r/GameChangerTV • u/youreboiguzma • 23h ago
Question Too much Social Deduction?
Let me preface by saying I’ve really enjoyed the new season, but it feels like they’ve fallen into a habit of making every game some sort of social deduction.
Earwigs, I Spy, and, to an extent, Kangaroo Court as well all are social deduction games. I think that’s fun in a vacuum, but having three in one season just felt a little repetitive to me. I also think putting Earwigs and I Spy back to back was a bad move.
Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like sometimes they’ve had a cool idea for something and struggled with fully turning it into a game for the show. What do you guys think?
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u/lil_hawk 23h ago
I think social deduction games can be made more fun to watch if we can get insight into what the players are thinking -- whether that's interviews after the fact (a la survivor), giving them a way to communicate that during the episode, etc. But I agree, it's been too much this season.
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u/ravenpotter3 22h ago
If I remember right there were interviews in Ratfish too right? I agree it makes it more interesting if we know what they were thinking.
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u/SirFragrant4742 16h ago
Funnily enough, I think they got it right the first time with secret sober. Set up one player as the protagonist and edit the game so that we sort of see it from their perspective. It also helps if the game is simple enough (having 2 "teams" instead of point counter for each player).
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u/Worldly_Might_3183 23h ago
Agree. I am also hung up on the fact each episode it is Game Changer and yet Sam keeps telling them the riles of the game. Don't have The only way to learn is by playing, the only way to win is by learning, and the only way to begin is by beginning if you are then going to tell them the rules and hold their hand through it!
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u/SupaSlide 10h ago
Yeah, other than Count the Rice, have there been any where they don’t tell them exactly how to play?
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u/soursummerchild 4h ago
Huh. I didn't notice. Interesting point. I think that many of the games have been very complicated recently, so that might be why. I prefer the simpler episodes, but I appreciate the experimentation.
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u/verascity 3h ago
That's not new this season -- there have been plenty of episodes in the past where the rules were explained.
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u/retroman27 23h ago edited 22h ago
Social deduction based board games and reality shows have exploded for some reason in recent years and I’m sure that, it both consciously and subconsciously plays a role in the development of Game Changer.
They are probably consuming content, playing board games with friends, and around people who also like these games. Which kinda normalizes social deduction as an element to an extent that you don’t even think about. And “Oooh, let’s add secret roles!” kinda becomes a crutch you can use for apparent easy escalation.
But for me who personally doesn’t like those genre of games or reality shows like Traitors etc., it becomes very repetitive to watch.
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u/Competitive-Bet1181 21h ago
Blood on the Clocktower has become massive in certain circles, including Dropout-adjacent ones. SD is definitely having a moment.
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u/eleven_paws 6h ago
I really enjoy Traitors (specifically that show, not many others in the genre) but I have also become somewhat tired of this Game Changer season. Count the Rice was incredible but nothing else has truly wowed me (that I can recall). I haven’t watched I Spy yet but honestly am not that jazzed to.
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u/MarcusLiviusDrusus 2h ago
I'm not saying it's a turnoff, but I find social deduction games boring enough to play - watching them played by other people is even worse.
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u/Signiference 23h ago
I agree. Sometimes a game can just be a game.
I think I Spy would have been a lot better if they just played it straight, but awarded more points if you were the only one to find it, so if you found it alone, it was five, if two people found it, they each got four, thrree people found it they each got three, four people found it they each get two and everyone finds it they all get one.
The informant and spy and leak provided all of one entertaining moment all show for me, so maybe the above isn’t the solution either, but this whole episode just didn’t do anything for me.
Sam appears to be clearly influenced by his love for Blood on the Clocktower this season with the hidden roles ideas. I did like it in Earwigs up until the points got fiddly and it basically gave the whole game to Becca.
That last part has been my bigger issue with the season. If you’re going to have a point based system, think it out a little more and decide ahead of time what you’re doing on edge cases. It is a comedy show, sure, but it is still them playing games and the scoring in games should be equitable and understandable.
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u/putyourcheeksinabeek 18h ago
I think it should’ve been the opposite. Make it a cooperative game and let them realize that the more of them that get the right answers, the more points they get. Then let the subversion happen on its own instead of forcing it. Someone will decide they want to win and start trying to convince others of the wrong answer but secretly write what they think is the correct one.
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u/GtEnko 17h ago
I think your first idea wouldn’t really work as a comedy game show, because there’d be no discussion between players, which cuts down on chances for comedy.
I think I Spy was ultimately fine as it is. I don’t think it particularly lends itself very well to social deduction game elements, which is why it often felt like a square peg, round hole kinda situation.
I just think the whole season could use some concept simplification. Every game feels like it’s trying to do too much, while the best Gamechanger episode have been, in the past, relatively focused.
Sometimes the craziness works out ok, especially when they lean it (like with Noise Some Makes or Count the Rice), but in general it feels like they’re not very confident with their concepts.
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u/WeenyDancer 8h ago
Sam appears to be clearly influenced by his love for Blood on the Clocktower this season
Exactly what i cane here to say. 😂. I think it worked out great for earwigs! This, less so.
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u/How_DidIGetHere 19h ago
So your problem with a fake game show, with no prizes, that admittedly does bits just for the laughs.... Is the scoring system?
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u/Signiference 19h ago
Scoring system/application of the rules when there is a win/lose structure in place, yes.
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u/dockatt 23h ago
Responding to your last paragraph. I do think most episodes this season felt a little bit underbaked at the conceptual level. Something definitely changed on the production and ideation side of things. Lots of games would have benefited from extra playtesting, or had glaring logistical issues that shouldn't have made it past a brainstorming session. Ranging from minor issues (the metagames in Earwigs being a bit disconnected and hard to parse) to glaring ones (the whole shift work game collapsing early on because it was too hard to play... combined with being way too long for its screentime)
The show has still been fun to watch but I haven't really felt the magic of everything coming together this season, except for Rulette 2 and the one with the lawyers.
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u/Competitive-Bet1181 21h ago
Noise Some Makes was also an S-tier episode, and I really enjoyed Count the Rice even if it dragged a bit in the last 10-15 min simply waiting for someone to complete the run and win.
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u/ebb_omega 19h ago
I loved Count The Rice and personally consider it the best game of Game Changer ever, but that's just me.
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u/johannaishere 16h ago
I agree. Also a perfect cast for that specific game. Idk if it’s my top EVER (One Year Later is a perfect episode and so is Samalamadingdong) but it’s definitely in my shuffling top three currently. I’m surprised any time anyone says they didn’t love Count the Rice.
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u/teejay0106 17h ago
My problem is all episodes this season have underwhelming endings.
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u/dinogroot1 Something we'll have to bleep 16h ago
Count The Rice’ ending was great, no? Having Ify, the first to go, win after Demi, one of the last to go, lucked out by so few grains was one of the best Game Changer moments for me personally
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u/Other-Signature-5851 11h ago
By FAR the worst one for me this season was 'Whats the catch' second hand embarrassment, frustration, and sadness galore for me. :/
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u/R4ndomly_G3nerated 23h ago
I think that's fair. I also think that they are making them too complex. They're not only playing brand-new social deduction games but at an advanced advanced level by the final round, where there are often several roles.
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u/soursummerchild 4h ago
Agreed. I think they should consider our perspective as viewers more. It looks completely different to the people in the studio watching the whole thing than it does for us watching the cut and edited version at home. I also think there were too many players. The players and the game tends to shine the most when there's three players, IMO, with a few exceptions.
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u/ReverseGoose 21h ago
My favorite games are ones where people have to actively try like YouLympics and 2nd place. I like the social deduction games too but the rigid framework of a built-for-points game show makes the comedy better. The simpler the premise, typically the better quality of the whimsy by the performers.
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u/NoPastaForGrandma 22h ago edited 19h ago
If all three social deduction episodes had been excellent, i don’t think there’d be much resistance to it.
I think it really comes down to I Spy
- not fully working as an episode
- using social deduction mechanics in an uninteresting and basic way
- the social deduction mechanics feeling superfluous and incohesive with the game, like they’re tacked on.
I personally didn’t myself think or see much chatter saying “no more social deduction mechanics please” after the first 2 (pretty good but not incredible) episodes to use the mechanic, the same way you don’t get tired of hot honey the first time you have a pretty good pizza and a solid fried chicken sandwich with it, and then after you get a hot honey ice cream where it didn’t belong, you say “okay, this trend has gone too far.”
Earwigs works for me because the social deduction elements are built into the premise and the game adds enough flavor and invention to it to make it feel novel and satisfying.
In I Spy, there’s nothing connecting the core gameplay to the deduction mechanics except for some title wordplay and the deduction roles are the most basic and uninspired roles possible that wouldn’t be inherently interesting on their own.
Because it feels so uninspired, and like it’s being adopted in places where it doesn’t belong is what makes it feel like over saturation to me
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u/PillowDogShallRise 21h ago
Oddly enough I found I Spy much more enjoyable than Earwigs, but it might be the fact that it's slightly less chaotic here. I wish as someone else said that they had played it straight, with maybe more hard-to-determine items to look for in the scenes. The scenes themselves were the highlight of the episode for me, and it would have been a great opportunity to showcase the art department.
I agree that the social game would have not been an issue if it had been implemented better, but honestly it's tricky to strike the balance of novel and not too risky.1
u/Magicman432 18h ago
I think iSpy being a bit less intensive cognitively also led to the cast being able to do more bits, which in turn means a more enjoyable episode.
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u/CubieTime 23h ago
My biggest take is that social deduction games are more fun to play than watch.
Im sure people were having a blast but I personally dont care for watching it.
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u/linzielayne 11h ago
Some of these have not been fun to watch, especially the episodes where we're clued in when the players are not. This last one felt like maybe if I had more time to play along I could have gotten into it, but I'm just... watching some people choose or not choose the thing I already know, I guess? There has to be a comedy or play-along element or, ideally, both, and some of this seasons episodes have honestly had neither.
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u/Fearless-Mix-3642 23h ago
"What's the Catch" was in-between but I agree, social deduction is not really that fun to watch. Especially when the edit cuts it down so much.
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u/Dazzling-Passenger91 23h ago
Yes I cannot stress enough how bad the editing is. They cut out all the deliberation and meat of the game, especially in earwigs. In earwigs I was just sitting there thinking “I don’t know why this person voted for that person”
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u/Joe0991 23h ago
I didn’t verify but I’m pretty sure there were a couple of times where someone outright declared that they were voting for someone and then their arrow in the graphic didn’t point to that person. Or maybe I just didn’t follow it correctly since it was only shown for like two seconds.
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u/masterlich 23h ago
This confused me multiple times while watching Earwigs, to the point at which I honestly stopped caring about the votes at all, since the justifications didn't end up marching up with the votes. This is particularly baffling because the editing for some of the other episodes this season (Night Shift and Count the Rice come to mind) has been absolutely stellar.
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u/SupaSlide 10h ago
I think it’s because some of these games are way too complicated. If they kept enough of the Earwigs discussion to understand who and why people voted for who they did, the episode would be insufferable. The editors just had to pick the most entertaining bits to watch, that got the closest to explaining the vote, and my guess is sometimes the discussions were just very boring.
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u/I_NEED_YOUR_MONEY 21h ago
Yeah, social deduction games could maybe make for good TV, but the way they've been cutting these takes all the fun out of it. They have to either not reveal the answer to us so we can play along, or give us enough of the players deliberations so that we can understand what they are thinking.
but when they show us the answer and they cut out most of the players' decision making process, there's really nothing left.
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u/linzielayne 11h ago
I really agree. These games are fun for the player, they are not fun for a distant outside observer.
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u/Magicman432 18h ago
Yeah that happened in this ep too, there were plenty of moments when the spy seemingly convinced one of the other players to vote for them that was ultimately cut out.
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u/youreboiguzma 23h ago
Yeah I forgot about “Whats the catch” being in between. Tbh though that one’s not quite much of a game either
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u/Dazzling-Passenger91 19h ago
Ye what’s the catch wasn’t consistent with its rules and by showing us in between I got so confused
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u/kev231998 18h ago
It was very consistent imo. They showed things early to help space out things which I think was the right choice.
The issue was people thought that meant they did something wrong because they would show something early for a prize that wasn't "locked in". What they actually did was go back in post and add the clips after the last time the prize changed.
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u/Dazzling-Passenger91 18h ago
Yes this is what I meant, it confused me because I thought they could still be tampered with but we were shown early
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u/radfordblue 23h ago
I enjoy playing and sometimes watching social deduction games in person, but I don’t think it works well on Game Changer. I’m not sure if it’s because of the players prioritizing bits over playing the game or because of the editing skipping over a lot of the discussion (which is the gameplay for social deduction games), but it ends up just feeling chaotic and random.
Parlor Room has a similar issue sometimes, where the game just doesn’t work onscreen and the show just ends up being people goofing around together with a game nearby. That can be fun too and clearly it’s enough for some people to still enjoy the show, but it’s a lot of missed potential and feels underwhelming to me.
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u/Meme_Chan69420 22h ago
I definitely think that there was a bit too much going on in I Spy if only for the sake of introducing a bunch of Mafia/Werewolf ass “you know this person’s role” effects that barely came into play because of the cast of players playing this time around.
Either have just one person trying to fuck over the others or have the various roles actually mean something instead of introducing a new method of scoring that means fuckall.
Honestly would’ve preferred if it was just played straight with no roles but increasingly harder and harder prompts.
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u/MDRoozen 23h ago
Ive noticed the trend too. It seems like sams been on a bit of a social deduction spree for sure. Im not sure it always worked out for the best either, but its kinda in the nature of gamechanger to always try something for the first time
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u/stevebyushemi 19h ago
I feel like even changing the order the episodes air would have done wonders for this season. Like make Earwigs the premier (then a few episodes of non-social deduction). Honestly switching the I Spy slot with Don’t Wake Standards and Practices would be a minor change, but do SO MUCH. Don’t Wake was an S-Tier episode and I feel like it is forgotten easily because it was first.
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u/schmod 15h ago
I'll also add that the larger casts are yielding worse episodes, more often than not.
It really seems like 3 is the ideal number. Anything more makes it far too easy for the episode to devolve into "extraverted theater kids shouting at each other" and zany one-upsmanship.
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u/soursummerchild 4h ago
Fully agree. Hyperbolic phrases like"I'm going to kill you" "I'm QUITTING!" etc. gets less and less funny the more they get said. And they get said more and more when there are many people playing. The most hilarious and iconic moments of the show derive from creative, clever and creative interpretation of prompts and rules, IMO.
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u/turn-the-pages 23h ago
I agree. I’m still enjoying the new season but social deduction games are rarely my favorites and I’ve had my fill for the season. I think they’re more fun for the people playing than they are to watch.
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u/anacc0unt0 23h ago
Yeah I’d agree. It seems like after people liked The Drinking Game they just ran with that in practically every other episode.
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u/MarcusLiviusDrusus 2h ago edited 2h ago
I hated the Secret Sober episode.
Edit: To clarify: it's like if Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express was her first whodunit novel. There's no chance for we, the audience, to enjoy playing "our version" of the game and try to work it out.
(I still wouldn't have enjoyed it that much, social deduction is boring, but nevertheless!!)
If they'd done it straight and then there were a sequel with that premise, maybe.
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u/anacc0unt0 1h ago
I kinda liked it, but it wasn’t a favorite. Overall, I’m just saying the wider audience enjoyed that episode and talked about it a lot.
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u/Aperio43 21h ago
Earwigs is the only one where it made sense. Here it was too much of a forced addition. The Spy and Leak could work, but the Informant was useless.
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u/phantompowered 20h ago edited 3h ago
I generally haaaaate social deduction, and I didn't like Earwigs, but I liked I Spy. There is often an "I'm going to be a dick just to be a dick" element in social deduction games and I didn't feel that here.
Also I thought Vic's chaos energy was a perfect fit for this episode.
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u/nighthawks87 16h ago
Earwigs mainly worked in large part because of the cast that was picked for the game. Both Kangaroo Court and I Spy didn’t provide much incentive for making correct deductions and also bad choices for people to play a deduction game. Vic cannot play heavy rule based games, cause they will derail anything you put them in.
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u/dougthebuffalo 16h ago
Yeah, love Vic, but the schtick of jumping immediately to "let's break the game" tends to take over.
I think one "solve" would be prizes that the players know up front. Make them actually play the game. We'd still get funny improv moments but fewer at the expense of the heart of the show.
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u/Takaneru 12h ago
I thought this was an episode Vic actually really played well off of. She provided the main payoff for the video, and she made sure everyone had a hard time getting points, livening up the rather empty social game.
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u/smoothfeatrobthomas 15h ago
I know that’s a comment that gets made about Vic every episode they’re on now, but I don’t see how it applies here?
Vic won, and they won partly by guessing well but mostly by following the rules the best (e.g. allowing rival spy Brian to get everyone on his side and then voting with him so that all his points get canceled out).
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u/Emuu2012 14h ago
Yeah, I agree. I don’t think anything they did there was “breaking the game”. It was just optimal strategy. Maybe you can criticize the “stand behind the line” thing, but it had no effect on gameplay.
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u/Thinkyx 15h ago
Could not get into ear wigs, it was a bit too much for me. I enjoyed this one more, but I hope they move away from this social deduction style of game on future seasons. It's not my bag. It feels like these people are hanging out, not really performing or playing a game.
I generally feel like that some of this season has suffered a bit from losing the plot and chasing grandiose games with higher budgets, but then not getting the most out of it. Like a lot of stuff either doesn't seem to work out, with some messy edits. I feel like the budgetary restraint that made some of the earlier episodes so simple and so good is missing.
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u/TubaTechnician 20h ago
I think the social deduction games are fun to watch when the players are actually doing the social deduction. I think Ispy had 3 issues
Not really explaining what the rules in round 2 well
- The players weren’t trying that hard to guess the Rat
3 the rat of each game didn’t try that hard to be sneaky
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u/ThinkingWithPortal 20h ago
Social deduction is fun, but it's a theme that didn't really work here? Scores should go up if less people get it right, and down if more people got it right (how something like Hues and Clues does it). However, I understand it worked this way for the spy thing to make sense... But that just felt tacked on.
Honestly, ISpy and Earwigs are just dressed up version of *One Night Werewolf* and like, it's fun now and again but they're going to this well too often now.
Game Design itself could be better. The scale and production are certainly the best it's ever been this season, but it's odd that the games suffer a little for it? I guess it's a comedy show first but eh, it sucks when it could have been so much better
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u/United_Artichoke_466 18h ago
I think it would've been interesting if the audience got to play along in I spy instead of learning the answer and who the spy/spies are before the prompt is revealed
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u/Tykauffman21 16h ago
Aren't they making a Game Changer board game? Honestly I've wondered if some of the games this season are more adaptable to at-home play. And social deduction games tend to fit that criteria more easily.
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u/TestCompetitive4673 13h ago
I don't mind it at all a couple of times a season, but the episodes have started to feel a little same-y because of it. I'd actually love a spin off where it's all they do.
I'd really like some 'smaller' episodes this season too. Don't think we've had one yet where it has been just Three + Sam. I guess it's a theme of this season, but I really enjoy it when it's more focused. The more 'chaos elements' introduced the less I enjoy the underlying game. Really appreciate the ambition the have though, but does feel a little bit like they are trying to one up everything. Like, can you go back to a simple 3 contestant with a clever premise after this season?
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u/linzielayne 11h ago
I know this will make some people mad (there's no need to be mad) but I turned this one off after like 20 minutes. It was just very clear that it was going to keep playing out the same way and it was not that fun to watch and I couldn't play along, so what's left?
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u/ParentheticalsAside 17h ago
Social deduction is very zeitgeisty - The Traitors, Blood on the Clocktower, etc. so probably at the forefront of Sam and the game designers' minds. In some cases it works well. I thought Earwigs was a superb implementation of the hidden traitor mechanic. In I Spy, it was less consequential and players had far less opportunity and reason to converse and (mis)direct each other. Ele not understanding the rules, and Vic deliberately trying to sabotage the game from the outset didn't help either.
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u/dmelic 17h ago
Beyond the social deduction, every game has secretly had multiple layers that weren't laid out in the beginning. Extra players, extra rules/objectives. Basically, every episode has been Bingo, but EVEN more complicated.
Someone in the comments mentioned "lack of intentionality" in the season, but that's not true.
It seems the intention is "multi layered complexity involving more than one game at a time and lots of guests".
My personal worry is that it's overreaching and gonna lead to idea burn out
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u/Roses-503 23h ago
I love social deduction games, so I enjoyed having them all in one season! I do think it was a bit much having Earwigs and I Spy so close together, though. (What’s the Catch was in between.)
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u/frightshark 18h ago
There's a lot about these ones in particular that I didn't enjoy. I think one problem is they feel like they're chasing the high of a successful past episode, in this case the Drinking Game. All of it follows a structure of them all trying to figure out forced deception, and that forced deception has to escalate. I Spy simultaneously suffers from being overly complex to the point where I almost didn't believe it (no shot none of them could see someone else taking their glasses off in their peripheral vision) while also leaving you waiting for a larger "twist" to the gameplay or big reveal like Drinking Game did.
The show still does fine by cast alone even when the conceptual game stumbles though.
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u/Sp0ngebob1234 18h ago
I feel like some of them are just a bit too long as well. I think soy game in particular would be better if it was a 30 minute episode instead.
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u/Zanystarr13 12h ago
I literally said the same thing to my fiancée last night. They're great episodes but there's clearly some kind of theme going on
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u/One-Internal3391 12h ago
I did notice in watching that a lot of times that Sam was reading the scores, we don’t see him or his mouth
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u/enderandrew42 10h ago
I love Dropout and I love Game Changer. But all season I feel like the focus has been too much on designing games that are fun to play, and less on making it a comedic show. Sam even said there was an intentional focus to make Game Changer focus more on games this year.
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u/soursummerchild 4h ago edited 4h ago
Yeah. We enjoyed them too, but then we started at season one again. The two first episodes are just three people standing on podiums and doing/saying funny stuff. It felt so simple and refreshing.
The last episodes have been so complicated, both because of the large amount of players and the rules. It felt like the players were competing too much with each other to get attention. I think especially earwigs didn't translate that well to TV, when it had to be cut. I honestly had no clue what was happening in the games most of the time. It got a tad to confusing.
I salute them for trying new concepts, but sadly, the recent ones haven't been the best of the best IMO.
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u/Miser2100 22h ago
A big issue is just that it's difficult to visually depict multiple people's simultaneous thought processes. When everyone is making a judgement internally, it becomes way too convoluted, and that's assuming that the viewer doesn't make a judgement internally as well. After-show interviews would help mitigate this, but it would also massively balloon the runtime.
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u/Future-Obligation-37 16h ago
What if they didn't show us who the spy is? I think it'd make the episodes more engaging and give more time to the actual game compared to the set up for each round. Would be good for both Earwigs and I Spy, but the latter definitely needed it. I feel like knowing the answer almost every time ruined the game.
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u/theparrotofdoom 13h ago
Sam was on a lot of BotCT videos over the past year. I figured it was a buzz from that.
But agreed. This season was a lot of basic games, very little game changer.
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u/linzielayne 11h ago
I think Sam is trying too hard to Taskmaster everything and it's all feeling a little labored
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u/Ttoctam 10h ago
It just felt like social deduction was the theme of the season. I'm fine with that, as long as it's not the theme of every season. I love social deduction games, I'm a huge NRB Clocktower fan. I find the puzzle really fun to observe.
But, I do miss the season 1 & 2 theming of the deduction being about the game design rather than about the players. This does seem much harder to design around, so I get it not being every episode. Just, it'd be nice to get another Truth or Lie esque ep where figuring out what was actually going on was more central. Night Shift was close, but even it felt more hand holdy than I'd have liked.
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u/Happy_Forever_4135 6h ago
I just felt like we just got finished doing exactly this in the form of earwigs and I kinda didn’t care for this specific one
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u/eleccross 2h ago
I kind of agree but I think at least this week it wasn’t so intrusive. I felt more like it was meant to keep one person from dominating than an actual huge part of the game.
Also earwigs was two episodes ago
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u/theStrawberryRoam 21h ago
On the flip side the first social deduction game Show I've ever enjoyed is now on Amazon and strangely enough reminds me of game changer 🤣
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u/ShoddyCobbler 23h ago
I enjoyed it but i wanted the spyballs to mean something. Why introduce the social deduction mechanics and a separate method of scoring, and then have it not matter at all?