thomblake comments on Open Thread: August 2009 - Less Wrong
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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?
meh. The "say something maximally offensive" game is nothing new, and I'm not sure there's a lot to be gained here.
It isn't just shock value; it isn't just "say something maximally offensive".