Quote Originally Posted by Miriel View Post
The point of the game is to analyze the posts in this thread in order to figure out who is or isn't mafia. How can you do that if people are deliberating amongst themselves who Mafia is or isn't and that discussion isn't happening in this thread?

That was the whole point of me making a post about it in the first place. You can't exactly do that kind of thing in real life Mafia. And as far as I know, in online Mafia you're not supposed to do that either (according to the Mafia wiki Levian linked to in the beginning).

It's different if you come into this thread going, "well I just received a PM letting me know who Mafia is, so I'm going to vote for..." Because at least then, the group as a whole knows that this is what's going on. And that can lead to interesting questions like who is sending those PMs? Is the person sending the PM Mafia or Cop or a citizen trying to be funny? It has the potential to make it interesting or get the ball rolling on conversation and investigation.

The part that is unfun is when a person comes into the thread saying, "I'm going to vote for so-and-so because I have a feeling they're Mafia" when in fact they're voting that way because of a private message they got from someone else informing them that so-and-so was Mafia.

YOU SEE?
The internet and real life games have to be seperate in their rules because over a longer time period people have more time to speculate and much more things to speculate on. Without being able to hear the tone in people's voices or even chatting to them on msn for people like me who are yet to befriend anyone to that level it can be next to impossible for someone to decide upon whether someone is mafia or not. We've already seen the effects someone pretending to be a cop can have on the whole trust issue, and DKs stroke of annoying genius has prevented anyone from trusting another cop who comes forward.

It would be a lot more fun if the way you describe worked properly, but unfortunately things you type here can't go away like memories of spoken words can in the offline version. People can flick back and check what you've done or said with incredible ease and so people are having to be careful of both attracting mafia attention and also presenting themselves in such a manner that their own enigmatic teammates vote to have them killed.