Real People or Fake Friends
or, Fake Real Friends and Real Fake Friends
Gnosia is a single-player visual novel contained within a simulator for Werewolf. There is an overarching story that plays out during, before, and after each game of Werewolf that you play with a cast of 14 characters. There’s the main enemy faction (aware of one another), their cult members (unaware of one another or their leaders), doctors, guardian angels, detectives (engineers), guaranteed safe crew members, and a rogue element trying to survive until the end to fulfill their own win condition separate from the crew.
The game feels largely like playing social deduction games with your friends. The catch being, these people aren’t real. I’ve played Werewolf both with people I’ve known for years and people I’ve only just met. I’ve played plenty of social deduction games while in my college’s tabletop club. Which is what makes each of these characters all the more interesting for how they replicate archetypes I’ve seen past friends embody during play.
Shigemichi is an awful liar. In a game about social deduction, you would think it makes the game fairly flat since you can’t be surprised by him, but that also means you (as well as everyone else) can tell very easily when he’s lying. This also means that when he is your Gnosia co-conspirator you have to work harder to maintain his cover for him to retain your numbers advantage. This means that it’s easy to sniff out when he’s trying to hide something from you, makes working with him as Gnosia dangerous, and with his very trustworthy nature, he becomes incredibly valuable as an asset in the event you need to sway the vote or discern between friend or foe in a smaller pool of survivors.
On the complete opposite end, Sha-Ming is a prolific liar. Even when he’s on the crew member’s side, I’ve had multiple games where he said he would completely back someone during the vote, only to then be the deciding vote that casts that person out. Whether he’s a crew member or as a titular Gnosia, he is incredibly hard to pin down and understand the role he’s playing if not a guaranteed crew member. He can also frequently obfuscate conversations and shirk attention away from himself even should you have him absolutely dead to rights as one of the Gnosia. Making him incredibly dangerous as an enemy, but highly valuable as an ally.
Given the game’s nature of everyone essentially getting chances to be any role at any given time, it’s hard to ever have hard feelings. Some characters I get more nervous being on opposite sides of than others, but I’ve also grown so attached to Setsu that I’ll back them up and protect them until the end of the game even if they are Gnosia. With a revolving door of who is both your allies and enemies, it made the game simply feel like I was playing a game with friends. Which has made playing a team-based hero shooter a very interesting contrast.
Marvel Rivals is a popular hero based team game released by NetEase Games on December 5th 2024. The game has over 40 million registered users (actual active users are certainly lower due to common practice of people making alt accounts) and a healthy competitive community encouraged by the developers. There’s also plenty upon plenty of community resource guides from how to find a character you like and crosshairs per character, all the way to how you should be positioning per role, as well as higher level terms to better communicate with your teammates.
As is the ever present trade-off for any online game, the community is filled with pleasant and extremely unpleasant people. A lot more of those unpleasant people tend to be in the ranked mode than the pleasant ones as well. For context, I had reached GrandMaster 3 during a solo climb for Season 0, again during Season 1 with a four stack, and I’ve hit GM1 after some solo climbing during the current Season 1.5 and the experience is extremely stark.
Most matches feel like a fight more against your own team than the enemies. Frequently, both in matches we won and lost, there were players questioning either me or whoever they perceived as the weakest link instead of even entertaining the possibility they could or should have changed anything they did at all. Playing healer and dealing with three enemies diving you? It’s on you to not be dove. Playing a DPS role? You have to constantly be getting kills or be yelled at to switch off. Playing a tank? You have to always be on the objective at all time and survive all the enemies attacking you at once while your team hunts supports.
My experience has been largely focused on American servers, and my experience with US player bases when it comes to other team based/cooperative games is certainly not emblematic of how all online communities are. Yet the experience has consistently been extremely toxic and uninviting. To the point that I openly avoid using any in-game voice comms and instead elect to use the ping system. While I do recognize that the ping system can’t communicate nuance or important info like specific strategies, it’s generally more beneficial to me than the ever increasing chances of being called a slur as I climb higher in elo.
Sometimes people give very bad calls, tell you incorrect information, just make noise, or are just unpleasant to listen to while I’ve been in situations where hearing footsteps behind me has both cost and won me games. This isn’t to say every person is unpleasant, but the notable exceptions make the frequency of highly ego-centric teammates much less appealing to encounter or deal with. In high intensity situations, sometimes it’s better to focus purely on yourself and trust your own judgement than deal with someone complaining about not being healed while they are in the enemy backline and half the enemy team is contesting the main objective.
I bring up the comparison between a single-player game where friends and enemies flip each match you play and a multiplayer team-based competitive hero styled game to showcase a problem I’ve seen grow more and more present in online spaces: Real people have a higher likelihood of being more dreadful than fake ones. As much as I tend to bring up the lack of social connectivity that people in general have nowadays, another factor is the further stratification self-imposed by those attempting to interact with other people. How is it easier to show grace to an NPC who you know isn’t real than it is to do the same for a real person?
Ego and pride certainly play a factor, sure, but why? Why do we have to impose ourselves and sense of self onto others as a way to verify our own perceptions of who we are at the denigration of others, while they must become this fixed object simply “in our way” than being their own person? Why must our subjective selves be proven as fact at the cost of the other person? Are you truly so infallible that literally every other person is always dragging you down or wrong yet you never err in your own reasoning or judgement? Are NPCs exempt from this judgmental nature because we know they are limited in what they can, or will ever express?
Are our social skills so atrophied that we must adhere to specific archetypes and structures to function in groups? Must we stick to hard and fast rules while we never stray from what the self-titled “leader” states as true objective fact? Maybe one person doesn’t know what to do in certain situations, would they not seek someone else who might know or perform better in this moment? Is that not a sign of a capable leader? We all come with a wide variety of different skills and perspectives. To simply always denote someone else or yourself as the “one who knows all” is to limit not only yourself but others as well. To reason that “if I don’t know the answer, then nobody does” is not only shallow but entirely self-defeating and unconstructive to your own ability to develop as well.
If our only ability to interact with one another becomes fixed on these ideas of archetypes and set roles of structures, then we become little more than cogs waiting to be placed into fixed places within a machine. We aren’t cogs or machines. We all exist as individuals and people. Some of us are bad liars, some of us can keep our story straight without a moment to rehearse, and some of us are perceptive to the point of it almost being invasive. We aren’t flawless, but that also doesn’t mean we’re entirely flawed beings. We have strengths and weaknesses that can’t be perfectly categorized.
When we are able to break from our own fixed ideas of who we are in rigid structures imposed on us by ourselves, we can start seeing the humanity each of us carry. Sometimes we have off days, and sometimes we have days where we perform better than we’ve ever done before. Being human is an ongoing experience and development. We’re never fixed in who we are or can be. When you start imposing limits on who a person is by giving them fixed definitions, you see them as nothing but a fixed point based on your own fallible subjectivity. To believe someone can be a fixed idea is to also believe that others (including yourself) are fixed in who they can be as well.
I know what I’m capable of. I may not be the best at everything I do, nor do I expect perfection from myself at all times (at least I’m trying not to anymore) but I know I can improve. I may not reach the point in certain traits that others seemingly were at for their entire lives, but I also have strengths some of those people can’t even begin to imagine possessing. To resign one’s self to stagnancy is to stop growing, and to stop growing is to begin dying. You are always capable of growing and being if not better than you were yesterday, then you can become someone different than who you were the day prior. If you can change, then so can others. We aren’t fictional characters with fixed parameters and linear dialogue paths. You’re a living, breathing person with your own wants, desires, expectations, fears, hopes, and dreams. Don’t reduce yourself or others to something shallow just to protect an equally self-centered perception of the world.
