A Baudrillardian Perspective on Hard-Claiming (or: why claims matter, kind of)
a reflection on the evolution of claims as a medium of communication and how BOTC fundamentally opposes homogeneity
Preamble
Blood on the Clocktower is a bluffing game: good-aligned players are encouraged to hide in the beginning to gather information, and evil-aligned players must do so in order to buy time to exercise their abilities throughout the course of the game.
As a player or group continues to play the game, overall patterns in bluffs can emerge. If a player is known to openly share information when good and is currently approaching you with information, chances are they’re about to tell the truth. Likewise, if a player known to be secretive about information is openly sharing, they might be under the effects of madness. Although these social patterns can be used to support claims of good alignment, they begin to be counterproductive once the player must play for evil: as players gain experience, they tend to switch playstyles to avoid this.
Once the game begins, players canvas the town for information. For a good player, sharing absolutely nothing about one’s role or information gathered is an easy way to hinder one’s team, but being fully open leaves one vulnerable to metas and being picked off by the evil team. Despite all of this, sharing information is a net benefit for the good team.
What then, should players claim?
Throughout my own games and those uploaded as content, I’ve noticed that claims evolve through a pattern similar to Baudrillard’s theory of Simulacra and Simulation. This theory attempts to explain the evolution and distortion of language and communication as a result of mass media consumption by the general public. If you’ll humour me for a little longer, I hope to show why so many experienced players rarely share information on the first day, and a perspective on why most BOTC streams might start off quite silly before the true game begins.
Signs and Referents
A sign refers to a unique concept evoked by a particular communication, while a referent is the reality the signs refer to. In our case, claims are signs which refer to the token (referent) an individual draws.
Baudrillard’s theory proposes four successive eras of the sign(1):
The sign is a faithful and transparent representation of reality.
The sign masks reality, presenting a distorted image of underlying reality.
The sign pretends to be a representation of a reality that does not exist.
The sign has no relationship to any reality and becomes pure simulacrum.
(Note 1: As it stands, this theory only holds for players who’ve drawn good-aligned tokens. Players with evil tokens inherently must lie about their role, in which case there can never be the reality referent the theory is based upon. Interestingly, this still applies to Kazali/LoT/marionette roles: regardless of alignment, the blue token drawn is built off of when considering what to claim.)
Orders of Simulacra
Sacramental: a faithful representation of reality
Beginner players tend to either openly play their role, or avoid hard-claiming by sharing vague points of information. Regardless, a claim is made according to a faithful reality, and these signs are accepted by players of similar experience levels because they resemble their equivalent referent by name or intent. Consider an Empath ("Each night, you learn how many of your 2 alive neighbors are evil.") claiming an ‘ongoing information role’: it is a faithful sign despite its vagueness because it truthfully reflects the Empath token the player drew.
Maleficence(2): beginnings of a distorted reality
As players begin to realise that playing with full honesty paints a target on their backs for the evil team, players tend to adjust their claims towards a desired perception. Typically, this is done to bait or discourage Demon kills, but may extend towards poison, madness, and other mechanics propagated by evil abilities. In Trouble Brewing (TB), an Empath might claim Ravenkeeper ("If you die at night, you are woken to choose a player: you learn their character.") to discourage being targeted by the Demon. Importantly, though these claims refer to a reality intentionally distorted by the sign, it still refers to the actual reality through misdirection.
Some players realise that evil players can also reverse a claim to infer the underlying referent communicated. Thus, some players choose to switch between these two stages, occasionally playing their role openly to disrupt a noticeable bluffing pattern.
Sorcery: the sign plays at an appearance of reality that does not exist
In this stage, a claim pretends to represent some token it has no relation to, by referencing some other token that was not drawn.
After having played a significant number of games, players understand that similarly experienced players will claim roles in an arbitrary matter. Players begin interacting with BOTC beyond simply a game, but as a social experience. By this point, players tend to claim a role that they would enjoy bluffing irrespective of a drawn token. Of my local group, one player always bluffs Savant if on script, another bluffs Goblin (irrespective of alignment), and yet another bluffs Amnesiac.
Simulacra: the sign becomes pure simulacrum.
This stage has been harder to observe as most games remain near the third stage – a satisfying equilibrium to disrupt social patterns while maintaining replayability. However, streamed games demonstrate a good example where claims no longer refer to one’s role at all. Often, players ask ‘silly questions’, discuss external information a player is aware of, or choose to never claim a role. Notably, the player still engages as an active player for their team, but does so by circulating others’ information as opposed to their own.
At this point, the claim fully separates from reality and implodes: a state that occurs when the boundaries between the sign (claim) and reality (token) become significantly arbitrary and their differences disappear – power is underpinned, and once it reaches some level of a pure arbitrary state, the sign’s loss of power begins interfering with its purpose as a medium of communication. Rather than leading to an equivalence between the claim and the token, the claim as a whole stops functioning as a sign to begin with and is accepted only by interacting with external information.
Interestingly, this isn’t an inherently negative circumstance: just as a player with ongoing information may die before receiving anything and yet still win with their team, a player not referencing their token with their claim is still an active participant that engages with external information so long as other players are engaging in lesser orders. (If all players decide to engage in imploded realities, the game loses the core mechanic of deduction.) Though, as with any form of lesser information, this tends to make solving the game more difficult.
(Note 2: Although this order is largely known under the name Maleficence due to English translation, the original French text is better understood translated to “bad”. The distortion of reality is not inherently bad under all concepts, as we will find, though Baudrillard’s specific referent to media-dominated society explains the negative connotation.)
Hyperreality
Once claims hit pure simulacrum, they are considered to enter a state of hyperreality characterised by a confusion between signs (claims) and referents (tokens) – implosion becomes a significant hindrance on communication prospects.
However, Baudrillard’s hyperreality engages in another key concept: hyperreality is apathetic, uncommitted, and disillusioned. As the theory hypothesised to the prevalence of consumerism and media, hyperreality takes the sign-referent implosion and takes it one step further: the medium (media) and reality implode as well. This is observed in our world as media begins impacting real life (What items do you actually need, versus what is being sold to you?).
This does not apply to BOTC.
Although claims seem to implode with their referents over time, it does so within the mechanics of the game: the hyperreality it creates does not implode with reality. More importantly, the reality Baudrillard postulated his framework on refers to one that evolves towards an aggregate: a loss of nuance, distinction, and reality. BOTC does quite the opposite. The game operates with an understanding that all actions taken during the game are done with respect to both the game and the overall social experience that everyone partakes in – a distinction that prevents the ultimate implosion of reality.
From another perspective, Baudrillard’s stages of evolution only ever evolves forwards towards a path of disillusioned and arbitrary apathy. BOTC however, at its core, is a game about building community and playing around other people. Claims evolve bidirectionally as ongoing metas do, and rarely stay within one stage for long. It is within the game's nature for players to develop ever-changing playstyles.
Now, even though BOTC does not approach complete implosion, it demonstratedly follows the orders of simulacra. Having thought about this for a long time, I've started to wonder: why claim at all in a group that has reached a stage of arbitrariness? I think the answer comes with experience, something I cannot claim to have just yet. But, if you'll allow me a couple thoughts:
So .. what?
Noticing the arbitrary nature of a group's claims seems to point towards a shift towards the community aspect of the game, rather than playing exclusively to win. It demonstrates a familiarity with the game, an understanding that the evil team may favour an interesting game above an optimised one wherein there is little to gain by hiding a role. Demons will sometimes kill Farmers, Ravenkeepers, or pick the funny Barber-swap. At this point, claims become information towards the player’s perspective towards the game rather than their role: will the player be sharing information openly, or selectively? Will the player be circulating external information, or their own? I've played many games within my local group where a role is hard claimed and stuck to, even if double-claimed or ‘proven’ otherwise, and end up playing a strong social game.
At this point, claims seem to become a reflection of the player rather than their token…which can be considered implosion after all. Perhaps in the Coterminality perspective of Simulacra, BOTC’s reality implosion results in the direct opposite to Baudrillard’s implosion: a reality based upon the richness of individuality, interaction, and community, the diametric opposite of an apathetic aggregate.
Then, what should one claim? Why claim at all? I believe it ties back to the overall goal of the game: to have a good time. There is no one ‘right’ way to play the game: a player might choose to claim actual information to engage with solving, distorted information to engage with bluffing, or no information to engage with others. And, so long as the player is stewarding the game by circulating information and engaging with others: so long as players are having a good time playing the game…it doesn't seem to matter what one initially claims.
Afterword
Writing this piece has given me a lot of time to reflect on what it means to play BOTC. Although I'm sure my stance will change as I play more games and gain the experience needed for insight, I've found myself with quite a satisfying conclusion – there is no ‘point’ to claiming beyond it facilitating the opening of the game, in the same way there is no ‘correct’ claim for any given token: BOTC is only ever truly ‘won’ when players enjoy themselves.
But in the meantime, I've got more games to play.
