Managerial One-Night Werewolf Commentary

• Explain the game One Night Werewolf in Business Administration (organization theory) terms, not werewolf terms.

One Night Werewolf is a game of organizational decision-making control

• Many consider themselves on the side of good.
• Therefore, they tend to think that people who think differently from them are evil.
• Conflicts of opinion can occur in organizational management.
• But this isn’t a conflict between good and evil.
• There is just a discrepancy in the direction we are aiming for.
• So you could be at odds with the kind-hearted person who offers you a seat on the train, and you are not evil, and neither is the other person.
• One Night Werewolf is a game that allows you to experience this situation where there is a discrepancy in the direction that the members of the organization are aiming for.
• Players typically split into two teams
• After about 5 minutes of discussion time, one person is chosen by vote, and that person is destined to have a terrible time in the game.
• Neither team wants their people to have a terrible time. That’s what each team’s win condition is.
• So, you make various statements during the discussion time and try your best to converge the opinions of other members into one that suits you.
• In other words, it is a game of control over organizational decision-making

Minority and Majority

• The organization’s two teams are divided into a minority and a majority.
• Minorities are sacrificed by the majority vote if they are found to be in the minority.
• So the minority hides its true identity.
• Minorities typically know each other.
  • I’ll make a small tweak here, depending on the variation of the rule.
  • Minority groups need to work together and control organizational decision making to suit their minority
• Majorities don’t know each other (if they did, they’d just vote for someone other than each other).
  • So I don’t know who around me is the enemy.
  • If Mr. A is told by another person B that “Mr. A may be suspicious,” Mr. A knows that he is in the majority, so he would think that Mr. B, who pointed out so, is suspicious. But even if he asserts this, since only Mr. A knows “that Mr. A is in the majority,” Mr. C, who hears his opinion, will not be able to distinguish between Mr. A being in the minority and Mr. B asserting that he is in the majority because he was pointed out to him that way.
  • The majority needs to do its best not to be led into wrong decisions by the minority.
• Logical reasoning makes it clear to all and objective decisions are rarely made in this game.
  • Of course there are probabilistic highs and lows, but none of these phenomena are so low as to be negligible.
    • For example, if you are dealing 5 cards from a 5-player game with 7 cards and 2 “minority” cards
    • Phenomena can occur where no one is in the minority. We tend to think that it is an exceptional event, a very small probability.
    • But 2/7 * 1/6 = 1 / 21, so it happens about 5% of the time.
    • In this case, if we do not come to an agreement that there is “no minority in the field”, we are doing something terrible to our own people and losing!
  • It seems to me that there are more subjective factors than probability calculations and logic: reputation, trust, conviction, etc.

The approximate game situation is described above, but to make the story more interesting, a “special person” is introduced from here

• For any one person, who knows whether that person is in the majority or minority.

  • The information this person brings is important.
  • But this person himself has no means of proving that he is capable of doing so.
  • So to others, he’s just “someone who claims he knows what he’s talking about”.
  • Let’s put ourselves in the minority.
    • Suppose some person A says, “I know who is in the minority; it is Mr. B.”
    • When this is the case, and the atmosphere of the place recognizes it as a fact, the minority team loses.
    • what to do about it
    • For example, Mr. B says, “Eh, no.
    • Or someone C on the minority team claims “A is a liar, because I’m the real one.”
    • Now the mood is, “Which one of you is real?” becomes “Which is the real one?
    • If there is an atmosphere that declaring first is the real thing, the minority team will backstab you by declaring first.
  • If you, Mr. A, were the majority team and Mr. B said, “Mr. A is the majority team,” your trust in Mr. B would increase
    • But Mr. B may be a minority team and just happen to hit the mark by saying so at random. The majority team has a large number of people, so if you say that you are the majority team anyway, you will hit it with a high probability.

• I don’t know how to explain it.

  • Some people are hard to explain with this organizational management metaphor, but I personally find it very interesting.
  • A person who exchanges his/her role with one of his/her choice.
    • The person being replaced can’t see that.
    • If Mr. A exchanges with Mr. B using this special ability and Mr. B is in the minority
      • Mr. A has made himself a minority and he will lose if he doesn’t keep that fact secret.
      • Mr. B becomes “the majority who believes he is in the minority”.
      • Other minorities believe that Mr. B is the minority and Mr. A is the majority, which is not true.
      • Mr. A is not perceived by the minority as a peer, but he shares the winning condition
      • A situation arises in which other players misunderstand your affiliation.
    • In response to the above statement “who knows the role of any one person”
      • I can back up that claim by saying that I traded with that person and that claim is correct.
      • On the other hand, we could point out that they are lying.
    • And this person, again, has no way to prove to himself that he has that ability.

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