Is Werewolf Killing the Conference Hackfest? (2007) | Hacker News Reader

Is Werewolf Killing the Conference Hackfest? (2007)

headius.blogspot.com

39 pointsLammy25 comments

Our best and brightest open source software engineers are having unproductive fun instead of creating more software for me to use! How dare they!

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).

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?

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.

“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.

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

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.

HN certainly seems to value productivity a lot. The startup scene demands it.

However there's seemingly a group of users that have no interest in the grind, and who just want a quiet life away from it.

I enjoy that both participate in the discussion.

I'm in the latter camp, so I'm quite happy that a bunch of like-minded people connect over a game. The open source world can wait.

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.

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

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.

> 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.

> like drinking, Werewolf is not everyone’s cup of tea; do non-players simply get to stay home and get nothing?

I'm someone who really doesn't enjoy Mafia/Werewolf, but it's just the reality that it's impossible to include everyone: some people don't want to X for any X. Overnight hacking sessions until 4am are also exclusionary. Werewolf seems better than binge drinking in terms of inclusion.

> did Werewolf simply meme-infect the conference population

The evidence would be essentially all other conferences, which are "bad" in the way the article is griping about and which rarely involve Werewolf. 2007 Rubyconf sounds normal, so it seems like it would have been more productive to try to discuss what made 2002 Rubyconf special rather than what made 2007 Rubyconf not-special.

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.

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.

Do you know if there is a similar mafia-type app but with video chat instead of text chat?

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.

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 :)

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.

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.

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.

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 ;-)

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!

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.

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.

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