Guttersnipe

Postmodern techniques

A postmodern method might make use of some or all of the following techniques:

1. The accepted norms of the game are challenged and disregarded, while experimental methods and playstyles are created.
2. A pastiche of different textualities and posting styles is used, including the simultaneous use of multiple arguments or strategies, and there is the 'theft' of a heterogeneous group of playstyles.
3. The case against a player need not be complete but can be broken, paradoxical and imagistic. There is a movement away from linearity to multiplicity (to inter-related webs of reasoning), where well defined stages of the game give way to a series of peripatetic dramatic moments.
4. Player reads are fragmented, forming a collection of contrasting and parallel impressions pointing to a central motivation, scheme, or alignment.
5. Each new iteration of a mafia setup is a new Gestalt, a unique spectacle, with no intent of methodical reproduction of strategy.
6. The audience is integral to the shared meaning making of the scumhunting process and its members are included in the dialogue of argument.
7. There is a rejection of the notions of "Town" and "Anti-Town" play. The distinction exists only in the players' minds as what the players interpret - nothing more and nothing less.
8. The lynching process in the overall game is driven more by shared meaning-making and intuition, rather than the individual arguments.
9. The game steps back from reality to create its own self-conscious atmosphere. This is sometimes referred to as meta-mafia.

Note: R.H. gave five distinct techniques that may be found in meta-mafia. These include ceremony within a game, role-playing within a role, reference to reality, self-reference of the argument, and a game within a game.

While these techniques are often found in postmodern games they are never part of a centralised movement or style. Rather, they are tools for authentic introspection, questioning, and identification of scum and third parties.

Realism

S.D. suggests that "metamafiality" should be defined by its fundamental effect of destabilizing any sense of realism:

" 'Metamafia' is a convenient name for the quality or force in a game which challenges scumhunting's claim to be simply realistic — to be a simple mirror in which we view the actions and reactions of players like ourselves, suspending our disbelief in their arbitrary meaninglessness. Metamafia begins by sharpening awareness of the unlikeness of one player personality to another; it may end by making us aware of a playstyle's uncanny likeness to artifice or illusion. By calling attention to the strangeness, artificiality, illusory scumminess, or arbitrariness — in short, the VI-ness — of player's style, it marks those frames and boundaries that conventional mechanistic scumhunting would hide." - S.D., “Metamafia”, Spring 1999.

Favourite Games

Newbie 780 ~ Mafia in the Valley