‘I didn’t have anything to prove’: What Traitors finalist Jade Scott learned about surviving video games | games

TThe latest series of The Traitors, which concluded last week with a thrilling finale, featured some of the usual characters – from naive extroverts to a Columbus wannabe who endlessly watches his fellow contestants for the slightest glimmer of betrayal. But one believer stood out for her calm determination, despite the constant onslaught of doubts and accusations. That character was Jade Scott, and I wasn’t at all surprised when she revealed very early in the series that she was an avid gamer.

“Minecraft was my way into life when I was 15,” she says. “I made a lot of friends at school while playing this game.” However, from this innocent introduction, it moved on to darker titles: the first-person shooter Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and the multiplayer battle arena game Dota. “This is where my interest in strategy games started,” she says.

After all, The Traitors is a different game than other reality TV shows. It is heavily inspired by the parlor game known variously as Werewolf or Mafia, in which participants use social deduction skills to identify the killer in their midst. In fact, the original version of the series, the Dutch series De Verraders, came about after the first coronavirus lockdown, with hundreds of thousands of people discovering the multiplayer online game Among Us, in which a group of players must carry out menial tasks on a spaceship while determining which of them is the killer. So the video game player would have the advantage in Traitors, right?

In the year prior to his appearance on the show, Scott had been playing two indie social deduction games: the survival adventure Project Winter and the office satire, Dale & Dawson Stationery Supplies. Both require groups of players to carry out a set of tasks in a high-stress environment, while a select few are there to sabotage progress. Honest workers must discover and expose the miscreants before it is too late. She was, effectively, training to be loyal.

“I always wanted to come out as a believer,” she affirms. “My opinion on this matter has changed since leaving the castle, but I always thought the game was harder for believers and I like to play games in a more difficult environment. As a believer, you try to figure out who the traitors are, but as a traitor, I thought you lost that puzzle-solving aspect. My strategy was to go in and get it right away.” some Suspicion, because that way you are protected from being killed… I didn’t realize how much suspicion I would be exposed to!”

In fact, Scott was a constant target of accusations and suspicions. It was difficult. With games, you’re sitting behind a screen, communicating via Discord, so you just start talking and building friendly relationships with people, but with The Traitors, you have nothing to hide behind. It was a completely different environment to think about strategy and how to communicate with people.

So did the tactics you learned by playing games like Project Winter and Dale & Dawson instantly fall apart? “I was very good at advocating for myself at the roundtable,” she says. “A lot of that came from the training I had in social deception games. The moment you approach the table with some logic and thought, and say: ‘I understand why you think that, but I’ve done nothing to suggest that’, they have nothing to argue with. I also didn’t feel like I had anything to prove to anyone – I think when you’re on the defensive, it makes it worse if you go and try to blend in. I was thinking, if I go and talk to this person, is it like that?” Trying to get their good books?

One aspect that Scott has definitely taken away from playing strategy simulation games is observing the game mechanics and taking notes. “I had different formats,” she says. “Every day I had a sort of traffic light system of how I felt about each person. Green was the person I thought was loyal, even though you’re not 100 percent sure – and those people would inevitably be killed! Red was the person I was most convinced was disloyal at that point. I also wrote everyone’s names on a piece of paper and then drew lines between them, based on who I saw them having conversations – a bit like the corkboards that TV detectives use, in red. Earlier, but I was staring at that page and the only contestants I didn’t draw between were Rachel and Stephen.

Since leaving The Traitors’ castle, Scott says she hasn’t played the social deduction game – perhaps she’s done arousing others’ suspicions. Now I’ve moved on to games like Outer Wilds and Blue Prince, which pit you against strange and puzzling environments rather than other human beings. There was another interesting effect of her time on traitors, though. She is currently studying for her PhD, and believes that her experiences at the end of the Roundtable were very useful to one side or another. “The thing I was really apprehensive about, and I think a lot of PhD students are the same, is life,” she says. “You’re literally sitting in a room with examiners and you have to defend your thesis. Well, I’ve really learned how to defend myself and argue a point!”