Accused, isolated and constantly under scrutiny, The Traitors contestant drew on years of social deduction gaming to stay calm under pressure
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he latest series of The Traitors, which ended last week on a nail-biting finale, featured some of the usual characters – from guileless extroverts to wannabe Columbos endlessly observing fellow contestants for the slightest flicker of treachery. But one faithful stood out for her quiet determination, despite a ceaseless onslaught of suspicion and accusation. That person was Jade Scott, and I wasn’t at all surprised when, quite early on in the series, she revealed she was a keen gamer.
“Minecraft was my way in, when I was 15,” she says. “I made loads of friends at school playing that.” From this innocent introduction, however, she moved on to darker titles: the first-person shooter Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and the multiplayer battle-arena game Dota. “That’s where my interest in strategy gaming really kicked in,” she says.
The Traitors is, after all, a game in a way that other reality TV shows aren’t. It’s heavily inspired by the parlour game variously known as werewolf or mafia, in which participants use social deduction skills to identify a murderer in their midst. Indeed, the original version of the show, the Dutch series De Verraders, emerged after the first Covid lockdown, during which hundreds of thousands of people had discovered the multiplayer online game Among Us, in which a group of players have to carry out menial tasks on a spaceship while working out which of them is a killer. So a video game player would have an advantage in The Traitors, right?
