Images: Wikimedia Commons; Anna Shvets (Pexels)
Killing Tommy
Death, Silencing, and Social Order in Mafia
by Emily Koonce
Whether you call it Mafia or Werewolf, assign roles with a French deck or folded index cards, portray a conniving mafia member or an innocent villager, you know that when you play this game, someone is going to die. And in my friend group, it's usually Tommy.
Mafia is a social deduction game. Each player has a hidden role and is tasked to either kill all non-Mafia, or discover who the Mafia members are in order to kill them first by a majority vote. These deaths are necessary for the win condition, but also serve a very particular social purpose. In versions of the game where players cannot speak after they’ve died, death is ultimately an act of silencing; it functions as a means to alter the way a person has been communicating with the group. In high school, this meant sitting on my living room floor eating Dum Dums as I announced in a dramatic monologue that Tommy—probably flirting with my mom, rifling through my pantry, or blaring German EDM music—had to shut up.
Before his untimely death, Tommy usually spent a round on trial by the players. Charming and cheeky, he would bat his eyelashes and try to convince us that he was innocent as always, yet we could never shake the notion that he was up to something. Rather than addressing this out loud, we filtered this feeling through the game via violent, repeated deaths: as Mafia co-opting Tommy's presumption of guilt to keep ourselves looking unsuspicious, as villagers voting him out immediately to curb any doubts, or collectively as players to get him to stop talking so we can finally think in peace.
Killing selectively is an important tactic for the Mafia. For example, they may choose the person with the detective role to stop them from revealing crucial information. But Mafia is so deeply embedded in the social dynamics of the play community—in this case, our high school friend group—that its utility extends beyond strategy and becomes a social punishment, inflicted on Mafia and townspeople alike for being too loud, vocal, or annoying in-game. Death acts as a didactic symbol that communicates both our in-game and out-of-game expectations of each other and enforces certain social roles.
So when you play a lot with the same group of people, you start to notice trends. Ryan dies when he's talking too much. Rachel dies when she's talking too little. Regardless of the amount Tommy talks, you know he's on his way out.
Here, death has a pattern. We may not always know who will die next and the meaning of that death may change, but we know that it has a purpose. When we would look over at recently murdered Tommy—mildly peeved, quietly scrolling through his phone—we knew why someone (or ourself) had killed him. While it may not be related to winning, and it may not be a justified punishment to enact upon a friend, death in Mafia always happens for a reason.*
But that's not how death works in the real world. So we use games like Mafia in lots of subconscious ways. Depending on the context, Mafia is a path to better understand our friends and our social roles. It’s an excuse to indulge in the delight of deceit. It’s a method of convincing ourselves that we only need our intuition and logic to uncover the truth. It’s a soothing reassurance that the deaths around us, including our own, have some extrinsic value. It’s a reality we create where death is sometimes unfair, but always rational. In Mafia, the cause of death expresses the collective will of the players, drives the game forward, and is revealed to all at the end of the game.
But most importantly, it’s something fun to do with a group of people while we’re all still living.
*Killing Tommy the first night eventually became the "safe move" and not killing Tommy became a subversive tactic signifying that the Mafia was up for a challenge. Or it just meant that Tommy was in the Mafia. I mean, who other than Tommy would spare Tommy in the first round?!
Emily Koonce (she/her) is a writer, programmer, and game designer interested in the intersection of folk games, philosophy, and education. She teaches game development at the NYU Game Center and is currently working on Crockpot, a game about being bored in the suburbs. Find her on Twitter and Itch.io.