Can game design help you beat The Traitors?
Could a strong knowledge of game design help you win The Traitors? This was the question UK series one contestant Ivan Brett had in mind when he joined the show last year, keen to beat the odds for as long as he could while playing as one of the game’s Faithful. The author of The Floor is Lava and Bored? Games!, a professional D&D Dungeon Master and long-time fan of social gaming, Brett’s own pitch to the series’ producers was that he could beat them at their own format. Of course, things didn’t entirely go to plan.
Still, he believes there’s a method to the series’ format, a meta to follow to avoid being murdered, and several social game design tweaks he would make to keep the series feeling fresh for years to come. I sat down with Brett this week ahead of a big week of episodes in the show’s hit second season to discuss all of that and more.
“I love social deduction and social strategy games – adore them – and have for many years been running them as part of my job,” Brett says to me of his gaming background – a similar pitch to the one he used to apply. “I was running a lot of Mafia, Werewolf, those kinds of games in youth clubs and for corporate training exercises when I saw this advertised, and I thought ‘brilliant!’, obviously – if I was ever going to apply for a reality show it would be this.
“I got the idea pretty quickly that TV shows need you to have an elevator pitch for what you are like – a one line sell for what you will provide. So in a very sort of calculated way, I said ‘alright, well, I’m gonna be the guy who has run the game for years and now wants to play it, who has seen all the strategies and seen everything play out, and can now play using the best of those. So that was my application. In the edit I was listed as a children’s author, which is something else I did – probably to build the wholesomeness of my character rather than the strategic element, as they didn’t really show much of the Faithfuls plotting at all.” He sighs. “But that’s fine.”
“Winning as a Faithful has only a tiny chance of success.”
As an applicant to The Traitors’ first run, the exact rules of the show were still something of a mystery to contestants, but Brett knew enough that he wanted to be one of the good guys, the Faithful, even though it was likely to be more of a challenge. “I thought that would be more worthwhile – so I went, ‘here’s my 10 point plan for how to survive as a faithful, here’s how I don’t get murdered, here’s how I don’t get banished’, all that kind of stuff. I really wanted to make the claim that I’d solve the game as much as possible – in a game where winning as a Faithful has only a tiny chance of success.”
Because here’s the thing – The Traitors isn’t evenly balanced, far from it. Globally, with the format produced in numerous countries, Traitor series wins far outnumber those of the Faithful. Even here in the UK, where Traitor Wilf fell at the final hurdle last year, that result only came to pass because of a controversial ‘parting gift’ from backstabbed player Kieran. More on that moment later.
