games - People Who Read People: A Psychology Podcast

The 13th “People Who Read People” episode is an interview with Polina Vorozheykina, a software engineer based in Portland, Oregon, who also is a skilled player of so-called social deduction games. Social deduction games typically involve trying to figure out the secret roles and motivations of your opponents based on their actions and behaviors. Examples of social deduction games are Werewolf, Mafia, Avalon, and Resistance.

Links to the episode:

In this podcast, we discuss Secret Hitler, a popular social deduction game from the makers of Cards Against Humanity. Polina and I discuss topics including:

In August of 2018 I interviewed an acquaintance, Jon Bismut, who’s a big pinball aficionado/player/fan. He’s not a big name in the pinball world, but he knows enough that I thought it would make an interesting interview for people, like myself, who don’t know much about pinball. One thing that initially struck my interest and made me want to interview him was him saying how big an edge highly-skilled pinball players have on lesser opponents; it’s a very big edge. This was surprising to me, being a novice who usually can’t last more than a few seconds on a pinball machine, so I wanted to delve into what makes a great pinball player and what makes it such a skill game.

Also, did you know that “tilting” in poker has its origin (so it’s widely assumed) from when pinball machines would go on Tilt from being jostled too much? Just an interesting poker connection.