An Exploration of Player Elimination in Multiplayer Games

An Exploration of Player Elimination in Multiplayer Games

03 May 2025

This was an essay written for year two of my game design course at the University of South Wales. While the course primarily focuses on video games, I am equally interested in tabletop games and game shows, so I try to make my work about them as much as I can. I submitted it in March and it scored a 90, which I'm really happy with! The full bibliography is available here. So without further ado:

“They’ve Taken My Experience Away From Me”: An Exploration of Player Elimination in Multiplayer Games

Player Elimination is a controversial mechanic in tabletop game design. It was a staple mechanic of classic games like Monopoly (Darrow and Magie, 1935) and Risk (Lamorisse and Levin, 1959), but modern designers have grown to exclude it over time. Designers Engelstein and Shalev (2020) describe it as “a mechanism to be avoided,” and it featured on blogger Skeleton Code Machine’s list of outdated game mechanisms (Exeunt Press, 2023). Despite this, player elimination still has a major presence in television game shows, from daytime quiz shows to late-night reality TV. This essay will explore the mechanic of player elimination, discuss criticisms levied against it and provide alternatives and tweaks to the mechanic to better suit different design ideas.

Skeleton Code Machine author Exeunt Press (2023) defines the mechanic simply: “a player can be removed from the game, no longer participating.” An example of player elimination in its simplest form is in the social deduction game Mafia (Davidoff, 1986) (also known as Werewolf). In Mafia, most players are Villagers and a few players are Mafia. The Mafia know who each other are, while the villagers do not know who is on which team. The game is played over a number of days and nights. At the end of each day, the players will vote to eliminate someone, with the aim of eliminating all mafia members. During each night, the living mafia players will choose a player to eliminate, with the aim to eliminate all the villagers.

The fundamental issue with player elimination is simple: eliminated players aren’t playing the game anymore, and not playing the game isn’t fun. There are also criticisms that can be applied to Mafia’s player elimination mechanic specifically: notably how players are eliminated from the very beginning of the game, and how they have no way to defend themself when eliminated by the Mafia.

Firstly, the fact that eliminated players are no longer playing. Juul (2013) defines 3 types of goals a player can have: Completable Goals, Transient Goals and Improvement Goals. Winning a game of Mafia is a transient goal, since “failure is tied to a specific game session, and no time invested can make up for it after the game is over” (Juul, 2013). Juul also defines the severity of failure, not by how frequently it occurs, but by how severe the punishment for failure is. Total elimination from the game is as severe of a consequence as it gets for a transient goal. This combination of the severity of the punishment and the inability to make up for failure can become incredibly frustrating for eliminated players.

Blood on the Clocktower (The Pandemonium Institute, 2022), is another social deduction game like Mafia, where players can die by public vote or by the evil players during the night. Except when a player dies in Clocktower, they do not become a spectator. Instead, dead players lose the character ability they were given at the start of the game, and can no longer nominate players for execution. Additionally, they only get to vote for one more execution for the rest of the game, but dead players can still speak, and still win or lose with their team at the end of the game. Some characters even want to die, since they learn information when they do. By keeping dead players in the game, Clocktower averts the boredom that player elimination can instill, without removing a core mechanic of the genre. In fact, dead players are encouraged to stay involved in the game, the fact that the dead majorly outnumber the living at the end of the game means that, in the final round, “the game is usually decided by the votes and opinions of the dead players,” (The Pandemonium Institute, 2022). This mechanic keeps dead players engaged, while also introducing new strategies by making death a benefit for certain players.

Another criticism of Mafia is that players are eliminated from the very first round, meaning some will spend the majority of the game’s runtime not playing. This can lead to “awkward social situations” (Engelstein and Shalev, 2020) where eliminated players are sat idle, waiting a while for the game to finish before rejoining. In the Art of Failure, Juul (2013) asks us to “think not about the number of failures but about the amount of time the player loses when failing.” In a 10 player game of Mafia, the player to be eliminated on day 1 would sit out for 3 more in-game days, that means they’d spend 75% of the runtime eliminated, a significant amount of time to lose!

There are two ways to reduce how much time players spend eliminated: make the runtime of the game shorter, or make all elimination happen near the end of the game.

In Love Letters (Kanai, 2012), eliminating the other players is one of two victory conditions, but the game only lasts around 20 minutes. Being eliminated in Love Letters results in a significantly shorter time loss than in Mafia, which means the “awkward social situations” are shorter too, this makes elimination in Love Letters generally more palatable to its players.

The online game show series Duelist Mansion (Chaos Corp, 2023) uses the popular trading card game Yu-Gi-Oh as its core mechanics, and follows a group of 8 competitors competing to earn cards for their decks. It is only in the final two episodes that players begin to be eliminated, as they compete in a bracket to crown the winner. By incorporating deckbuilding mechanics into the show, they are able to reward contestants for succeeding, instead of eliminating them for failing.

Instead of saving all the elimination until the end, designers could make the game come to an end quickly after the first player is eliminated. Clank! (Dennen, 2016) is a race game where players delve into a dungeon, collect artifacts, and get out before they are killed by the dragon. There are two ways a player can be eliminated in Clank!: either they finish the race and win, or they are killed and lose. Regardless of which happens, the player no longer participates in the game. However, when an eliminated player’s turn comes around, the dragon attacks! This means that, as more players get eliminated, the game becomes deadlier and likely to end sooner. Clank! keeps the threat of elimination present throughout the game, while reducing the amount of time that eliminated players spend not playing.

The final criticism against Mafia is that being eliminated at the hands of the mafia players takes no skill, and there is no way for eliminated players to defend themselves. The television game show the Traitors is heavily based on Mafia, except players are playing for a cash prize of up to £120,000. It follows the same rhythm of eliminations as Mafia - alternating between an elimination voted for by all players at the Round Table, and an elimination decided by the traitors during the night. In the 3rd episode of Season 1 (Episode 3, 2022), it is revealed that Claire was murdered by the traitors. When she learns this, she is furious, specifically because she was killed in the night. She says “I would rather have everybody put my name up at the round table than this,” and “they’ve taken my experience away from me.” Here, she highlights her frustration with her lack of agency. There was nothing she could have done to avoid being eliminated, unlike at the round table, where she could have defended herself and been backed up by trusted allies. In the Traitors, being eliminated early means you lose out on the chance to win the prize money, in Mafia, being eliminated early means you could be sitting out of the game for almost an hour before the next game starts, both frustrating!

In the Korean game show The Genius, players have a chance to redeem themselves from being eliminated. Each episode features two games: a main match, and a deathmatch. The player who loses the main match chooses another player to compete in the deathmatch with, and the player who loses the deathmatch is eliminated. This mechanic gives greater agency to players by allowing them to avoid elimination by demonstrating skill. Players who win the main match also earn immunity from the death match, which still gives incentives to perform well. This can backfire, however, as placing anywhere other than first place can make you vulnerable to elimination, and aggressive players may jump on the first opportunity to attempt to eliminate skilled opponents who are set to go far in the game. This happened to competitor Cha Min-Soo in Episode 3 of Season 1 (‘Abundance and Famine’, 2013), who demonstrated great skill, but became a target of Kim Sung-Gyu when he lost the main match. This led to Cha Min-Soo’s elimination, much earlier than many of the other competitors expected.

Player Elimination also features in some video games, notably in the battle royale genre. In battle royale games like Fortnite (Epic Games, 2017), 99 players are eliminated over the course of a match. However, due to video game technologies that aren't available to tabletop game designers, when players are eliminated in Fortnite, they can leave the match and quickly requeue into a new one. This completely overcomes the problems of player boredom or awkwardness that are the driving factors behind the mechanic’s decline in popularity in tabletop spaces. This recontextualising of player elimination could open a lot of design space outside of the battle royale genre.

Many social deduction video games still do not let players easily requeue. Among Us (Innersloth, 2018) instead attempts to keep dead players occupied by involving them in the secondary win condition for the crewmates (this game’s townsfolk). Among Us has the same primary win conditions as Mafia, crewmates must vote out all imposters, and imposters must murder all crewmates. However, crewmates can also win the game if everyone - living and dead - completes a number of tasks. While the tasks are simple, reviews of the game, such as Leana Hafer’s review for IGN (Hafer, 2020), praise that they create tension by covering most of the game’s screen, which stops players from seeing anyone sneaking up on them. However, this tension is irrelevant to dead players, since they cannot be killed again. This leaves the tasks as simple actions with minimal tension, yet dead players must perform them anyway to strive for the alternate win condition.

With requeueing in mind, player elimination could be incorporated in many competitive multiplayer video games. In shooter games with smaller player counts than battle royales (either 1vs1 or small teams), a gamemode could feature elimination brackets, where players progress up the ladder, facing stronger opponents until they are eliminated or emerge victorious. While tournament brackets exist in many esports competitions, it is less commonly incorporated into the game itself. An example can be seen in Tourney Mode in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (Bandai Namco Studios and Sora Ltd., 2018), which gives eliminated players the choice to stay and watch or leave and continue playing.

Despite its lack of popularity in the tabletop scene, player elimination appears to have a new horizon in video games. Hopefully the success of the battle royale genre can bolster new innovation in other genres, and designers can take this attitude to elimination and implement it elsewhere. Time will tell whether this is player elimination’s time in the spotlight, or whether it will fade into distaste once again.

 

Thanks for reading, I'm really happy with this overall. Amazingly, in the two months between me submitting this and publishing it here, Mario Kart World was announced to include an elimination mode, which starts with 24 players and whittles them down four at a time until there is one winner remaining. It has been a major part of the marketing for the game, unlike Tourney mode in Smash Ultimate, which seems to suggest that modern designers agree that player elimination has a place in video games. On top of that, the English adaptation of The Genius has begun airing, hosted by David Tennant on ITV! So now you don't have to track down pirated copies of a decade-old Korean reality show to see the main match and deathmatch system in action.