to be honest, i think i actually sort of see where jake is coming from here.
starting from the premises that you should always be playing to your win condition as much as you can and that you shouldn't be playing to future win conditions, i could see a line of thinking in which not only is faking a guilty logical, but it's the
only
thing to do. falsely claiming guilties destroys both your credibility and the credibility of all guilty claims for future games, but you shouldn't be playing to future win conditions. with that in mind, if one were to truly think that someone else were scum and if falsely claiming a guilty is the quickest and most convincing way to get people to vote with you, it could be said that in order to most effectively play to your win condition you would
have
to do everything possible to get your scumread lynched, and that would mean falsely claiming a guilty.
just in case it's not clear, i do not think that this is actually a good idea. i think it just
can
logically follow from a set of premises.
First, I think that "don't play to future win conditions" isn't entirely accurate. I think a more accurate statement would be "don't play to future win conditions
instead of
your current win condition. I think that this is more accurate because it gets to the heart of the entire reason that it's a principle in the first place, trust telling. Among other possible reasons, we don't like trust telling because when someone refuses to trust tell that they're town, they throw away the game as scum for the sake of being confirmed town in future games, and this isn't fair to the scumteam in the game they refuse to trust tell in, and it's arguable not fair to the scumteam in the game that they
do
trust tell in. The person refusing to trust tell as scum is playing to a future win condition
instead of
their current win condition. To put it succinctly, it's game-breaking.
As a player, there is nothing wrong with playing to
both
your current and future win conditions, and indeed this is what most people actually do. If you care about your credibility at all beyond the purview of the game that you're currently in, you are in some sense playing to a future win condition. I don't think there's anything wrong with this, and I don't imagine many people would argue that there is.
Second, I don't have a problem with "you should always be playing to your win condition as much as you can", but I
do
think that fake-claiming guilties would be a misapplication of this. I think that as a player you should always be aware of your own strengths, weaknesses and accuracy, and take that into account.
Mathdino has the best summary of that idea, so I'll leave most of the elaboration to him. Basically, I think that failure to take into account your own accuracy when considering whether or not you should fakeclaim a guilty
would
be a failure to play to your win condition as much as you can, just the same as a deliberate refusal to take into account some piece of information in the game thread would be. Information about yourself and your own abilities is perhaps equally as relevant as information about other players.
There's a lot of things you could call it: culture, a standard, site meta, an unspoken agreement. Whatever you call it, faking a guilty is going against it, and almost universally gets people mad. You're prioritizing your own beliefs over everyone else's, bypassing the normal process of discussion, and taking advantage of people's trust on a level higher than in-game alignments. And that's all before considering whether you were even right or wrong.