(This was written back in early November, and some of the references refer to matters as they stood back then, or posts written by Anon back then.)
I apologize in advance for the length of this, but this is like trying to keep track of the claims of George Santos: it is long. complicated and ugly. When you review the history of this telecommunications rule, you quickly conclude that the real problem is not a ruling but the ruler. It's not a matter of "What did he do wrong?" It's more like "Did he do anything right?" As he constantly reminds us, there is a dark spirit that lies within, and it has made a baffling, muddled mess of this situation with a stew of dogmatism, ineptitude and sneakiness with a side order of bias.
Like most of you, I never gave the rules more than a glance the last number of years, even when I was running a contest. When I saw the "telecommunications" phrase, I thought it was a old-fashioned way of saying "Internet." After all, it was part of a rule about reference materials. I considered running a contest as one of the prices a winning team had to pay for winning the contest, along with paying to mail the trophy to the next winner. Do the minor accounting, keep track of the scores, make a couple observations, congratulate the winners, make a decision on the rare occasion one was necessary. I thought this mostly a housekeeping chore, not a power.
During these exchanges, it has become clear the current gamerunner views himself not as a houseminder but Lord of the Tournament, more like Chairman Xi (or maybe a more tyrannical Miss Grundy) than bookkeeper. His disparagement of democracy and any other such affront to his personal rule goes without saying, but let me point out some other similarities.
2011: A Bad YearLet's go back to 2011. It is discovered that the ever-present time lag issue can be exploited with a cell phone. So what does Chairman Anon do? He bans all telecommunications besides the Buzztime app in the bar! No explanation of the change, no request for comment. Doesn't this seem just like a Chinese COVID lockdown order?
There are good reasons why rule-making agencies explain changes and request comments: it catches overlooked mistakes and problems. There was none of that here, so no one got the chance to point out any problems, like these:
He banned the wrong thing: If you want to make an activity illegal, you make the activity illegal. This rule does not make use of a time lag illegal. It does not even mention the words "time lag"! So what does it do instead? It does not prohibit the action; it prohibits the instrument. It is like trying to stop drunk driving, not by making drunk driving a crime, but by banning cars.
He illegalized wetware: The core principle of the initial anti-computing rules was "Answers should only come from human heads" It's simple, clear, and it covers computers and time lag and split schedules. Illegalizing "telecommunications" does something quite different: It makes otherwise legitimate wetware illegal. People providing answers is no longer good enough; it must be people providing answers inside the bar. Wetware used to be equal; with this rule, some wetware is more equal than others. Why? What is the difference between getting an answer from someone over at the next barstool and getting that answer from someone over the phone? If the principle is "Answers should only come from human heads," the answer is "Nothing."
Isn't that an awfully big change for a housekeeper to make, especially without explaining the need for it or asking for comment or even pointing out the change?
Poor English: The phrasing and arrangement of this rule is also poor. All versions of the rule clump in telecommunications with reference materials, categorizing people as a type of reference material. The original 2011 version at least conveys the writer's fervent desire to ban anything and everything not originating in the bar . Later versions do not:
2011: All answers must be solely provided by the collective brainpower of the assembled team at the location without the use of any reference materials of any kind (or telecommunication from outside the location).
2015 and after: As has become customary for this tournament, it is for wetware teams only. This means no computers and no references of any kind are to be used during gameplay, either paper or electronic (or telecommunication from outside the location).
Here is STRO reading this more recent version with a team playing remotely:
Wetware only? That's us. No reference materials? We're good to go. What's this telecommunications stuff? Well, it's part of a prohibition on reference materials, so it must be about using the Internet to retrieve answers. We're fine there, too.
A rule that can be easily misinterpreted is a bad rule. We had no idea that we were doing anything against any rules until we used the hybrid, long after we came in third place in a tournament run by the same person with the same rules.
The 2015 rules can be interpreted to ban the use of Buzztime itself (which requires both computers and telecommunications to be used during gameplay).
Finally, the writer seems to think that "assembled" means only "gathered in a single place." Not so. It can also mean "gathered for a purpose," which fits remote and hybrid play fine.
How should this have been handled?
If you want to ban the use of any technique which uses the time lag to provide correct answers, you write a rule that says "You cannot use any technique which uses the time lag to provide you, directly or indirectly, with correct answers."
If you still want to ban the use of telecommunications, you cannot ban it on the basis that it violates the "Answers should only come from human heads" principle, because it doesn't. If you want to do this competently, you come up with a different reason for the ban, and state it as a different rule. You do not bolt it on at the end of a sentence talking about reference materials, because that looks incompetent, sneaky, or both.
As a justification for this rule, we hear about a selfless sacrifice by a team not calling an ex-teammate in France around 3am for answers. Some of you might also be wondering, "This rule has been on the books all this time, why the complaint now?"
The problem with bringing "Phone-a-friend" from Millionaire to Buzztime is not that it is evil but that it is not effective. All that matters when you get an answer from elsewhere, good, bad or indifferent, is the amount of time it takes you to get the answer from whoever wherever compared to the amount of time the game gives you to enter an answer. Parsing then conveying at least the gist of a question over the phone, then (usually) relaying the answer from the phone is time-consuming (and also occupies the attention of a second player), so giving that up is not any big sacrifice. While it can sometimes work in Showdown, which has longer intervals and rounds with no timed point reduction, it is inefficient even for Showdown and ineffective for the other, faster-paced games. That would have gotten old quick for FROG croaking out answers, especially when the croaking would start at 2:30am local time.
So for most of the time since the rule's creation; it prohibited an ineffective activity. It was a dead letter rule.
On the other hand, Zoom, etc. is much, much better than a phone for getting an answer from somewhere else. Fully remote play with Zoom has no time issue. and you can hear answers from multiple people at the same time. The Hybrid at Herrill's is far less efficient than fully remote at home, but it's still better than the phone. Zoom is a much more credible Terror from Beyond the Bar than any phone.
2022: A Worse OneMoving on . . . after the French lament, we suddenly get this pivot and the gamerunner tells us that telecommunications is actually OK . . . when my team needed it during COVID, as long as we don't play using it in a tournament with The Rule (which is beginning to sound like one of the Ten Commandments, only more important, by the end of the piece). But once it was back to normal for my team, it was back to me scheduling tournaments with The Rule.
I see. A crisis is over when it's over for you. Yes, you said something about a "critical mass" of sites being available. Really? What's that? Obviously can't include NYC and Washington and many other places. The only critical mass that seemed to count when you restarted was the majority of your team that voted to restart it.
Yet, the first time the Rule is dusted-off post-Covid, and the first time the Rule could have been actually used in a real situation, it wasn't. An exemption is granted to an orphaned team for the Brainbuster tournament. In October, we were told, "As I think you know, we agreed to grant your team an exemption for the Brainbuster tournament based entirely on the fact that it—alone among all of the other teams—had no actual brick-and-mortar location in NY at which to play."
The exempter goes on, "However inconvenient Herrill Lanes may be for some of you, it is an actual brick-and-mortar location at which a quorum of people play. As the basis for the exemption no longer exists, so does the exemption."
Except . . . I didn't know. There was no record of this in Scaratings or my emails, or PMs or head, so I asked. The answer we got was
"I didn't tell anyone outside of someone who asked, not even you, mostly because I did not want others to notice and I didn't want to encourage others to do the same." The only regret he seemed to have was granting the exemption, not covering it up. This is like Nixon going on national television and announcing "I ordered the Watergate break-in because I was afraid of losing the election. I guess I should have stopped the election instead."
Just to make this perfectly clear, here is a chronology:
1) Tournament is announced.
2) STRO, having no idea there is a rule banning his team's participation, applies for entry.
3) Chairman Anon, not aware that STRO is not aware of his precious Rule, decides to grant an exemption to the Rule, but does not tell STRO nor the other participants. He only puts Lighthouse in, and only discloses the exemption privately to someone who asked privately after seeing Lighthouse included on the tournament list. STRO has no idea an exemption was granted bercause he had no idea one was needed and was never told otherwise.
4) Fast forward to September. STRO comes up with Hybrid and tries it out. Chairman Anon notices, thinks Mad River has found a new home and contacts STRO by private email. STRO corrects that impression and explains Hybrid to him. Chairman Anon states that Hybrid will not be kosher for Sandbag Tournament, blaming his team for that. STRO is pretty stunned at this interpretation of the rule and starts researching history of it. STRO also prepares lenghty descriptions and justifications for Hybrid and formally requests inclusion in Sandbag to get an on-the-record decision. Chairman Anon prepares such, citing previous rules and decisions for which there is no record. STRO inquires, response reveals secret history of the exception to Rule.
So the only actual expressions of this exception is a private email to someone and the sort-of expression of a rule made after applying for a different tournament. Before going into the substance of this, a few words about the process:
this is not acceptable behavior. If there had been any mechanism for removing you, we would demanded it back then. You do not make secret decisions and implement them hoping no one will notice. You are supposed to be accountable for the decisions you make and you do that by revealing them to affected parties, no matter how whatever you think your position makes you. And no, transparent does not mean invisible. This is like Trump declassifying documents in his head. You make that kind of decision, you post it publicly. Period.
Getting back to substance, we have had an Unknown Rule and an Invisible Exemption, differing pieces of which were made known to different individual/groups at different times, but usually long after it was supposed to take effect.
Unknown Rule: To play in one of my tournaments, your entire team must go to a Buzztime location if there is one in your state and if a "quorum" can get to that location.
Invisible Exemption: The ruler may exempt a team from The Rule if the state requirement is not met.
Putting aside the unknowableness and invisibility of this, is the state requirement a good rule? No, because it chooses a nonrational basis for granting an exemption. A rational basis for an exemption could be the physical distance to a location, or the length of travel time. A state border is no impediment to travel in-and-of itself, while states can be . . . big. Buffalo is about 300 miles from New York. Cincinnati is over 200 miles away from Cleveland.
Did the former Mad River team meet the Invisible Exception to the Unknown Rule for the Buzztime Tournament?
I don't know, because the Invisible Exception as stated to somebody else in March was not the same as the one stated to all of us in October ; the March version did not mention a specific state requirement or quorum rule. Did those requirements exist in the mind of the rulemaker before October? Sorry, but I can't do telepathy and if I could, I can only assume that would also fall under the telecommunications ban if I played Showdown with it.
Back in March, there actually were a few locations in New York State. Most were a couple hundred miles away. One was closer, just a 4 1/2 hour commute under perfect conditions, but if you do not make perfect connections the instant Showdown is over (have cab there, get in cab, travel 3 miles to railroad station and get on platform . . . in about 5 minutes), you have to wait over three hours for the next train and get home at 3am. Surely no one could expect mostly elderly people to take that trip frequently for anything outside of chemotherapy, but maybe not. That was no reason not to go according to the October rules . . . except for, maybe, this quorum requirement. Now only if we knew what a "quorum" was . . . .
After a keyword scan on Scaratings, I discovered that "quorum" has been used a few times to describe at least 5/6 boxes in play for a premium game, which is the basis for calculating a location score.
This creates a Catch-22 for a team like us: if you can't get to a place in your state, you cannot see nor play the game. But if one or two of you, or maybe you and a local manage to get to a place and play six boxes, then you are disqualified because your whole team is then required to go to the bar rather than have some play remotely under this quorum rule.
But, if this rule had actually been made known to everyone with the Sandbag tournament announcement, we could have told you we would play with five boxes and you would have had no choice but to accept us under the Invisible Exception. And, unless you can show that these rules were posted anywhere outside of your imagination, we could have demanded that you include us in this tournament and calculate our scores with the top five scores as just compensation for you not following your own rules.
Unless . . . the Invisible Rule is actually the Inapplicable Rule because if the October rules apply to March (never mind ex post facto), there was a location in New York State where a few brave souls undeterred by a return trip that would challenge James Bond could travel and . . . get their team disqualified if they played a box too many. So we shouldn't have gotten that medal after all.
Are you dazed and confused enough? Is this the person you want making rules and decisions for you, especially when he keeps them under his Mad Hatter hat?
Really, folks, if your housekeeper made such a mess of things, then tried to cover it up, what would you do with him/her?
And this was a ruling that was in our favor! I apologize for wasting so much of the readers' remaining time on Earth with this, but imagine how I feel expending far more time trying to make sense of this. This is what happens when someone makes things up on the fly without thinking them out and not telling anyone.
But what matters more here is the human element. I began my discussion of Hybrid Showdown by talking about Dorothy and her wish to play Showdown again. The answer to her is "I don't care if you're over eighty years old with a bad knee and have to commute five hours to play Showdown, get thee to the bowling alley if you want to play in any tournament of mine."
Man, that's cruel. Yes, there is indeed a dark spirit that lies beneath.
It was not that way on March 15, 2020, when it was a question of how far your team had to travel to play Showdown at the beginning of COVID, when you said, "I think our closest location is Zooky's Sports Tavern in New Brighton, PA--about 1 1/2 hours from my house. I suspect it will be a tough sell for the team
." Then again, the Invisible Exception for some inconceivable reason implicitly precludes interstate transport. But if it didn't, I'm sure some new Unseen Invention would have popped up.
Would it have been reasonable to have expected anyone to travel so far, especially at the dawn of COVID? No, of course not, that would have been inhumane. But so is insisting on this from people with no nearby place to play due to the consequences of COVID.
Why?When you go through this, you keep asking yourself, "What could be the reason, the motivation that compels such slavish adherence to this bar fetish?" This is more than "This is the way we've always done it." This is more like preventing blasphemy and sacrilege.
I asked for reasons, but what I got was fears. A lot of fears, lightly disguised, but still fears. Fear that some Zoomatics would fiendishly recruit Ken Jennings or James Holzhauer or some world coalition to join them
(read to beat Red Fox). Fear that other teams could use this to gang up on Danny K's (
read Red Fox). Fear that somebody somewhere might be looking up answers somehow somewhere off-camera
(read to beat Red Fox)Some of this could easily be handled by a rule: You could specify that a player could only play on one team per tournament. Some of this is just prejudice; to presume that people playing remotely are more prone to cheat than those playing at a bar is just the same-old Fear of the Unfamiliar, except the Unfamiliar isn't immigrants or blacks, but Zoomies. (You do get video on Zoom, which makes that sort of effort more noticeable, and again, it's the speed of the game that's the biggest factor here). Now maybe you're that sneaky and think everyone else is, too, but history gives us actual examples of teams using computers at the bar loudly and proudly for years. I would have far better reason than you have to say "National West Covina and Inglewood have used computers in bars. Let's ban bars from tournaments." Some is just excessive self-centeredness: if it were advertised in the media that Ken Jennings and/or James Holzhauer were playing Buzztime, that would be GREAT for the game, might even guarantee its continued existence, EVEN if it meant Red Fox losing a tournament.
But if you're afraid of being knocked off your pedestal, if anything new or different might be a threat to the status quo, lots of things look like threats. Ask Chairman Xi.
A corollary to this fear is the desire to protect your group by preventing others from gaining the same advantages through other means that you currently enjoy . Red Fox has an unusually large contingent of players, which is rarely if ever matched by its competitors. While I think Zoom, etc. is self-limiting when it comes to creating mega-numerous teams (see
https://www.rieti.go.jp/en/special/p_a_w/177.html for some research on this) , it certainly could be used to create bigger, better teams.
And if it did, so what? Isn't that the nature of competition? If something new would be good for the game but bad for your team, do you say, "Let it be," or do you ban it?
I took a look at Red Fox's statistics to get an idea as to what those advantages are. What you notice immediately is that there are far more boxes playing Brainbuster than Showdown: usually 25-31 for Brainbuster, (as many as 40), 15-20 for Showdown. It's very, very unlikely that the extra Brainbuster players regularly decide to go home after that game. It is very, very unlikely that Red Fox has 25+ boxes and a bunch are put away at 8:30. It's possible that some or all of the excess boxes are players' second boxes, but photos of the Red Fox team show rather more than 15-18 players. The most reasonable assumption is that the number of boxes playing Showdown are the current number if working boxes at the place and there are somewhat to a lot more players than boxes for Showdown.
Who gets to play Showdown? How are the excess players playing Brainbuster?
To answer the first, about a dozen handles play Showdown almost every time they play Brainbuster. About a half-dozen get to play Showdown about half the time, and about five show up regularly and almost never get to play Showdown. The doghouse bunch have handles like MIGUEL, BHUTAN, WIGINS and TREIZE. They are almost always there for Brainbuster, but almost never there for Showdown. I don't think these are second boxes, most of them have pictures rather different from those of the regular players.
Then there is the mystery of DROLL. You've heard of DROLL; he was the Napkin Hall-of-Famer who moved to Chicago. You would think DROLL would be one of those sure-to-play players, but while he was at Red Fox, he had 18 Brainbuster games to his credit in the past six months (as of early November), but had not played a single game of Showdown during that time.
Moving on, so how are the excess players playing Brainbuster, and where? There are only two possibilities:
1) Because a few players almost never get to play Showdown after Brainbuster, and a few more play sometimes, it is conceivable that some are playing remotely. If that is the case, the score patterns indicate they are not playing by themselves (their scores are often near the top), so there would have to be some form of Hybrid in operations. Is that convincing evidence? No, but when you see handles like MIGUEL and BHUTAN and WIGINS and TREIZE almost never get a chance to play Showdown while others almost always do, it makes you wonder.
2) More likely, everyone is at the bar; the excess players play Brainbuster on their phones, and most stay to provide answers in Showdown. This would be in accordance with the current rules, but let's compare what they do to what the Mad River people do in the Hybrid:
Red Fox: For Brainbuster: Play game on phone, shout out answers. For Showdown: Shout out answers to people with boxes.
Mad River: For Brainbuster: Play game on phone, shout out answers. For Showdown: Shout out answers to people with boxes.
Both groups are doing the exact same thing. The only difference is that the second group is doing it over a video link.
Does the video link somehow violate the "Answers should only come from human heads" principle? No.
Is there anything about the video link that inherently creates cheating? No.
Could the use of video threaten the status quo? Yes.
Could it be used to match quantity/quality advantages held by certain members of the status quo. Yes.
If the answer to 1 and 2 are "No," is it sufficient reason to ban a technique if the answers to 3 and 4 are Yes?
You answer that. Not ANON. Not the Fellowship. Not me.
The prevention of potential threats to Red Fox looks to be the real rationale for the slavish adherence to the dubious rule, though there seems to be more than self-interest in play here. There seems to be a visceral repulsion to the concept going back to 2011, a repulsion untempered by actually doing it when his team had no choice. There seems to be at least a hefty dose of xenophobia flavoring this, maybe more.
The main issue for me is establishing the legitimacy of these styles of remote play, not necessarily qualification for a particular tournament. Under normal circumstances, it would be reasonable to allow some time for a decision. But this person made up his mind on this back in 2011, and I didn't hear anything about getting the opinions of others when I was told "No" in September . Is there a difference between getting an answer from someone in the bar and getting that answer from someone outside the bar? He's been saying "Yes" for the last 11 years. None of the fears he listed as reasons to reject this will go away any time soon or ever, and all of his fears boil down to "This could dethrone us!" which is not a reason to ban anything. Add to that this person's actions that state "I don't even have to tell you about decisions I make that affect you!" and I have little hope that any promised review for the next tournament will be any more open to change than Chairman Xi's Party Congress.
You can't claim to be acting on the behalf of the other teams, then refuse to ask them about the issue. After you hide decisions and give us Invisible Exceptions and Unknown Rules based on Nonrational "reasons," you shouldn't then claim to "avoid arbitrariness and capriciousness." Finally, after you confess to making a decision without announcing it to the participants, it is laughable to claim to be worried about being unfair to participating teams.
Word GamesThe term "fair play" is cited a lot. It's not mentioned or defined in the rules, though by now we should expect invisible rules. My experience has taught me that when people use the word "fair," it usually means "better for me." The real issue is not "fair play," but who decides what fair play is. For instance. I have heard from multiple people the opinion that Red Fox playing with 30 or 40 people is not fair. Like beauty, fair play is in the eyes of the beholder, and when the beholder/ruler reminds you more some combo of the Mad Hatter and the Queen of Hearts more than any other giant of jurisprudence, that ought to bother you, especially when the guiding principle seems to be "What's good for Red Fox is good for America."
Nor is "fair play" the only phrase endangered by the Alice-in-Wonderland treatment. "Cheating" is another. In another rule revision slipped in without any explanation, the ruler may ban/disqualifying a team for "any form of cheating." There is no definition of cheating in even the most general sense, which means cheating is anything the Through the Looking Glass ruler feels like calling cheating. Well, yes, this does happen in the real world, usually the Third one. In contrast. competent rules define these terms so as to keep those enforcing the rules from making up reasons to support their arbitrary and capricious decisions. Not surprisingly, when asked about this, the ruler did not seem to comprehend the concept that rules ought to limit the power of the ruler.
Is it good when the person running a little contest thinks himself the sole authority? No, but it's not surprising. Is it good when that person puts the interest of his team ahead of the overall good? No, but again, not a shock. But when that power-that-be refers to past events and rulings that did not happen and those rules that actually exist are either faulty or make little sense at all, we have a bigger problem than whether or not a particular team gets to use video to play in a particular tournament. Do you really want a judge who reminds you of something out of Lewis Carroll?
I'll put it this way. The judge made two decisions about my team. One was in our favor; one was against. We find how the judge handled the one we won far worse than the one we lost. That's bad.
I understand that nobody wants to be bothered with this stuff, but that's how those who want to be bothered with this stuff get control, and that's why they want to be bothered..
So what can be done? These tournaments are a small chore, normally requiring a few minor tasks. There was no perceived need for a lot of rules governing the activity because there was usually so little to do. Unfortunately, the lack of rules has been interpreted by a few to mean, "I can do anything I want." Anything?
Many conceivable situations have no answer in our lack of rules. For instance, what if you need to get rid of someone? Let's say a gamerunner loses a tournament and says. "They cheated. We won. See you next year." What do you do, and who decides?
General consensus is a good principle to base rules upon. You can hardly have that if you aren't even told about rules and decisions that affect you. No rulemaker is perfect. Certainly it wouldn't hurt to explain changes to people and give them a chance to have their say about it? After all, this is America, not China.
More thoughts about this in future posts. Thank you for your patience.