Traitors finalist Jade Scott says video games shaped her survival strategy

Jade Scott, a finalist on the latest series of The Traitors, told the Guardian she drew on years of video-game play as she weathered suspicion and accusation on the show, which ended last week. Scott said she began gaming with Minecraft at 15, then moved to first-person shooter Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and strategy title Dota, and that the social-deduction mechanics of games informed her approach.

The Traitors itself is based on the parlour game also known as werewolf or mafia, and the format echoes the surge in social deduction play during the Covid lockdown, when Among Us became popular. In the year before appearing she played two indie social-deduction games, Project Winter and Dale & Dawson Stationery Supplies, which she said effectively trained her to be a faithful.

Scott said her plan was to “immediately garner some suspicion, because that way you’re protected from murder”, and that she defended herself at the roundtable by appealing to logic and reasoning. She also described the contrast between communicating via Discord in games and facing people in person on the show.

Scott said she kept written notes — a traffic-light system marking who she thought faithful or suspect and diagrams linking conversation partners — and acknowledged she missed some obvious connections between contestants.

Key Topics

Culture, Jade Scott, The Traitors, Project Winter, Dale & Dawson, Minecraft