Shamelessness as a strategy (2019)

Summary

I’ve enjoyed playing a game called Avalon recently. I won’t go too far into the rules, but it’s a hidden role game in the vein of Secret Hitler or Werewolf, where one team is “good”, trying to uncover who among them is “evil”, before the evil team wins. One of the characters you can play is Merlin. Merlin knows who the evil players are, but can’t reveal what he knows, because the evil team can kill Merlin and win the game. So Merlin relies on another character, Percival, to be his decoy. Percival’s only power is that he knows who Merlin is. So he secretly watches Merlin’s actions throughout the game and amplifies those signals to the rest of the group. The typical strategy is for Percival to attract attention away from Merlin and towards himself. But another, riskier strategy is for Merlin to play as though he is Percival. In this case, Merlin displays what he knows so shamelessly that he throws everyone off. The evil team, believing that no Merlin would be stupid enough to put himself out there like that, figures he must be Percival, and writes him off. The Merlin-as-Percival strategy is bold, because it blatantly defies our expectations about how the game is won. To pull it off, Merlin must create confusion around his actions. He needs the other players to feel unsure about whether he’s being incredibly stupid or incredibly smart. Increasingly, I think the “shameless” approach is becoming a dominant strategy today. It was first popularized in modern canon by Paris Hilton, who played the “dumb blonde heiress” stereotype so smoothly that everyone assumed she really was as stupid as she seemed. Paris didn’t play by the “obvious” rules for famous people. She was widely derided by both media and her peers as at best, a train wreck, and at worst, a self-serving aggrandizer. And yet, people couldn’t stop talking about her. A decade later, Paris is now remembered as the mastermind behind the playbook that’s made the Kardashians, Jenners, and other celebrity socialites so ...