It is incredibly difficult for me to tackle the "What if literally everything is theater?" angle without a more specific criticism.
You've brought up me talking with with fferyllt a few times now, so maybe it is worth explaining the history here.
The most important game in understanding me as a town player is
Dystopia!, which fferyllt modded.
This game was the first one where my absolute obsession with winning came out. I spent day after day after day constantly pouring back through the ISOs of every single player, asking questions, demanding explanations, etc. I was a universal TR, all of the town let me unilaterally pick the vote, and I tunneled one player (Elbirn) who just refused to engage with the game. I singlehandedly blew two miselims, and we lost. I was devastated. This game has haunted me for years. This was the game that drove me to swap my style around completely to accommodate others.
There were entire pages of me talking to myself, alone, while ffery would post thing like
this: "Everyone but Prism has been prodded.
"
Where I saw a town I catastrophically failed and shut out by being too demanding, others like Regfan and fferyllt, saw a strong town player that simply needed a bit more help.
By the time I came back to forum mafia in 2020, I had entirely swapped my approach, leading to posts like
this one where I describe my goals as a player.
I ran into fferyllt again in illicit substances mafia. We exchanged this sequence of posts:
In post 295, morph the cat wrote:Now we live in a world where I have to actually content-sort Prism... assuming content arrives.
I really don't see the game as of yet being toxic or very long, and so apathy seems a little pre-mature.
Come shine for me, Prism.
In post 508, morph the cat wrote: In post 497, Prism wrote:I don't think my
454 comes close to answering your (Bell's) questions without really committing myself to more than I feel in reality.
I do want to challenge the morph townread. Taking a strong scum presence is likely to be extremely important this game-you can't just sit on the backfoot. Ffery might legitimately be excited to get to play with me, but the motivational "Shine!" stuff feels a bit off to me. I definitely started off a bit more confident in
Dystopia but the focused, obsessive play came much later. In
Midscummer Night's Dream it never really happened at all, though it's hard to separate mine and nancy's effort because we didn't really sign.
I can see why they probably liked my Dystopia play, but honestly that game is more vivid to me because I
singlehandedly lost my team the game
with my intensity.
Do they actually want me to shine or are they just saying it? I don't really know. I think the pressure for content is okay but perhaps overwrought.
Prism, I want to play with that person. You were impressive despite the loss. You went up against scum-Jingle in an anonymous alt, which I wouldn't wish on anyone, and you came that little bit short mostly due to a town that flaked way more than you deserved.
Though modding that game did help me eventually see scum-Jingle in a different anonymous alt in an anon game I played a few weeks later. Mostly because the play was identifiable Jingle as well as scum-Jingle after having a ringside seat for a few weeks.
This exchange, and the expectations ffery seemed to have for me, was a huge part of what threw me into such a gigantic depression, and in the end I shut down entirely and flaked from the game.
Fferyllt realized I really didn't like this, backed off from it and didn't press me so hard the next time we played in Xenoblade (very limited interactions), or when she rolled scum against me in 2181. I really appreciated that. But I know she still thinks it, I know she wants to see me the Dystopia-Prism come out, and in some ways it has. Some things haven't changed. I still get overemotional, obsessive, and can be difficult to keep up with. But there's a very real difference here, which is that I will do
whatever it takes
to help set up the other town players for success.
I don't think ffery looks at my increased willingness to defer or my drive to work with others and thinks it's a bad thing, which is where the joke in
1813 comes in. But Dystopia was a mistake, there are better ways to do things, and I have spent years stewing on that game thinking how I could have gotten more out of Elbirn/Mulch, rather than making the game "Shut up and vote who Prism wants" and blaming them when I get it wrong.
All of that said, this game is not Dystopia, despite the parallels. None of you are Elbirn or Mulch, and the history does not matter. And fundamentally, all that matters is that we win, this is not some grand test of my mafia philosophy, and I don't think ffery would disagree that I've made improvements since 2017.
