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'LE' Smogn invttonl Gam Thred (Mafia Wins)
- Thread starter Asek
- Start date
As much as I meme there. I do actually feel good about OM room. I haven't paid attention to much of anything in this game since last night/page 25. But initial posts by scum are sometimes some of the easiest things to catch on to. And I do think OM rooms initial push against me was very agenda-y and forced.
Fair, I was keeping an eye on thread and went "oh no u didnt" at yeti's entrance, then called it a day. I think having two people (texas voted at the same time) instantly vote you after your entrance qualifies as pressure though, and I don't believe there was much to question her about at that point in time since what prompted my vote was her tone and the fact that an experienced player who knows the playerlist would be genuinely surprised by the sight of 10 pages. I can see where you're coming from though
MoodyCloud level with me. Are you scum? Asking for a friend.
And what are your current thoughts on relevant people? I've seen a few of them in the last few pages but what about the other people?
And what are your current thoughts on relevant people? I've seen a few of them in the last few pages but what about the other people?
Still on page 13, Yeti doesn't really address the votes on her at all, asks if my vote is my only post all game, seems to try to brush it off and ignore it
She brings up something which pinged me a bit earlier (OM room looking very concerned by the fact his vote was the second one on whoever it was on, FH I think ?), and has a go at FH's "self-aware bad post", calling it busywork
I don't remember FH looking as at a loss for ways to get reads going as he looks right now in his scum games, and don't really remember what his town game was other than it made me want to death tunnel him every time, so I guess I'm going with town lean for now
She brings up something which pinged me a bit earlier (OM room looking very concerned by the fact his vote was the second one on whoever it was on, FH I think ?), and has a go at FH's "self-aware bad post", calling it busywork
I don't remember FH looking as at a loss for ways to get reads going as he looks right now in his scum games, and don't really remember what his town game was other than it made me want to death tunnel him every time, so I guess I'm going with town lean for now
Give me a moment I must confer with my scum buddies
My thoughts on Josh is that if he's still alive by day 4 that will be the time to maybe succumb to paranoia, but now isn't that time
His interactions with Texas and MS have seemed largely inoffensive and back patting in circles and I haven't been interested in them so far
DLE seemed to be memeing
I don't remember much else from others at the moment
What agenda do you think I could have been pushing?
Forced definitely is there, that was part of the shenanigans
Also fuck you Josh
post or be ly
nothing there is meta
This is a better look for yeti, the post she quoted came off as passive commentary to me when I came across it
no idea whether nuxl has placed votes yet, I'll give his posts some more attention when I'm done catching up if I ever manage to
Metal sonic has posted twice so far about how Yeti's intent is to break up a towncore comprised of his buddies
2
I thought I would open with a funny story (well I think it's amusing). Some years ago there was a NOC on Smogon and the posting was getting "out of control." I apostrophize this because by today's standards I'm sure the posting was very tame. In any case, the problem that the esteemed circus moderator crux had was that there was too much nonsensical posting for his standards so he threatened to implement a word count and infract people who were posting nonsense. this was a great opportunity for me to poke fun at his nonsense so I started to attach a word count to all of my posts. Then pm'd me to stop being annoying and that was that. Very amusing I know!
(an aside to that aside: why the fuck crux was a moderator only god knows. i don't like to be rude but the dude was a complete asshole. That wasn't even the weird part. The weird part was that he went from literally not playing mafia to becoming the moderator and becoming this big force in mafia games really quickly. to me it seems like he had this weird change in personality from being a normal mafia dude to an aggressive player who was an asshole (and bad moderator, but that goes without saying). it was just really strange. I dunno he just seemed like a very weird dude and then he got permabanned for some reason I forget (although I don't know if I ever knew). Hope he's out there solving cancer or something.)
I guess what this story serves to illustrate (even if it doesn't really, I know) is that shift in playstyle that I was talking about earlier. If something like that seemed absurd then imagine how absurd it would be now. So I suppose now is as good a time as any to delve into why I find it problematic. The "it" being the trend to minimize the length of one's posts in favor of hitting the "post reply" button as many times as possible. The trend I think I am seeing is that the more you can condense a thought (if there even is one) into a multitude of posts the better. "activity" "participation" all your classic buzzwords seem to be tied down into the number of posts you can fill the thread up with. (Again, this is not wrong nor am I asking people to do something different).
I have to ask then - Why is length (length meaning more) seen as measure of success? Something good? I distinctly remember people talking about some NOC game hitting 100++ pages as if that was an achievement to celebrate. why does more mean better? It's as if we've collectively decided that the way to play the game and the way to be seen as playing the game is by posting a lot, regardless of what is being posted. I think you could say the same for people who wallpost, not that that is relevant anymore. I'm not sure we've reached the point where we say a game is good because there were a lot of posts. I think it is too simplistic to make that sort of claim, even if it's probably true that the less posts a NOC has, the worse the game probably was. But it certainly feels like someone could make the argument that the more pages the better.
I guess I need to interrupt myself to add that I'm not entirely sure this is what's happening this game. I've seen a couple posts that make me think or at least I presume they would if I really wanted to think about them. It's not really fair for me to make a definitive statement either way. I know that's hard to do because...well I'm kind of using this thread as my mouthpiece. At the same time it is fair and reasonable I think (see: what I said about how I think people should be able to play how they want to play). That aside, the evidence that this is happening in this game can be seen by the fact that we are at page 37 in less than 24 hours. That seems...excessive...Of course, I leave the judgement out of it. Perhaps I do go back and look, perhaps not. But I think it's important to make clear that while I'm probably talking about this game, I think I'm giving myself enough space to say that I'm not really talking about this game (or any specific game, just the game in general).
Anyways, I've meandered a bit so I'll just cut right to it now - the problem that I have isn't that we've decided that we need to communicate in this way (this way = more posts the better). If that's the way people want to play and think it's a good idea to play, by all means. Rather, it's that the process of doing this has degraded that I feel has degraded the way we transmit meaning and communication. What do I mean by that? I think there's information being lost when people go from wallposting to breaking up that wallpost into 50 different single line thoughts. OK, arguably the ultimate meaning is still there and readily available to be interpreted. What is lacking instead is the reasoning for me.
I think reasoning is so fundamentally important in mafia because it informs every decision people make (well at least I would to think that). Mafia as a game is interesting because it is a "team" game where you don't act as a team but play as an individual. As a result, how one reasons because incredibly important in finding a consensus so that you can act as a team as best as possible. The way in which people interpret and think about the game informs how they act and how they post. Every decision you make in voting comes down to how you reason about the game. The essence of mafia I think boils down to taking 13 or whatever number different people talking about how "we" should reason to find out who is mafia. Largely that comes down to thinking about behavior. How do we interpret behavior and connect that to alignment?
I feel like there's two paths I can go down here. One is how I think about playing mafia (i.e. how do we find the mafia?), the other is more closer to where I started/ended this. What do I mean by lacking reasoning? Why should we care if people lack reason in what they say? I'm not sure what I want to do so I guess I will conclude with this. Both are interesting avenues and are relevant. We'll see which one I decide to go on first.
Later
I thought I would open with a funny story (well I think it's amusing). Some years ago there was a NOC on Smogon and the posting was getting "out of control." I apostrophize this because by today's standards I'm sure the posting was very tame. In any case, the problem that the esteemed circus moderator crux had was that there was too much nonsensical posting for his standards so he threatened to implement a word count and infract people who were posting nonsense. this was a great opportunity for me to poke fun at his nonsense so I started to attach a word count to all of my posts. Then pm'd me to stop being annoying and that was that. Very amusing I know!
(an aside to that aside: why the fuck crux was a moderator only god knows. i don't like to be rude but the dude was a complete asshole. That wasn't even the weird part. The weird part was that he went from literally not playing mafia to becoming the moderator and becoming this big force in mafia games really quickly. to me it seems like he had this weird change in personality from being a normal mafia dude to an aggressive player who was an asshole (and bad moderator, but that goes without saying). it was just really strange. I dunno he just seemed like a very weird dude and then he got permabanned for some reason I forget (although I don't know if I ever knew). Hope he's out there solving cancer or something.)
I guess what this story serves to illustrate (even if it doesn't really, I know) is that shift in playstyle that I was talking about earlier. If something like that seemed absurd then imagine how absurd it would be now. So I suppose now is as good a time as any to delve into why I find it problematic. The "it" being the trend to minimize the length of one's posts in favor of hitting the "post reply" button as many times as possible. The trend I think I am seeing is that the more you can condense a thought (if there even is one) into a multitude of posts the better. "activity" "participation" all your classic buzzwords seem to be tied down into the number of posts you can fill the thread up with. (Again, this is not wrong nor am I asking people to do something different).
I have to ask then - Why is length (length meaning more) seen as measure of success? Something good? I distinctly remember people talking about some NOC game hitting 100++ pages as if that was an achievement to celebrate. why does more mean better? It's as if we've collectively decided that the way to play the game and the way to be seen as playing the game is by posting a lot, regardless of what is being posted. I think you could say the same for people who wallpost, not that that is relevant anymore. I'm not sure we've reached the point where we say a game is good because there were a lot of posts. I think it is too simplistic to make that sort of claim, even if it's probably true that the less posts a NOC has, the worse the game probably was. But it certainly feels like someone could make the argument that the more pages the better.
I guess I need to interrupt myself to add that I'm not entirely sure this is what's happening this game. I've seen a couple posts that make me think or at least I presume they would if I really wanted to think about them. It's not really fair for me to make a definitive statement either way. I know that's hard to do because...well I'm kind of using this thread as my mouthpiece. At the same time it is fair and reasonable I think (see: what I said about how I think people should be able to play how they want to play). That aside, the evidence that this is happening in this game can be seen by the fact that we are at page 37 in less than 24 hours. That seems...excessive...Of course, I leave the judgement out of it. Perhaps I do go back and look, perhaps not. But I think it's important to make clear that while I'm probably talking about this game, I think I'm giving myself enough space to say that I'm not really talking about this game (or any specific game, just the game in general).
Anyways, I've meandered a bit so I'll just cut right to it now - the problem that I have isn't that we've decided that we need to communicate in this way (this way = more posts the better). If that's the way people want to play and think it's a good idea to play, by all means. Rather, it's that the process of doing this has degraded that I feel has degraded the way we transmit meaning and communication. What do I mean by that? I think there's information being lost when people go from wallposting to breaking up that wallpost into 50 different single line thoughts. OK, arguably the ultimate meaning is still there and readily available to be interpreted. What is lacking instead is the reasoning for me.
I think reasoning is so fundamentally important in mafia because it informs every decision people make (well at least I would to think that). Mafia as a game is interesting because it is a "team" game where you don't act as a team but play as an individual. As a result, how one reasons because incredibly important in finding a consensus so that you can act as a team as best as possible. The way in which people interpret and think about the game informs how they act and how they post. Every decision you make in voting comes down to how you reason about the game. The essence of mafia I think boils down to taking 13 or whatever number different people talking about how "we" should reason to find out who is mafia. Largely that comes down to thinking about behavior. How do we interpret behavior and connect that to alignment?
I feel like there's two paths I can go down here. One is how I think about playing mafia (i.e. how do we find the mafia?), the other is more closer to where I started/ended this. What do I mean by lacking reasoning? Why should we care if people lack reason in what they say? I'm not sure what I want to do so I guess I will conclude with this. Both are interesting avenues and are relevant. We'll see which one I decide to go on first.
Later
This post made me think about what I've talked about so far and want to talk about so I'm quoting you to remind myself to think about lurking within this framework I'm thinking about. Namely how this concept of "lurking" interacts with posting and posting volume and how it relates to reasoning and behavior. Thanks for bringing this up!
Sure, after work
Jalmont the long and short of it is that longer posts are more curated and are inherently seen in a better light in the lens of content creation and are therefore easier to use as scum to gain town cred that the content itself might not deserve
The short and quick posting style is an excellent way to convey tone while also creating room for mafia to slip their alignment.
There's always a place for longer posts and descriptive analysis but their needs to be a purpose behind it rather than just big posting for the sake of big posting. In contrast, small posting for the sake of it allows you to demonstrate tone and short focus quips that create more behavioural evidence for others to read you on later.
Unfortunately if everyone big posts all the time and limits their post volume there just doesn't end up being enough to read people on outside on content, in the form of content that most easily allows for scum deception.
The short and quick posting style is an excellent way to convey tone while also creating room for mafia to slip their alignment.
There's always a place for longer posts and descriptive analysis but their needs to be a purpose behind it rather than just big posting for the sake of big posting. In contrast, small posting for the sake of it allows you to demonstrate tone and short focus quips that create more behavioural evidence for others to read you on later.
Unfortunately if everyone big posts all the time and limits their post volume there just doesn't end up being enough to read people on outside on content, in the form of content that most easily allows for scum deception.
Oh also you get a lot more pvp interaction when you post more which is inherently valuable