The Creator of Mafia Has Feelings About The Traitors

Peacock’s addictive, backstabby reality series The Traitors is often compared with Mafia, the party game played at sleepovers, summer camps, and game nights since the early ’90s. Both games involve psychological strategy with players sniffing out liars and eliminating them before they kill. Many, many media outlets have noted Mafia’s influence on The Traitors since its launch in the Netherlands in 2021 and subsequent spread to 22 countries and counting. It even gets a nod on NBC’s website and The Traitors’s own Wikipedia page.

But until recently, the creator of Mafia, Dimma Davidoff, had never watched the show. With the cast of season four just announced — and season three in the thick of the Emmys race, aiming for a second win — I asked Davidoff to stream some episodes. We talked about what he likes and doesn’t like about the series as well as Mafia’s 40-year viral history, starting with its invention in Soviet-era Moscow as a teaching tool. He discussed his game’s decades of influence on TV shows, films, and related games, some of which even credited him and sent a check. (The Traitors is not in this camp.) He also offered next season’s contestants some free advice, straight from the man who knows more about this brand of whispery intrigue than anyone on the planet.

You invented Mafia in the mid-1980s, and Tetris had just been created in 1985 — both born in Moscow, both in an academic setting. What was happening there to inspire these two blockbuster games?
The short answer is probably the end of “psychological winter” in the Soviet Union. After Stalin’s purges in the 1930s, the study of psychology became very limited; you don’t need psychology if you just want your citizens to be like Pavlov’s trained dogs. But eventually, this thawed. One of the figures who resurfaced was Lev Vygotsky, the “Mozart of Psychology,” who revolutionized the field in the 1920s. Vygotsky was the first to recognize games as a pinnacle of human culture, something crucial for human development. When his ideas were resurrected by his colleagues and students in the 1970s, it led to many interesting results.

I know Vadim Gerasimov, co-author of Tetris, who invited me to talk about the Mafia game at MIT a long time ago. As far as I remember, they were trying to use games for psychological diagnostics. Tetris was a digital twin of the Pentomino puzzle, which had been used as a test before. Packing — things into a suitcase, steps into a dance, thoughts into words — is a very important skill. Tetris captures that and translates perfectly into a game.

For me and Mafia, well … The origin is also in psychology, but it’s a little more complicated.

What were you trying to do?
I was teaching psychology to high-school students. They were good listeners, but they were reluctant to engage. At some point, I realized, It’s me, my authority that creates this silence. I have to somehow remove myself from the picture. I asked a couple of students to go outside and agree on a secret discussion topic for the class, then move us into discussing your topic without us noticing. They would come back and try to manipulate the group into talking about it.

It was a tough task for them: How do you manipulate the group when everybody is watching? In one way, I had reached my goal — they became the focus of the group’s attention. Unfortunately, not for long. They were not able to manipulate us, and “secret topic” was not engaging. But it did give me a thought, my eureka moment: It would be easier for them if we did not know who went out of the room in the first place.

That’s where the idea of the Mafia comes from. The idea that there is a secret connection in the group: Well, this becomes the topic. It trumps all other topics. We have to solve it first before moving on. If Mafia members are together and we don’t know who they are, then the whole group is not together. We have to start building alliances now — from the ground up. The core action becomes persuading others to join in collaborative actions. These collaborative actions, by the way, are what Vygotsky believes to be the building blocks of the world.

On the subway ride back from the university, I finished the rules.

So quickly, what are the original Mafia rules?
Players are secretly assigned roles as either Mafia (the bad guys) or Villagers (the good guys). The goal of the Mafia is to eliminate all Villagers, while the Villagers try to find and vote out the Mafia.

The game alternates between night and day. At night, the Mafia secretly chooses a player to eliminate. During the day, everyone debates who might be Mafia and votes on a suspect to eliminate. The game continues until either all Mafia are eliminated and the Villagers win, or the Mafia outnumber the Villagers and the Mafia wins.

Then, somehow, Mafia caught on. How did that happen?
I lived in a Moscow University dormitory at that time. It was two huge connected 16-story buildings housing around 3,000 students. It has a pool, café, winter garden, movie theater — everything. Students would live inside for months without leaving the buildings. And they all loved parties, and playing games at the parties. So I started playing Mafia games with everyone I knew. It was such fun to see how people engaged with my game for the first time — that moment of panic when someone realizes nothing they say will be believed! And then I figured out that many of those people would enjoy introducing Mafia to their friends, too, and it would go everywhere. So it did.

How quickly did that happen?
In Russia, instantly among the students. Moscow University summer-science camps were very popular, and there were no board games to play at that time, so Mafia has created this space for adult group play. It was also spreading in other countries through exchange students going back to their countries and Soviet citizens who were able to get out after the USSR collapsed.

When I came to the United States, I heard someone speaking Russian in a local supermarket. This was in August of 1991. We started talking, and he invited me to a game night. They were playing Mafia. That was fast, I thought. At that time, it was still possible to trace the chain of players back to me.

Any other memories as the game was taking over the world?
Many moments. The game got big in Silicon Valley in the mid-’90s. The engineers would stay up all night playing Mafia and Werewolf, which is a version of Mafia. Some of the engineers brought it back to their home countries. In China, this is how the “killer clubs” began. The Chinese players had taken to playing Mafia through virtual-reality helmets, and the killer clubs is where this took place. There were ten factories in China producing these helmets for all of the killer clubs that popped up.

As time went on and the year 2000 came, there was a Mafia story every week. An African village was cut off from electricity, so the people played Mafia through the crisis. A Christian camp in Pennsylvania gets busted because of naked Mafia games. A school worries that Mafia is corrupting the youth. And so on. I would walk into an airport and see kids from delayed flights sitting in a circle and playing Mafia. They were using a particular gesture I describe in my original rules — hand on top of the head to vote.

And, you know, a lot of TV shows, films. Between 2000 and 2015, I tracked them all very diligently. That became an experiment in itself, to watch the spreading of the idea through social networks.

The Traitors wasn’t the first reality television show?
No, of course. There were many. The first was in Russia, and they would organize contests between psychics or detectives. Latvia maybe was the second. This was in the 1990s. I would need to go through my archives. Many countries. And fictional treatments, too — a whole series of movies in Japan, a television series in South Korea.

And that Mafia movie in Russia about ten years ago. That trailer is a hoot. The year is 2072, Mafia is the most famous TV show in the world. Losing players get killed, Squid Game style.
Yes. Big budget. Less wonderful reviews.

Your original Mafia game gave birth to a whole genre of games. Some of them are incredibly popular. The standouts in just the past handful of years include Secret Hitler and the video game Among Us. Those all get traced back to Mafia.
Yes. Those are innovations, and innovation is how new games are developed. One other example is a kind of music Mafia — eight people with earphones are dancing, six people have one music, and two people have different music. You have to figure out who has a different rhythm. Very cool. And I’m very happy about this, actually. When I go into a game shop and I see the Mafia premise created into something new, this is encouraging. But when someone just changes the name of roles — Mafia now are “Traitors” and Honest are “Faithful” … Well, there was a popular book series in Russia once. The Parry Hotter books.

And were you getting royalties from all this?
Not from all of this. That 2015 Mafia film licensed the rights. They paid the royalties; in the credits, you see “based on Mafia game” by yours truly. I try to contact people who make commercial versions, or they write to me and ask for a license. But if someone fabricates a story about the origins of the game, they are not thinking about licensing it. One European version claimed on its box that Mafia came from the Stalin-era Gulag. This is just sad.

So you’ve watched The Traitors?
For this interview, yes, I have finally watched it. My daughter-in-law told me about the popularity of this show. She’s a fan.

And?
They have made an entertaining show, but the way they went about it is disappointing.

I understand the producers never contacted you?
Nothing. I tried to contact them through their website portal some time ago but did not get any answer. Of course, they know about the Mafia game. How can they not? If you do any kind of due diligence, you see that Mafia is my game, under copyright. My email is right there. Of course, games are a complicated part of intellectual property, but it does not mean they do not have value. Game designers’ work deserves recognition and reward.

I don’t just say this for myself. It’s a problem because not respecting other creators is bad for everyone. It does not help game designers to create better games. If even a well-known game such as Mafia could be pirated by big organizations, and a young game designer sees this, they think, What chance do I have? It sends a message that all of their work is up for grabs.

Do people still credit you and pay to use Mafia?
Yes, of course. Some find a creative way to credit me. There’s an Australian game that has 180 different roles. They wrote me a letter suggesting to pay me an honorary stipend.

Are you still a game designer?
Yes. I am an independent researcher and continue to make psychological games. They are my research tools and my books. One of my longtime projects is creating games that humans, pets, and robots can play together. My other current passion is dexterity games — how to move fast and nimbly. I am trying to make games to capture psychological concepts.

Any surprises from watching The Traitors this season?
Watching Boston Rob being sniffed out while being so good reminded me of my own Mafia games for many years. Since I was the one usually bringing the Mafia game to the party, everybody assumed I was very good and always killed me first. So the lesson of this season is: If you are too good, it’s a disadvantage. But this makes it more interesting.

That feels like a useful tip. Any other tips for next season’s contestants?
For the player, Mafia is a game of persuasion. As soon as we start thinking about persuasion, then lying is a bad strategy. I think Abraham Lincoln said, “No man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar.” So lie as little as you can — just in critical moments. You want to create a believable story.

But really, there are no secrets to this game. That’s the whole point of Mafia and why it is special. Nothing from outside the game can really help you in Mafia — no knowledge, no skill, no experience. You can play against children, and they will beat you. The beauty of Mafia is that you have nothing to stand on. But you do have free will, and you have to build your arguments from the ground up. Build up your world together. Lies will become truths only if the majority accepts them.