The Scumhunter's Playbook, Part I of V (Project Abandoned)

[Albert B. Rampage]

Introduction

Scumhunting. The very word inspires slight hesitancy and distant respect, splicing the visions of the dreaded witch hunts of an age long gone with obscure standards of playing that you will be judged on in nearly every mafia game you join. Scumhunting. The investigative process of deducing scum.

This is an in-depth guide to scumhunting, laid out to be as linear as can be imagined, exploring advanced scumhunting techniques as well as essential thematic elements, effectively taking you deep inside the minds of the most accomplished mafia players known to me. If you ever thought that lynching mafia was mostly about lucky guesswork and clumsy happenstance, this guide is about to blow the very lid off your perspective.

Profiling the Player

Profiling is the action of "recording a person's behavior and analyzing psychological characteristics in order to predict or assess their ability in a certain sphere or to identify a particular group of people", as defined by the Princeton WordNet lexical database. This will be the working definition I use for the remainder of this chapter.

Seasoned scumhunters profile their suspects much like the FBI does with criminals. Unlike meatworld criminals, however, the available evidence to profile a player in mafia games is limited.

Metagame

Metagame can be bended, altered, or face-lifted beyond recognition. As far as scumhunting goes, it's even less relevant than a secondhand opinion since you don't gain any new information about what player x thinks about player y. And it takes ten times the research. The dynamic nature of a mafia playstyle and its constant evolution through acquired experience cannot be held to a mold indefinitely, unless the player is intentionally perpetuating his metagame.

Some players I know actually do this. They hold to a specific metagame stipulation that they exploit as a last-ditch trump card in sticky situations. A classic example of this is the Pooky Guarantee:

Pooky GURANTEED his protownness this game.

You can not get more confirmed than thaT!!!!!

Pooky Gurantees have never been proven wrong!

Pooky's metagame was that every time he used the "Pooky Guarantee", he would be town. His logic was that it was a verifiable, historically accurate barometer of his pro-towness. The truth is that it was just a glorified Gambler's Fallacy.

This extends to my overall view of the concept of metagame itself. Although it is a powerful persuasion tool against the unwashed masses, it is fundamentally a fallacy. Don't let it impair your judgment, as it is the easiest thing to change in a playstyle, especially after someone points it out to you, which will always happen since this is mafia and players will post cases.

Archetype Assessment

Archetype Assessment is the counterpoint to metagame and what I personally use. From the data of the ongoing game, I loosely classify each player along the following points:

• Intelligence (INT)
  
  Intelligence roughly translates to communication, presentation and analysis skills, a logical system of beliefs and personal investigative prowess. Intelligence is built upon by experience gained by playing at the peak of one's ability. Some players can competently play a maximum of two games, others can play maybe four. Experience in substandard quality of play do not improve a player's Intelligence rating.
  
  
• Involvement (INV)
  
  Involvement can be defined as the unrelenting self-motivation and initiative to produce good content. The subject's posts express familiarity with the game across several different levels (the rules, the interactions, voting patterns, etc.) and a critical perspective that explores and expands new avenues of discussion. Involvement is cultivated by a player honing his capacity and desire to post relevant content.
  
  
• Activity (ACT)
  
  Activity is the general presence of the subject, whether it be to hammer before deadline or respond to questions in a reasonable timeframe. A player can improve his activity by simply having more time to check up on the state of his games.
  
  
• Links (LIN)
  
  The relationship and personal history the subject has with the other players in the game. More on this in a future chapter.

This constitutes a solid foundational framework to profile a player. Shifts in the parameters above are to be analyzed against the circumstances surrounding them. The method and manner of a scumtell is to be projected against the light of this information to gain insight on the intention -and therefore win condition- of the player.

EDIT: Instead of this article being part of a series, a standalone article on Gambits will be written.

[Albert B. Rampage]

You're wrong about the whole Pooky Guarantee thing. The whole point of the Guarantee is that he could never fake a Guarantee as Scum, or he would lose the advantage of the Guarantee in all future games.

You can point to your meta all day and say, "but if I ever switched up my meta, I would lose the advantage my current meta gives me in all future games!"

The fact of the matter is that meta is irrelevant and no player worth his salt would want to gamble a read over the hypothetical future games of another player