Ways of playing Mafia

In Mafia, there is often a separation between different ways of playing it. Some of them come down to the medium used to communicate, while others refer to the time it takes to play a game of Mafia in its entirety. This article will go over some of the more popular ways of playing Mafia.
== In-Person vs Voice vs Text ==
Of course when playing Mafia, you have to consider how you are interacting with the other players as well as the game moderator/host.
Typically there are 3 mainstream ways of doing so.
*In-Person Mafia: The original way of playing mafia is sitting down in a room with a group of players and playing with everyone face to face. Simple and Easy once you get going, but it requires an IRL group that has to come together in order to play, which can be both a hassle as well as impossible, if you don't have or know such a group. In person Mafia is usually peoples' first introduction to it, playing it on parties, school gatherings, or other get-togethers.
*Voice Mafia: The little brother of In-Person Mafia is Voice Mafia, here, instead of meeting up IRL, you get together in an online call, using Skype, Discord, or a different voice chat application, oftentimes, especially if you and your group are close, Video-Chatting is also introduced, in order to make the experience be as close to being In-Person as possible. It's not quite the same as being In-Person, but it usually gets the job done.
*Text Mafia: This is a summary-word that combines multiple different ways of playing Mafia purely through text. Voice and Speech interactions are foregone and every game interaction is handled purely by typing to the other players and game hosts. Usually, this way of playing can be categorized into two different sub-categories:
**Chat Mafia: Usually, when playing Chat Mafia, you are in a chatroom together with all other players at the same time, meaning even though you are not talking with your voice, everyone is present in the moment. It works similar to a regular game of Mafia, except that you don't see or hear the other participants, and instead you will have to go off of writing patterns and more logical deductions.
**Forum Mafia: Just as popular as Chat-Mafia, but also much more accessible is playing Mafia in a manner often seen on Forum's where the participants are not necessarily in the chatroom at the same time. This is also called "Asynchronous Mafia", because players will show up on their own time, catch up on what has happened while they are gone, comment on the previous posts made by other players, and interact live with only those that happen to be in the forum-thread at that moment. It plays very different to any other form of Mafia due to employing this unique way of getting together.
== Short-Form vs Long-Form ==
Taking into account what was just said, it's not that hard to figure out which types go where.
*Short Form Mafia: Short Form Mafia typically refers to anything that is played live, from start to finish, this includes In-Person, Voice- & Videochat as wwell as Chatroom Mafia. All of these usually start and end in one session and generally do not take longer than a few hours. Most of these games will typically go below an hour, some of them lasting as little as 5-10 minutes.
*Long Form Mafia: Long Form Mafia generally only includes Forum Mafia, but chatrooms have the possibility to adapt the same style, games played in this format will last between a few days to... pretty much forever. It's essentially possible to have one day of the game last a whole year, if that is what the game organizer and the players want to do. The options are endless with how long game phases last.
== Discord Mafia ==
Now, where do we come in?
Well, it's a bit complicated. You see, Discord is quite unique in how it is set up. On Discord, chatting with others is really easy.
That's good, but it makes playing Mafia on Discord a very unusual experience.
Our games on Discord Mafia usually run on 48h days and 24h nights, meaning they end after about 2 weeks each.
By definition, this makes Discord Mafia the equivalent of playing Long-Form Mafia on forums.
However, due to the nature of Discord, players are much more active, and their online times when compared to forums are a lot higher (since Discord is often used for personal use, interacting with the community, etc.) which results in games on Discord Mafia being a lot more active than you'd usually find them on forums.
Chatting patterns are usually also very different, while on forums, players tend to organize large posts with a lot of different thoughts in just one, on Discord Mafia, players play like they would in a chatroom, and just type one-liners while talking to people currently online and also referring to previous conversations at the same time.
To conclude, Discord Mafia is a blend of Short- and Long-Form Mafia as well as Chat- and Forum-Mafia at the same time, which makes Discord Mafia into a completely unique experience.
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