So this is the first installment of our written coverage of video games and I hope that I can cover what I want to say in detail within the topic that I want to focus on. That focus is directed on what is arguably considered to be a flash browser game. The title? “Town Of Salem”.
Now I may have lost a large portion of the audience already when I wrote that this game is a browser game, but please read on as this is much more than a browser game – some may argue a social experiment of trust between 15 people in a single game.
Town of Salem is a free browser game located here or available for $4.99/£3.99 on steam. The game comprises of a town of 15 real life people matched up within a server with an assigned role; ranging from friendly units such as a town lookout to a town mayor and enemy units like a serial killer to even supernatural roles such as werewolves, witches let alone the dreaded mafia.
The core gameplay is segmented into a day/night cycle where people are allowed to talk to each other through the daytime, and the detective roles (your wish of wanting to be a Magnum PI being granted) out there attempt to find out who is friend or foe, while the enemies of the town try to remain hidden by using their own knowledge of the game and wit, or simply by being silent to grant them their victory conditions. The game is very simple in its construct, but allows for a far-reaching level of social discourse with people acting erratically to be hung as quickly as possible (the jester role wins in this condition), while silent types may either be waiting to gather more information, or want to pose as a neutral role. These neutral roles, such as sheriffs or investigators, don’t want to out themselves too early or the evil roles will know who they are, leading to a quick demise. While neutral evil roles don’t want to put themselves in the limelight, lest they become found out and are summarily executed by the townsfolk.
What I like about the game is that each player has a unique role within the town, whether it be good or bad, and they must work with whoever may be a friend (or foe to confuse them) to achieve their goal. Most importantly, as each player is a real life person, it becomes a unique experience each time. Through playing this game, what became apparent to me is that many of the players hypothesise that a specific role called the “medium” is almost always the first target of the evil roles within the game, and will appear in the always mounting death list first. The medium role’s main ability is that through the night they are able to talk to the dead, so the idea behind this most likely comes from that as they are allowed to do this, they will become a part of this group very, very soon.
This “medium’s curse” intrigued me through all my playthroughs and I wondered, what if this is a legitimate thing? So in my research I aimed to play at least 25 games of Town of Salem “All Random” (every town player is a random role) and 50 rounds of the standard game type (which guarantees a medium in the town list). Below you can find the resultant data from each of these formats:
As you can see, the results kind of show a reverse bell curve where early round deaths AND late round/no deaths for the medium actually occurred for the standard format. With the “All Random” format it’s a mixed bag, with a strong direction leading to no medium at all (it is all random after all). These results, while limited, show that this so called “medium’s curse” is just a trend within the game’s player base. So I figured, are there any other thematic topics within the history of video games that hold this tradition of hearsay, which we as a player blindly accept?
What I found was interesting to say the least. First I will present the most obvious (and most argued) culprit in this format which is the system of holding the arrow “down and B” to affect the catachability of Pokemon in the various games that have been released. Some people argue holding “A” works, while there are firm believers that aim to prove this method is a legitimate strategy. Whatever the case may be, it still seems to fall down to pure luck. Similar stories of this hearsay type of tale however seem to have been disproved such as the ability to revive Aerith in Final Fantasy 7, if you were able to collect enough coins within Super Mario 64 you were able to play as Luigi, or even the sultry fabled Tomb Raider Nude Code.
All these so called playground gossip tales would reach one of us with our designated game when we were in those appropriate years (I fondly remember the Aerith revival story), however I feel this is a dying breed, what with the large surge of internet information available to a large portion of the world’s population within their pocket or through a simple google search. These mysteries arguably allow for games to shine with people who wish to seek out every nook and cranny in the geometry allowed for the character to walk through. This so called “medium’s curse” could be one of the last calls of playground tales within our videogames that we wish to seek to be a thing, but is actually just a random act of other users.
However, all is not lost as we still have the mystery of whether holding a button improves our pokemon catchability, we still have our questions regarding new games such as whether walls count in splatoon matches, we still have incredibly realised large open world games such as Witcher 3 and the newly announced Fallout 4 to discover, explore and exploit to create our own myths and legends that can, in time, become their own internet fables. These new theories and current trend of more realized worlds in video games give me hope that maybe the simple “medium’s curse” really may exist.
As for Town of Salem itself? The games are somewhat quick and are always defined by the players that you are matched with. Most of the time the game is very enjoyable, especially if you can collect a large portion of friends together as before you enter the game you can add a completely random name (meaning a mini game ensues where you try and figure out who your friends may be). One word of warning is if you attempt to play 50+ games in a row as fast as possible you may get worn out so treat this game more in kind to one of the Jackbox types of games.
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