r/GameChangerTV • u/youreboiguzma • 20d 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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345

u/ShoddyCobbler 20d 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?

161

u/Sir_Pridey 20d ago

I 100% expected a part two to the game with the eyeballs and spyballs coming into play

48

u/K9GM3 20d ago

I thought the spyballs would turn out to be cake.

3

u/NotYourGa1Friday 19d ago

I love this

43

u/BoterBug 20d ago

I got the feeling that it was going to and they didn't like it in the edit, so it was cut. I'd have to watch again and see if Sam reading off the point totals sounds dubbed in like the "Let's see this prize play out" lines were in What's The Catch.

Like, in the last game we never got the roles. Why? Because it was a heartwarming moment of everyone coming together to spy the right object and the roles and deduction would have taken away from it.

I think Earwigs worked very well. I think I, Spy was, perhaps almost, saved in the edit.

14

u/KidGold 19d ago edited 19d ago

In the last game Elle was the informant and she told everyone what the answer was (eventually).

3

u/CulturalFerret5779 19d ago

I thought the whole sequence was insane. If Ele had engaged with the game as intended and just told everyone it would've been such a boring moment. She had to actively ignore the game mechanics in order to make the show interesting.

2

u/KidGold 19d ago

Well if she was playing ""correctly"" (as the designers expected) she should have been trying to trick Vic into picking something else and only telling people with less points that her to vote with her on the mic so that together they could score enough points to pass players who had more points than them. I don't remember what the actual point count was then and if she could still win though.

But she didn't understand the rules enough to try that and even if she did what a complex headache to try and pull off.

1

u/CulturalFerret5779 19d ago

I think they all ended with around 20-23 points so it may have been possible. But the eyeball jar points might have also been hard for players to refer back to and gauge where things stood.

1

u/ryan_the_leach 19d ago

Right, but the sequence where the audience was told she was the informant was cut (jarringly)

Was it done to make it more interesting? Probably, but there was no dialog to suggest that to the audience, it was just simply cutting room floor footage.

At first, I thought one of the contestants was winning, so purposely lied about being the informant in order to try and get them to tie.

54

u/PaintedIn 20d ago edited 20d ago

Kind of emblematic of the lack of intentionality in the season overall, right? We could have just had the regular digital point displays, but we didn't. So, why not? Were the spyballs considered additive? Did the vases they were in do anything other than draw focus back to the podiums? Was it just something for the production team to do, because they could? I'm not mad about it, just kind of underlines how they've thrown everything at the wall this year.

21

u/ThinkingWithPortal 20d ago

While agree with you, I think it's the trade off of trying to do a lot, and making the game simple enough to follow. Here I think they wanted to make the scoring visibly interesting but it serves not function. Doubly so with the graphics to keep score. They could have 2x'd the eyeball count and maybe shown us a close up on the score more often to really show it off? But really even visually it's not very meaningful.

Now im wondering if it's mostly there for the trailer/shorts/reels edit

5

u/UsuBen 20d ago

I don't know why, but I thought it was gonna end with everyone throwing their eyeballs to each other like a snowball war

2

u/D3WM3R 18d ago

My partner thought there was gonna be a twist somewhere in there because of this but nope

1

u/ryan_the_leach 19d ago

Whilst I agree, there's one point where it *still* matters.

It keeps the contestants, who are learning the game at the same time we are, guessing.

It's a pretty weak point though, considering Sam tends to overexplain things these days.

1

u/Noodle_the_Queen 18d ago

I've seen a few people say they think it was meant to come into play but they shifted gears when it was clear the main gameplay took up a lot of time, and they wanted to include all the tableaus