =PSo that really sucked that you guys didn't even hold off for 12 hours and deprived yourselves of all that joy. Bummer. But I can't even guess what will happen 24 hours in advance in this game lol it's so crazy so I don't know how guessing would have worked out.
Besides, that was my second favorite, I was determined to hold back Consensus until I had a good situation.
That's why I was more than willing to postpone the game as long as I needed to find a time where it would work. It was like pulling all my hair out trying to just find a time where 11 of you could be online. ;_; So much planning! And then lousy loser Amelia and sketchy Khaled couldn't be there, major lame-o clown Boris left early cause he's an ass, Roxy was cool beans because he was on vacation. And I think Mirela couldn't make it which is fine Mirela was awesome. But it still worked out super-great anyway!
I'm actually kinda glad everyone was "almost decided" on Rey could you imagine how long that would have went if people were divided 50/50 on someone??? lol.Yeah so I was super happy about that and you can't have everything perfect haha that's not normal.
So yeah, that's the voting twist from start to finish, minus the actual details of the six voting shifts! A lot were a headache and I'll relive the pain in their own mini-essays which I'll write when that episode rolls around.
I like writing these things!
