In post 1416, Prism wrote:I got tangled up in an ego war which helped no one, and it was largely my fault.
Okay.
So technically, by sharing this secret with you right here in the now, I could be shooting myself in the foot. By saying this right now, I could be opening the door to scum successfully tricking me by mimicking this tactic, by using this against me at some future point in the game.
But I don't care.
You need to listen to this post. Promise you, this is a post you want to listen to, because this isn't about me.
It's about you.
You absolutely have nothing to be ashamed of by entering into an ego war.
Nothing at all.
In fact...that was MY goal all along.
Because ego wars have a funny way of making a player's alignment more obvious to me. I engaged in an early one with drealmerz. I exited with a townread on him. In fact, most of my townreads this game have been from an ego war--Gin I believe I had one. And now, with you, I have had one, and the result as of right now? Is, in fact, a townread.
I call this the magical power of talking. Just talking. That was why I was talking the way I was during the early parts of the game. It was, in a sense, bait for an ego war: me to show off
my
alignment to everyone, and also, by entering into an ego war, for me to get the alignment of those I debated, those I combated with.
Not all fights need lead to violent, neverending conflict. In fact, most fights resolve with both parties happy at the outcome. Because through the magic of talking, just talking, even--no, ESPECIALLY--in what feels like an ego-fueled rampage, we get to come to a common understanding of each other. You know how in Bleach, Ichigo Kurosaki said that whenever he clashed blades with someone, he just kinda...got to
know
them? That's not some mystical anime protagonist power. It's an actually real thing we do. It's just that instead of fighting with blades, we do it with our works.
We have conflict. We express our viewpoints, our emotions, our baseline beliefs, through these conflicts. And through these conflicts, we can better get to know one another. And from this better knowledge base, from this understanding, we generate increasingly more accurate reads. So to you, what was a useless exchange that helped nobody?
Was quite the opposite to me. It's helped me a lot, and gotten me to be an ally for you. When others come online to read (namely, players like Nacho), they, too, will back me up on this, that you're town. (They already know I'm town.) This exchange showed your alignment. You didn't think it did. But for me, now I see more or less what amounts to a town picture, and not a scum picture.
So you're town. We've gained that much. Talking is an effective scumhunting tactic. The words may get heated, even vitriolic. But they weren't worthless. They had meaning. They had purpose. They had intent. Perhaps not the meaning that you had intended, but existing all the same.
