A particular type of game is that of "Social deduction games," such as Mafia, Bang!, Secret Hitler, or Lupus, which are particularly popular in gatherings of social groups composed of young people. These games are characterized by their emphasis on players' ability to deduce hidden information and interact socially and strategically. They are particularly suitable because, by exploiting group dynamics, they reproduce the relational mechanisms of a musical ensemble. However, unlike music ensembles, which have a clearly different objective, these games lack the semantic level related to discovering and revealing a teammate's identity.
In a social deduction game, the group is usually divided into two parts: one team considered "good" and another "bad," but each player's identity or affiliation with a specific group is not known to anyone—or in some cases, only to certain players due to their specific roles (such as the sheriff, the village leader, etc.). The objective is to try to uncover the hidden role of others or their loyalty to the team in order to eliminate the opposing faction and/or ensure victory for one's own team.
During the game, players can use logic and deductive reasoning to try to infer the roles of others, while some players may bluff to avoid suspicion, creating an intricate network of hypotheses, lies, and truths that sometimes complicates the game in truly spectacular ways. Due to their unique complexity, in 1998, the Kaliningrad High School of the Ministry of Internal Affairs published the methodical text Non-verbal Communication. Development of role-playing games 'Mafia' and 'Assassin' for a course in visual psychodiagnostics to teach reading body language and non-verbal signals. Moreover, these games have even been the subject of artificial intelligence research, resulting in a significant demand for data processing and the use of various AI technologies, such as multi-agent coordination, intentional reading, and understanding of theory of mind.1
Dimitry Davidoff is generally recognized as the creator of one of the earliest social deduction games on record, Mafia. He traces the first Mafia game back to the spring of 1987 at the Department of Psychology at Moscow State University, from where the game spread to classrooms, dormitories, and summer camps at the University of Moscow. Davidoff developed the game to blend psychological research with his duties as a teacher to high school students, and certainly did not anticipate such international success.
Under this lens, Mr. White: A musical gaming experience was born, inspired by the social deduction game Undercover. In Undercover, a conflict is simulated between two groups: a minority (the Undercover - or "infiltrators") and a majority (the Civilians). At the beginning of the game, each player is secretly assigned a role affiliated with one of these teams and a secret word, which is the only clue to understanding their own identity and uncovering enemies. The game consists of two alternating phases: the daytime phase, during which players must provide information about their words to try to discover who is on their team and who is not, and the nighttime phase, in which players discuss the identities of the players and vote to eliminate a suspect. Through several elimination rounds, players must discover their own identity and uncover their enemies.
Mr. White maintains the original division of the game's groups. Civilians and Undercover are two different groups, characterized by two different musical materials, while a character outside these two groups (Mr. White) is unaware of everything. The objective of the Civilians is to discover all the Undercover, while the Undercover must strive to hide and blend in among the Civilians to avoid being killed. Mr. White, on the other hand, is the Joker, a character who exists only for himself and struggles to stay alive, being able to win only if he succeeds in this. The development of the piece will therefore proceed in alternating phases exactly like in Undercover: a first section, in which the musicians will be free to improvise on the given material according to the director's instructions, previously agreed upon with the composer, and a second section, during which the musicians will vote on who they think are the enemies among them. When a player has been "eliminated," they stop and are excluded from the game, no longer able to participate in the collective creation. The piece ends when all the Undercover have been uncovered, or when all the Civilians have been "eliminated." The actual duration of each performance is therefore impossible to predict, depending simultaneously on the musicians' performance skills and their predisposition to "deceive" or "guess" others' identities; essentially, on their skill in the game.
This game is based on the recognition of roles, which in the sonic adaptation is carried out through specially composed and randomly selected musical materials for each "match." Therefore, players must be very skilled not only in concealing their own fragment but also in paying close attention to the improvisations of others, in order to deduce the group to which the original material belongs.
This type of composition allows for an exploration of the artistic potential of ludic elements in improvisational practice, fostering operational research on the influence of games in contemporary musical composition. It also explores "playfulness" as a directive for performers, social dynamics, and communication through music and non-verbal means. Another significant aspect is the possibility of promoting a certain degree of inclusivity in musical practice, redirecting focus from mere virtuosity, a hallmark of the classical musician par excellence, to various characteristics such as flexibility in approaching a different score for each performance, ideational freshness, or cognitive flexibility.
Returning for a moment to Zorn, it is worth mentioning the care and attention devoted to the selection of performers, a key element for the success of a compositional practice that deeply involves the role of performers not only as mere executors of a pre-determined project but as true co-authors of the piece.
“The choice of performers is a fundamental aspect in the preparation of Cobra. Zorn described it as: "You have to choose someone not only because they can play well, but because they have a good sense of humor or get along with the guy across the room; because they believe in democracy or because they don't; because they want to subvert the shit or because they just want to sit down and do what they're told; because they have a lot of compositional ideas (and maybe they play really badly) but will make good interventions. There are many reasons to call someone into the band of a game piece.".2
It follows that extraordinary interpretative talents are not necessary to participate in an improvisation based on rules and regulations. Average executive skills and a good dose of musical initiative are sufficient to take part in any game piece of this kind.
The success of this piece does not solely reside in an acoustically and musically interesting execution, which can be enjoyed even with headphones without any understanding of the underlying concept of its composition. An effective realization occurs when inter-relational dynamics are punctually respected, each member of the ensemble listens attentively to recognize or not the fragment of others in relation to their own, and every passage of the game occurs with a certain degree of fluidity and simplicity, accompanied by a feeling of mild competitiveness that leads each player to feel relief in not being eliminated, and a healthy and genuine satisfaction in seeing their opponent eliminated.
Just like for the game pieces of the 1980s, the role of the "facilitator" is fundamental for Mr. White, in this case, a competent director of free improvisation practices. He is necessary above all to mark the turns, the moments of voting, and to indicate who the eliminated player is, always through gestures and symbols agreed upon beforehand with the ensemble.
The musical material consists of fragments pre-composed by the author himself and adapted as much as possible to the needs and/or the particular configuration or size of the ensemble. It is distributed via a remotely controlled web server, available online with an internet connection through a private modem activated on-site, to exclude interruptions or overloads that could occur with a common WiFi network connection. The web server was created through the writing of a Max/MSP patch and JavaScript language that distributes the various images of the score, in simple JPEG format, and can be viewed via tablets with common operating systems (iOS, Android, etc.). The web server is controlled in the backend during the performance, but the user interface can be used by the "facilitator" to conduct the performance and switch from one turn to another, and by the musicians, during the voting turn, to express their judgment on each other. In the end, the system collects the preferences and issues the verdict, communicating only to the director who the eliminated player is, who will be excluded from the rest of the process but will participate in the sonic atmospheres of the "night," like a ghost emerging as a warning to the living.
The greatest satisfaction derived from preparing such a piece lies in the initial moments of confusion within the ensemble, where players begin to grasp the connection between the dynamics of the game and the association with the musical materials. That is to say, the moments when one's own identity coincides, to give a simple example, with a C major scale, and thus a bluff coincides with an improvisation on a minor, hexatonic, or octatonic scale, and the listening of others is all focused on perceiving the presence or absence of common notes, similar indications, or any other clue indicating resemblance or difference, and understanding their possible intentionality. It is a type of attention completely different from that required for the performance of any piece, whether containing improvisational parts or not: it is a deductive, suspicious, and very sharp attention that furthermore fosters the consolidation of relationships among musicians.
The perspective regarding the weight of the objectives in the game and the weight of the musical objectives aligns, for this piece, with that of Ciciliani:
Regarding victory or lack thereof: Winning is by no means the sole criterion for judging the success of a performance, as artistic quality also emerges, if not primarily, through imperfection. Just as sports enthusiasts can appreciate surprising moves and unexpected individual saves (even from the opposing team), not just their own victory.3
For the video of the entire performance, please check here.
