[HN Gopher] Is Werewolf Killing the Conference Hackfest? (2007)
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Is Werewolf Killing the Conference Hackfest? (2007)
Author : Lammy
Score : 35 points
Date : 2021-04-24 08:16 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (headius.blogspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (headius.blogspot.com)
| teachingassist wrote:
| I'm interested to know what the author thinks is the fatal flaw.
|
| In my opinion, it's a flaw that you need a sufficiently strong
| narrator, who is then given all the narrating work.
|
| Exhausting ;-)
| skytreader wrote:
| My experience is different. One thing I looooovvvveeeee (I
| can't emphasize that enough) about Werewolf games is that it
| enables _emergent narratives_. The story writes itself, even in
| the one-night variant. Narrators, just write down the proper
| order of role callout each night. Waking one group up before
| another is what can spoil a game /round.
|
| I even used to not like being the narrator because I'm not in
| on the thrill. But knowing exactly what's happening and seeing
| people blunder, or take advantage of confusion, or whip up an
| alibi out of nowhere, is just as much a roller-coaster!
|
| There was even one time as a narrator, had one of the players
| been capable of reading micro-expressions, they would've had a
| huge leg-up from seeing my reaction to an in-game "day" event.
|
| This game is so much fun!
| rory wrote:
| The plus side of Werewolf as a social activity is that rounds are
| short and there's no need to strategize between them.
|
| It can certainly eat plenty of hours, but I've seen an entire
| engineering department ground to a halt by longer-term strategy
| games where everyone goes back to their desk and plots all day
| between rounds.
| teddyh wrote:
| There are some things which people are simply more receptive to,
| like playing Werewolf, or going out drinking1. Given a choice,
| most people would do these things in preference to almost _any
| other thing_.
|
| If a conference, which has the putative goal to advance the field
| which the conference covers, is allowing _too much_ of these
| other attractive activities, attendees will of course prefer
| these other activities, and the conference will not advance
| towards its supposed goal. There are some people whose definition
| of "conference" is simply "getting together with the people you
| know and doing whatever you feel like", and with that definition,
| of course, any activity is fair game and any outcome for the
| field is irrelevant. But for me, who do not share that
| definition, the goal of a conference - like in this instance
| RubyConf - should be to _advance the field_ in the maximally best
| way it can do so, not simply to be a social bash where fun should
| be maximized. Such an occasion should more accurately called a
| "party", not a "conference".
|
| (Always when I write these things2, there are comments pretending
| that I "hate fun" and want to eliminate partying (or Werewolf, as
| it were). But if you read more carefully, that is not what I
| write. For many people, fun is a required component of
| productivity, so fun should be included. But "fun", like
| paperclips, should not be the goal to be maximized.)
|
| There is an even worse situation which reportedly3 sometime
| happens: When the supposedly optional "fun" activities turn out
| to be not-so-optional if you want to actually get full value out
| of the conference.
|
| 1.
| https://web.archive.org/web/20130808111450/http://ryanfunduk...
|
| 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6373983
|
| 3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16176891
| esrauch wrote:
| Essentially all conferences are intended to be a mix of "hard"
| information transfer and "soft" networking/socialization. Very
| little can actually be directly achieved at a conference, and
| connections are probably _more_ important for ongoing future
| progress.
|
| IMO the article seems more like a standard case where there was
| some particularly exceptional "green field" days of Ruby around
| 2002 when everything was shiny and you could do something as
| important as "first real package manager" overnight. Even by
| 2007 things had matured well past that, and RubyConf shifting
| directionally towards what a Dentist Convention is like seems
| entirely natural.
| teddyh wrote:
| > _Very little can actually be directly achieved at a
| conference,_
|
| The article directly contradicts this.
|
| > _and connections are probably more important for ongoing
| future progress._
|
| Then why are so many of these "networking/socialization"
| events held in forms which don't facilitate either? With
| darkness, deafening music and copious hard liquor, the amount
| of socializing you can do is severely limited in scope and
| kind. (And non-partyers get to stay home and stay out of the
| loop, I guess.)
|
| Regarding Werewolf, it is certainly slightly more amenable to
| networking/socialization, but all things should be taken in
| moderation, which the original article argues it had
| exceeded. And, like drinking, Werewolf is not everyone's cup
| of tea; do non-players simply get to stay home and get
| nothing?
|
| > _things had matured well past that_
|
| Had it really, or did Werewolf simply meme-infect the
| conference population? There is no way to tell without more
| data.
| throwaway189262 wrote:
| Ruby is a dead language and even people attending the conferences
| know that. That's why people there are playing silly games
| instead. Most of them probably show up just to see their friends.
|
| There's a huge contingent of Rubyists in denial about the death
| of Ruby, but all signs point towards it going the way of Perl.
|
| On Tiobe and Github language surveys Ruby has had the biggest and
| longest drop in popularity of any language they track for years
| now.
| mettamage wrote:
| Werewolf? Where can I play? I used to do 24 hours binge sessions
| in college.
|
| I love the game. It has taught me so much about general human
| decision-making. For example, I have had multiple occasions where
| mob mentality occurred when the day before that a (now dead)
| villager had the perfect plan to win the game. Except, now he is
| dead, and the wolves have been able to sow enough chaos for the
| other villages to forget the importance of the plan.
|
| I also had games where this didn't happen.
|
| Or games where rare plays happened. One time the witch did a
| switcheroo (killed one person, saved the other). Based on this
| another villager noticed who the witch was (by using deduction).
| Says to the everyone "I am the witch". She used herself as a
| scapegoat and got killed by the wolves who now believed the witch
| was dead.
|
| I love that game.
| beagle3 wrote:
| "Among us" has a lot of the vibe if you want to join a random
| game when you have a few minutes to kill.
|
| It's not werewolf - but it is perhaps an arcade version.
| cnorthwood wrote:
| There are in-person groups in a few cities when gathering was
| permitted (I play in Manchester). We've moved to
| https://werewolv.es, which is an online platform and has a good
| Discord community attached
| vessenes wrote:
| Interesting that we have Feynman recalling he cured burnout by
| playing (at physics in his case, natch) and a complaint that too
| much playing means people aren't making cool shit on the top page
| of HN today.
|
| I have a quote up in my office: "I am very poorly today and very
| stupid and hate everybody and everything." -- Charles Darwin.
|
| Contra the comments here, during pandemic I think I'm especially
| receptive to the idea that getting a cohort of smart committed
| engineers together and giving them time to build something fun
| (feynman play?) is pretty special, and probably better for the
| universe on average than giving them time to ramp up their
| wetware into village politics mode, a mode that has to be buried
| pretty deep in our evolutionary history, but probably dominates
| the 'time to build cool shit' mental mode.
| evolve2k wrote:
| From my experiences at RailsCamp werewolf is a wonderful leveler,
| be you the local coding celebrity or a total newbie you could
| both join the fun and spar or join forces and create a shared
| narrative together.
|
| As a railcamp (hackfest weekend event) organiser, I often
| encouraged everyone to take time on the first night to play a big
| werewolf game, it was an excellent bonding experience and lead to
| more collaboration and coding across the rest of the camp.
|
| So I disagree, werewolf improves the camp IMHO.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| Our best and brightest open source software engineers are having
| unproductive fun instead of creating more software for me to use!
| How dare they!
| wirrbel wrote:
| Reminds me of my particle physics professor lamenting that we
| played Skat or Doppelkopf (trick taking card games) during
| coffee breaks..
|
| What he didn't see is that those who engaged in a few card
| games would also collaborate much better back at the desks and
| I would say the friendship formed over the games gave a real
| boost to the productivity of the whole research group.
|
| I think when I spent a day at a conference listening to talks
| etc. I am not in a state of mind for productive hacking.
| Forming relationships on the other hand may be able to advance
| a community much more (the hacking can be done at home).
| tomjen3 wrote:
| That is an unchairitable reading, the question is are they
| happier after having played the game than they would have been
| if they had hacked on something?
| thrower123 wrote:
| When IBM was still doing Lotusphere, I enjoyed that it was
| implicitly understood by everyone to be a week-long junket at
| Disney World. Sure, you'd fuck around on the show floor, scan
| some badges, collect some potential leads, and collect a backpack
| full of swag. But you were in sunny south Florida in January,
| rather than the ice-packed north, the beer and appetizers flowed,
| and they rented out an amusement park for a night for the
| Dilberts and Wallys to run riot in.
| timwaagh wrote:
| Just people being people. At college I used to be part of a
| cycling club. We went on camp twice a year. We went cycling
| during the day then we were tired and went to bed so we'd be good
| the next day.
|
| No of course not. We played games during the evening. we used to
| play this one along with card games. Personally I liked werewolf.
| It didn't mean we weren't riding our bikes anymore during the day
| though. I think the same is happening here. There has to be a
| balance. These kinds of events are supposed to be a little bit
| serious but also a lot of fun.
| exdsq wrote:
| If anyone here lives in London I highly recommend the London
| Wherewolf group (find it on MeetUp). Spent two years playing it
| with those guys and it was always a good laugh. They play a
| modified game that's a lot more complex than the traditional
| game.
| stared wrote:
| I miss Mafia. I used to play it in high school on some math
| camps, then during my first year of undergraduate. Later - not so
| much. I would love to participate in a conference and "being
| killed by Mafia".
|
| I loved the game so much that my Bachelor's thesis was "A
| mathematical model of the Mafia game" (took some time to find a
| professor willing to accept such an unusual topic).
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/1009.1031
|
| Funny fact: you get PI/2 ratio for winning chances ratio
| depending if the number of players is odd or even.
| tblakey89 wrote:
| Making a chat app with werewolf built in was actually the perfect
| opportunity for me to learn some Elixir, it was the perfect
| language for it: https://github.com/tblakey89/werewolf
|
| I ended up doing a Flutter app for it, it's on the Play Store and
| App Store if you search 'WolfChat'.
|
| Either way, I really recommend doing a werewolf game as a side
| project. It was really fun to program, and a bit different to the
| standard side project.
| demirev wrote:
| Do you know if there is a similar mafia-type app but with video
| chat instead of text chat?
| tblakey89 wrote:
| I believe it is called Zoom :p
|
| But seriously, Zoom with either the card game, or an app to
| run the game is perfect, you don't need more than that.
| demirev wrote:
| I was thinking in the lines of something with a lobby
| system and the option to join other people's games. But
| sure, once you have a group zoom works just fine :)
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(page generated 2021-04-25 23:02 UTC)