thread: 2015-03-23 : The Vengeful Demon of the Ring as a Con Game
On 2015-03-23, plausible.fabulist wrote:
I find this considerably more irritating than I found the among-friends version, and it would seriously deter me from attending such a con.
The among-friends version you posted earlier seemed innocuous enough. It put the burden of responsibility on the "witting players" (aka the players) to decide which of your friends would not-in-principle-mind, or be amused-after-the-fact, with the fact that they were involved in a thing, or anyway otherwise somehow to decide that this is a thing that works.
In this version, what comes across to me is "strangers will be playing games at you without telling you what they are doing; don't allow yourself to be made uncomfortable." I do see that "never let the possibility... make you do anything that makes you..." is different than "don't be...", but the tortured circumlocution doesn't seem to materially alter the sense that the burden of responsibility is placed here upon the mark.
This isn't primarily an ethical concern as such; I have no essential problem with the fact that the waiter in a restaurant who sets your glass down while you're playing Icehouse, thereby altering the playing field crucially, is, by your definition, an "unwitting player." The fact that you're playing a secret game involving X which X doesn't know about doesn't fundamentally alter, I guess, which actions you take towards X are ethical and which are not.
But it just seems like the announced possibility of secret games introduces a kind of noise into social relations that's going to, in the aggregate, make the atmosphere of the con less fun and more creepy. Is that person who is complimenting you, asking a favor of you, confiding in you, doing so in good faith, or as part of a secret game? The balance of I-Thou to I-It relationships is going to be shifted by making other people tokens and random-number-generators.
Games with "unwitting players", after all, abound. Pick-up artists are the obvious first example that springs to mind. I have the sense that the difference between a pick-up artist on the one hand and a swinger on the other hand has to do with gamification and an "unwitting player". It's one thing to have a human interaction for its own sake; another to decide, together, to keep score. But there's a fundamental power asymmetry when one side is keeping score, and concealing that fact.
This makes VB go "Interesting, thanks!"
