[2] Paranoia is notable among tabletop games for being more competitive than co-operative, with players encouraged to betray one another for their own interests, as well as for keeping a light-hearted, tongue in cheek tone despite its dystopian setting.

Most of the game's humor is derived from the players' (usually futile) attempts to complete their assignment while simultaneously adhering to the Computer's arbitrary, contradictory and often nonsensical security directives.

Alpha Complex is controlled by the Computer, a civil service AI construct (a literal realization of the "Influencing Machine" that some schizophrenics fear).

Additionally, each player character is generally an unregistered mutant and a secret society member (which are both termination offenses in Alpha Complex), and has a hidden agenda separate from the group's goals, often involving stealing from or killing teammates.

For example, previous editions included societies such as the "Seal Club" that idolizes the Outdoors but is unsure what plants and animals actually look like.

1st edition[a] was written by Greg Costikyan, Dan Gelber, and Eric Goldberg - published in 1984 by West End Games.

[1] This edition, while encouraging dark humour in-game, took a fairly serious dystopian tone; the supplements and adventures released to accompany it emphasised the lighter side, however, establishing the freewheeling mix of slapstick, intra-team backstabbing and satire that is classically associated with a game of Paranoia.

2nd edition[b] credited to Costikyan, Gelber, Goldberg, Ken Rolston, and Paul Murphy was published in 1987 by West End Games.

Many of the supplements released for the Second edition fall into a story arc set up by new writers and line editors that was intended to freshen up the game and broaden roleplay possibilities.

[citation needed] It has since been declared an "un-product"[d] by the writers of the current edition, due to its extremely poor commercial and critical reception.

Almost none of the original production staff were involved, and the books in this line focused less on the dark humor and oppressive nature of Alpha, and more on cheap pop culture spoofs, such as a Vampire: The Masquerade parody.

In an interview in 1999[5] Scott Palter of West End expressed hopes that the Third Edition would be published that summer; however, he also disclosed that court proceedings had been begun by the original designers in order to reclaim the rights to the game.

An upshot of this is that much of the poorly received metaplot established late in the West End Games line, from the Secret Society Wars to the Reboot and beyond, was disposed of.

While Paranoia XP kept Communists as the big bad scapegoat in spite of the Cold War being long over, the updated edition integrates several 21st-century themes into its satire.

New threats to Alpha Complex include file sharing, phishing scams, identity theft and weapons of mass destructions.

In writing the new edition, Varney, Goldberg and Costikyan reached out to and actively collaborated with the Paranoia online fan community through an official blog[10] and through Paranoia-Live.net.

Later, some of the best players and writers from the game and a few other places were formally integrated as the Traitor Recycling Studio to write official Paranoia material; their first credited work was the mission supplement Crash Priority.

Notable amongst the supplements was Extreme Paranoia, which provided ideas for scenarios based around characters of security clearances Orange to Violet, with premises differing greatly from the standard Red-clearance Troubleshooter concept but remaining thematically appropriate to the game's setting and atmosphere.

(This included an updated reprint of the 1st Edition supplement HIL Sector Blues, which focused on playing Blue-clearance IntSec agents.)

The Troubleshooters volume retains the play styles of the XP rulebook; however, the "Classic" playstyle is assumed by default, with "Zap" and "Straight" relegated to an appendix.

The base game was primarily designed by James Wallis with co-authors Grant Howitt and Paul Dean, and released in March 2017.

Additional writing for the new edition was initially provided by Gareth Hanrahan, while the first major expansion, Acute PARANOIA, was written by various writers and funded through Kickstarter[19] in 2018 for an early 2019 release.

"[9] In The Games Machine #3, John Wood enjoyed the "darkly humorous" artwork of the second edition, and complimented the writers for a better-organized set of rules.

After summarizing the lack of personal freedom under the control of the insane Computer, Swan allowed that "It sound oppressive, but it's all quite hilarious, thanks to the tongue-in-cheek approach permeating every aspect of the game."

Swan noted the elaborate rules for character creation and combat resolution, "but they're essentially irrelevant, because the referee is encouraged to make up everything as he goes along."

Nevertheless, Swan concluded by giving this game his top rating of 4 out of 4, saying, "This is sophisticated, intelligent role-playing at its most subversive, a satiric masterpiece that should delight any experienced player with a taste for the bizarre.

"[25] In a 1996 reader poll conducted by Arcane magazine to determine the 50 most popular roleplaying games of all time, Paranoia was ranked 7th.

Editor Paul Pettengale commented: "For players of games where character development and campaign continuity are a priority, Paranoia is an absolute no-no.

It took the form of a top-down maze shooter dressed in a Paranoia plot and trappings; reviews of the game from hobby magazines of the period pegged it as mediocre to poor.

Unauthorized automated versions of the story (a Troubleshooter's assignment to undermine the subversive activity known as Christmas) have circulated via machine-independent ports to C, Python, Go and Inform as well as to Adventure Game Toolkit and for Applix, CP/M and the Cybiko.