Wait what, Otter's allowed to post in a thread about civility?
Mainly wanted to address Meep's post. Because I like chess, I'm going to use that as an example. Let's look at a couple guys who like to play chess.
Billy thinks it's neat and likes to play, without really worrying about actually winning or trying too hard because that'd just be too much stress for a game that's supposed to be fun (it's a
game after all, right?). He makes moves for whimsical reasons, citing "instinct" and gut feeling, and if he happens to lose then he just figures it wasn't his lucky day and doesn't worry about it.
Bob likes to play too, but actually derives a lot of the pleasure from his struggle to win; in competitive matches, he reliably makes moves that he thinks will help him win, and if they turn out badly then he will remember that failure and actively avoid repeating it. Typically, he will be completely satisfied with a match that he's lost, because it's easier to learn from a player who's better than you. Although all his focus is on playing to win,
actual victories aren't important in and of themselves; Bob could play against a bunch of ten-year-olds and rack up wins if he wanted, but there wouldn't be any point. He's not playing
for wins, he's playing to win, and that means seeking stronger opponents and, yes, mixing up his strategies in search of new combinations so he won't end up pigeon-holing himself into one game plan.
Eventually, Bob's going to have worked out a fairly complex system in his mind governing his behavior in a given game. He will have a general idea of how to act in reaction to another player's moves. He knows that some things just never work, and he avoids these. If he plays against Billy repeatedly, and Billy keeps leaving his queen-bishop pawn open to Bob's knight sometime in the midgame, Bob's going to keep taking the pawn and forcing a fork that will eliminate Billy's rook and give Bob a significant advantage in the game, which Billy will often find insurmountable.
Billy will start to notice that Bob's strategy seems pretty consistent, and he's got two choices: start playing more like Bob's playing and actually learn not to repeat previous mistakes in an effort to improve his game, or decide that that's too much of a hassle and Bob's just being a dick for playing the same boring way every time. If he goes with the former, he could start playing at Bob's level fairly quickly and learn to adapt to a game that will soon be changing with each match, as the players adapt to each other's usual strategies and are consequently forced to experiment even more. If he doesn't feel like trying that hard and just wants to keep playing as he's been playing, he's going to keep losing and Bob will probably not be too interested in playing with him anymore.
Unless Bob doesn't have any other friends.
Then it gets ugly and I hope it's clear enough why. In a game like Mafia, where you need a whole gaggle of people to play, you are going to run sharply into the fact that one set of players is actually playing a completely different game from the rest, and the basic response of "Well, they should go find others of their kind to play with" doesn't
work here because there aren't any more. I mean, you could hit up some other online community, but frankly that's a doomed endeavor from the start for reasons I don't have to get into.
Is Mafia exactly like chess? No, it's got the luck element (and luck factors in
even more heavily, to the point of dominating the game actually, when most players are of the casual variety, and particularly in role-heavy setups; see FFT), and that means the players actually paying attention to game theory and maximizing their chances of winning (winning the game
they were under the impression they were playing, that is) aren't anywhere near guaranteed to get affirming results from their effort. Moreover, it's got the social element, and it's not all that surprising to see that casual players are going to get ticked off at rambling competitive players throwing their damn rules at them all the time.
My problem with the whole "playing the game the right way" thing isn't so much that it's a bad philosophy. Good play is always better than bad. However, people seem to use it as a shield for when they make bad moves. "Well, I was completely, one hundred percent wrong, but it's not my fault because it followed good play! In fact, I'm actually right in this situation and YOU'RE wrong because (etc)"
Bullshit. Patting yourself on the back for good play when you make a mistake, using it as a blanket for your failure is pitiful. I don't even really mean common, understandable mistakes. There are egregious, stupid mistakes that can be made and covered for under the good play safety net.
Actually, the player here is probably trying to justify his earlier decision in an effort not to get lynched. Let's say he contributed to a lynch train that turned out to be on a townie; this player wants to show exactly what his reasons were for being a part of that, because it's his assumption that he's going to fall under heavy suspicion and wants to preempt that. It only makes sense, to him, that the players who presented legitimate, pro-townie reasons for acting the way they did should fall under less suspicion than those who didn't provide any such reasoning; if a player had just pitched in a vote "on gut instinct," well, that's looking pretty shady once the flip's up. Right?
The casual player's response? "Bullshit! You screwed up and now you won't even admit it!" So what can our player do now? Apparently, actually justifying a vote with a reason that makes sense to you is perceived as "covering up" for your mistake. Now you're gonna get lynched and the people who didn't speak up are gonna be fine! I understand this mentality, too, because it's hard to respect a system of game theory that never seems to produce good results (since, y'know, the games actually played in the vicinity are all way too random and casual for these results to start manifesting) and besides, these guys who proclaim that they adhere to this playing-to-win competitive mentality start looking a whole lot like... an empowered minority. Which is
exactly what town's trying to hunt. This emotional reaction happened to me all the time when I played, I got suspicious of Alex constantly just because I knew he probably understood the game better than I did. That fact alone made him automatically unpredictable and untrustworthy. Was this rational? Hell no, but it was unavoidable when I was playing in a game with a bunch of people who weren't really playing too seriously and then Alex.
So, no, Mafia's not like chess, and a casual culture often means that anyone playing competitively could be at a
disadvantage depending on the whimsy of the crowd. Or he could pull out a win, instead -- for no particularly good reason. Somebody playing to win isn't going to find this satisfying at all, and without a larger pool of like-minded individuals to play with, he hasn't got a lot of recourse. He
wants to play that hardcore Mafia game, with people relying on the tried-and-true methods for victory and acknowledging the legitimacy of his thought processes when he invokes one of these policies. As for the rest, they're having fun playing a game that basically resembles a chatroom filled with random insanity-chatter and Hatbot rolls. It's not too far from text-based Mario Party. If it's fun, make no mistake, nobody wants you to stop having fun. Fun is great. People get it from different things, though, and personally I can't stand Mario Party.
This got super long and I don't know why.
tl;dr: different people get their enjoyment out of the "game experience" through different approaches to the game, and it is pretty silly to keep butting heads and insisting that you are right. "You're not even really playing the game at all" vs. "Yeah well at least I'm having fun" isn't going to get anyone anywhere, because the casual players
are having fun with the game they've chosen to play, and the competitive players are
also having fun playing to win. I think it's lame to see one game try to be two games at once and cause frustration on both sides, over and over. I don't really have any solution, I will just close by saying you should try your best not to take personal offense at anything somebody says in a social game. I can almost guarantee you that they didn't actually mean anything by it outside of that contrived context. Also, more people need to play me in chess, it's awesome and doesn't have these problems.
