TThe latest series of The Traitors, which concluded last week with a heartbreaking finale, featured some of the usual characters, from the benign extrovert to the Columbo wannabe who endlessly watches his fellow contestants for the slightest hint of betrayal. But despite the constant onslaught of doubts and accusations, one believer stood out for her quiet determination. That person is Jade Scott, and I wasn’t at all surprised when she revealed herself to be an avid gamer fairly early on in the series.
“Minecraft was my introduction when I was 15 years old,” she says. “I made a lot of friends at school playing it.” But from this innocent introduction, she moved on to darker titles, first-person shooter game Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and multiplayer battle arena game Dota. “That’s where my interest in strategy games really started,” she says.
After all, The Traitors is a game in a way that’s different from other reality shows. It is heavily inspired by the parlor game known variously as Werewolf or Mafia, where participants use social reasoning skills to identify the murderer in their midst. In fact, the original version of the show, the Dutch series “De Verraders,” appeared after the first coronavirus lockdown, during which hundreds of thousands of people discovered the multiplayer online game “Among Us.” In this game, a group of players must figure out who the killer is while completing menial tasks on a spaceship. So does that mean video game players have an advantage in The Traitors?
In the year leading up to his appearance on the show, Scott had been playing two indie games based on social deduction: the survival adventure Project Winter and the office satire Dale & Dawson Stationery Supplies. Both require a group of players to perform various tasks in a high-tension environment, but a select few are there to sabotage their progress. Honest workers must discover and expose unscrupulous people before it’s too late. She was, in effect, being trained to become a believer.
“I always wanted to come in as a believer,” she admits. “My opinion on this has changed since I left the castle, but I’ve always thought this game is much harder for believers, and I like playing the game on harder settings. As a believer you’re trying to solve who the traitor is, but as a traitor I thought you were losing on the puzzle-solving aspect of it. My strategy was to go in and grab it right away.” some Suspicion, because it would protect you from murder…I never realized how much suspicion I was going to get! ”
In fact, Scott was a constant target of criticism and suspicion. It was difficult. Whereas in games you sit behind a screen and communicate via Discord so you just start talking and build friendly relationships with people, in The Traitors you have nothing to hide behind. It was a completely different environment to think about strategy and how to communicate with people. ”
So did the tactics she learned playing games like “Project Winter” and “Dale & Dawson” quickly fall apart? “I was very good at defending myself at the roundtable,” she says. “A lot of that came from the practice I got in the social deception game. The moment you walk up to the table with logic and reasoning and say, ‘I understand why you think that, but I haven’t done anything to suggest that,’ they have no room for rebuttal. Also, I can’t tell anyone I felt like I had nothing to prove. I think it gets worse when you go around and try to interact. I was thinking, if I stand up and talk to this person, is it just going to look like I’m going to be in their good books?”
One thing Scott definitely learned from playing strategy sims was observing the game mechanics and taking notes. “There were different formats,” she says. “Every day, I used a kind of traffic light to show how I felt about each person. Green indicated who I thought was loyal, but inevitably, although I’m not 100 percent sure, those people would be killed! At that point, it was red that convinced me that they were traitors. I also wrote everyone’s names on a piece of paper. , I drew a line between them based on who I saw them talking to. It was like a cork board that TV detectives use, with red lines between the pictures.”I’ve hinted at this before, but I kept staring at that page, and the only contestants I didn’t draw a line with were Rachel and Stephen. I was so busy thinking about how to protect myself… I just missed the obvious, right? ”
Scott says she hasn’t played social deduction games since leaving Traitor’s Castle – perhaps she’s done dealing with other people’s suspicions. Now she’s moved on to games like Outer Wilds and Blue Prince, where you play against strange, mysterious environments rather than other humans. But her time with The Traitors had another interesting effect. Currently studying for her PhD, she believes that her experience at the final stage of the roundtable was extremely helpful in certain aspects. “What I’m really concerned about, and I think a lot of PhD students are too, is vitality,” she says. “You literally have to sit in a room with the examiner and defend your paper. Well, I really learned how to defend myself and get my point across!”
