thomblake comments on Open Thread: August 2009 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: taw 01 August 2009 03:06PM

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Comment author: Risto_Saarelma 04 August 2009 10:35:03AM *  4 points [-]

The Unpleasant Truth Party Game

I wanted to make this idea a new post, but apparently I need karma for that. So I'll just put it here:

The aim is to come up with sentences that are informative, true and maximally offensive. Each of the participants comes up with a sentence. The other participants rate the sentence for two values, how offensive it is on a scale from 0 (perfectly inoffensive) to 1 (the most unspeakable thing imaginable), and how informative it is from 0 (complete gibberish or an utterly obvious untruth) to 1 (immensely precise and true beyond question). As with any real-world probabilities, exact 0 and 1 should probably be avoided, but anything arbitrarily close to them is fair.

Each sentence is scored by it's offensiveness score Q and its truthfulness score P. The total score of the sentence is P * Q. This will give a higher score the more the statement is both true and offensive.

Coming up with absolute probabilities and calculating the score formula might be a bit hard for a tabletop game. A variation could have the players just ordering the sentences on offensiveness and truthfulness tracks, assign 1 to the top item each, 2 to the next and so on, multiply the two values for each sentence. In this variant, the lowest score wins.

In the ordering game, getting a good position on either track should beat an average position, 4 * 2 = 8 < 3 * 3 = 9.

Could this be made into an actually playable game? How many sessions could you play and still have a social circle?

Comment author: thomblake 04 August 2009 02:03:29PM 0 points [-]

meh. The "say something maximally offensive" game is nothing new, and I'm not sure there's a lot to be gained here.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 05 August 2009 12:10:45AM 0 points [-]

It isn't just shock value; it isn't just "say something maximally offensive".