Mini Normal 1823 - Game Over

[mastin2]

I enjoyed reading Mastin's analysis in the dead thread. It all made perfect sense, but left me wondering why I find this game so difficult when [SHE] makes it sound so easy.

The answer is: experience.
Between alts, hydras, and games that have been wiped from existence thanks to rollbacks, I've got over 200 games of experience.
There was a great video I listened to once. I wish I could remember enough of it to find it again (a quick browse of TVTropes, where I found it from, isn't showing it where I thought it would be), but basically, the video told about how this one guy took on the persona of a fortune teller, I believe it was.
And people would come in. At first, he would have to ask a lot of questions to get an idea for the person. With tricks, he would be able to get more and more specific, until he was able to identify their problem. He kept doing this over the course of a single day. And at the end of the day, he had gotten so good at it that when a lady walked in--without her saying anything--he was able to (accurately) tell her, "You recently lost your husband" (I believe it was that, anyway), and that is more or less the progression I went through to read players.

Given enough games, I can just look at a person. Never played with them before! And I can just guess facts about them from what they've said. Things like if they're an alt, and if not, how new they are. Things like how long they've been playing. Things like how cynical or idealistic they are. How they think, how they operate. Will it give me a perfect picture, no. But it's good to know.

It's not something which can really be taught. You can be shown the basics, walked through them step-by-step like I did in there, showing how I'd go about it. You can then use those basics to get started, to guide you through the process. But it's only through experience that you're able to actually let these skills sink in.

Try it for a while.
It won't work at first, but keep trying it. Keep trying it, and see what you get right and what you get wrong. Experience does the rest.

[mastin2]

sad part is my gut sr's were right and my logical ones were wrong...

Speaking as a veteran of the game:
While first and foremost, I tell people not to lie...
...A little, ah...

exaggeration

...here or there can be helpful from time to time.
In particular: my experience has taught me that trusting gut is right 90% of the time, and that you should just go for it.
You don't want to lie about doing this (seriously, no matter what, DO NOT MAKE UP REASONS, even for a gut read; it will only make you look worse), though you'll need more than "because, gut?" in order to be persuasive. It might seem like a catch-22, where you can't convince people using gut but you can't get away with lying, however, I've found workarounds to that.
Namely, if you can find specific posts to point to that your gut is particularly triggering on, you can do that; if you can't find any and it's just an "in general" thing, try to find a different way of explaining: "Their tone feels artificial", "their posting doesn't look like it is furthering a town wincon", "their interactions look stifled", etc.
Now, granted. You could argue that all of the above are just different ways of saying "gut".
But they

sound

better, so you can be more persuasive when using them.

In short: if you're faced with the dilemma of choosing between a gut read you can't explain and a logical read you can, go with the gut read and find a way to explain it, rather than falling back to the logical read.

This is my quick-patch version.
(My more advanced theory version delves into the idea that logic/gut stem from the same thing if you trace the root back far enough, though that's a little harder to explain succinctly.)