There’s an interesting article on CNet this morning about how the party game Werewolf (also known as Mafia) is quite popular among Silicon Valley tech folk lately (the article traces it to 2007 or so). It’s been popular among game designers for much longer than that, of course — I think the industry interest in it may have crested a few years ago, actually.

The thing that piques my interest in the article, though, is the suggestion that the game’s themes may be why it resonates so strongly in the go-go-go Silicon Valley culture. You see, Werewolf is a game in which you have a group of people lying to the other players.

Fundamentally, Werewolf is about deception by a minority, and about the ways in which manipulation happens. Villagers lose when they fail to act rationally, fail to cooperate to a sufficient degree, and fail at institutional memory.

“If you think about what the fundamental skills in play in something like Werewolf are, they have to do with persuasion and communication. For entrepreneurs in particular, this is kind of a lot of the currency of their everyday lives,” Slavin said. “Bringing the types of interactions that are most typical in those scenarios…and turning them into something useless, something that only has social currency instead of live-or-die consequences for the company, is (fun) in the same way that it’s fun to bankrupt your friends in Monopoly, not in real life.”

“Those are incredibly important lessons for an entrepreneur,” Ventilla said. “You’re constantly reminded of just how much you need to do until you’re really top-notch at those things.”

— Why do young techies want to be werewolves? | The Social – CNET News.

I suppose this is healthy or not for the entrepreneur (and Silicon Valley as whole!) depending on whether they prefer to play as a villager or as a werewolf…