I want to be clear that it’s not having rituals and taking them seriously that I object to. It’s sending the keys to people who may or may not care about that ritual, and then castigating them for not playing by rules that you’ve assigned them. They didn’t ask for this. [...]
Nobody has any right to involve other people in a game like that without consulting them, given the emotional investment in this that people seem to have.
(with the disclaimer that—again—I am not strongly invested in the Petrov Day game as practiced, nor do I have a strong opinion on whether the mods are doing it right)
I think it is an entirely reasonable thing to do, if you are attempting to establish a high-trust community, to assume a certain level of “buy-in” among core members of said community. I think one of the things that having a high-trust community gives you, is precisely the ability to coordinate actions and activities in ways more subtle and less legible than “opt-in only” (and to be clear, I view this as a positive externality; I would like more communities to have this ability!). I think, to the extent that a community is not yet at the level where [it is common knowledge that] you can do things like this, then doing things like playing the Petrov Day game is one of the fastest (and potentially, one of the only) ways to get to that point.
I want to register that your complaint only sounds reasonable because it is applied in the abstract, divorced of any particular social context. I want to register the extent to which, if someone were to raise a similar complaint in the middle of e.g. a physical event, they would receive questioning looks at best—and that this would happen even if the complaint were in response to something along the lines of a surprise party game, something none of the participants were told would be occurring beforehand. I want to register that, even though there are elements of the above scenario that are potentially disanalogous (e.g. presumably everyone at the physical event chose to show up there) to what’s happening here, there are other elements that importantly are analogous (e.g. the mods did not send out launch codes to a random selection of members).
Or, to put it more directly:
In my opinion Chris Leong showed incredible patience in writing a thoughtful post in the face of people being upset at him for doing the wrong thing in a game he didn’t ask to be involved in. If I’d been in his position I would have told the people who were upset at me that this was their own problem and they could quite frankly fuck off.
I think you should ponder on the fact that Chris Leong did not, in fact, do this thing you said you would have done in his place. Moreover, I think you should ponder on the fact that Chris Leong was among those to whom the mods chose to send launch codes, and you were not. Finally, I think you should ponder on the fact that perhaps these two things—the difference between Chris Leong’s response and yours, and the fact that it was Chris Leong and not you to whom codes were entrusted—are not a coincidence.
In my personal estimation, I think the emails for the first Petrov Day game could probably have been clearer about the (implicit) social stakes being attached to the game. I think the mods probably sent mixed messages with their phrasing, in a way that probably did not contribute positively to the game’s debut. I think there are probably legitimate complaints to be had there; but if so they are purely with the event’s execution, rather than with the general idea of “playing games that aren’t necessarily opt-in”.
And with regards to the event’s execution—well, I’m inclined to give the mods a pass on that one. First-time executions of anything are going to be shaky; that’s (incidentally) part of why it’s valuable to conduct those first-run executions as part of a controlled, low-stakes scenario, as practice for when the stakes aren’t quite so low. Probably, if the mods had had an opportunity to iterate, to do it over again, and to learn from past attempts at doing the same thing, they would have done things differently...
On to the object level:
(with the disclaimer that—again—I am not strongly invested in the Petrov Day game as practiced, nor do I have a strong opinion on whether the mods are doing it right)
I think it is an entirely reasonable thing to do, if you are attempting to establish a high-trust community, to assume a certain level of “buy-in” among core members of said community. I think one of the things that having a high-trust community gives you, is precisely the ability to coordinate actions and activities in ways more subtle and less legible than “opt-in only” (and to be clear, I view this as a positive externality; I would like more communities to have this ability!). I think, to the extent that a community is not yet at the level where [it is common knowledge that] you can do things like this, then doing things like playing the Petrov Day game is one of the fastest (and potentially, one of the only) ways to get to that point.
I want to register that your complaint only sounds reasonable because it is applied in the abstract, divorced of any particular social context. I want to register the extent to which, if someone were to raise a similar complaint in the middle of e.g. a physical event, they would receive questioning looks at best—and that this would happen even if the complaint were in response to something along the lines of a surprise party game, something none of the participants were told would be occurring beforehand. I want to register that, even though there are elements of the above scenario that are potentially disanalogous (e.g. presumably everyone at the physical event chose to show up there) to what’s happening here, there are other elements that importantly are analogous (e.g. the mods did not send out launch codes to a random selection of members).
Or, to put it more directly:
I think you should ponder on the fact that Chris Leong did not, in fact, do this thing you said you would have done in his place. Moreover, I think you should ponder on the fact that Chris Leong was among those to whom the mods chose to send launch codes, and you were not. Finally, I think you should ponder on the fact that perhaps these two things—the difference between Chris Leong’s response and yours, and the fact that it was Chris Leong and not you to whom codes were entrusted—are not a coincidence.
In my personal estimation, I think the emails for the first Petrov Day game could probably have been clearer about the (implicit) social stakes being attached to the game. I think the mods probably sent mixed messages with their phrasing, in a way that probably did not contribute positively to the game’s debut. I think there are probably legitimate complaints to be had there; but if so they are purely with the event’s execution, rather than with the general idea of “playing games that aren’t necessarily opt-in”.
And with regards to the event’s execution—well, I’m inclined to give the mods a pass on that one. First-time executions of anything are going to be shaky; that’s (incidentally) part of why it’s valuable to conduct those first-run executions as part of a controlled, low-stakes scenario, as practice for when the stakes aren’t quite so low. Probably, if the mods had had an opportunity to iterate, to do it over again, and to learn from past attempts at doing the same thing, they would have done things differently...
...oh, wait.