Decision Booth

I'm going to start with where my head was at going in to this tribal. I thought that my vote was mostly between dolphin and fennec, but I had serious concerns with both of their games and I was really looking for strong answers from either of them to sway me. Dolphin felt like he had played a stronger strategic game, relying on his under the radar status to constantly be able to wriggle out of elimination and subtly pushing the votes in the direction he wanted. Fennec felt like he had played a much much stronger social game, with strong relationships that he could rely on in order to not have to worry about elimination and play the game from the top. He did this while the whole time not seeming like a threatening player that needed to be taken out in the same way that pika or I did.

The main problems I had with dolphins game were all related to inactivity, which I believe he benefited from a great deal in the sense that it lowered his threat level in the same way that lurking in mafia as scum makes you less likely to be limmed. I needed to make sure that this behavior wasn't intentional and if it wasn't I needed acknowledgement from him that this had benefited him and a strong statement how even if we ignored that his threat level was lowered by frequently not being here, he still had played a better game than two people who had been here the whole time.

The main problem I had with fennecs game was it felt that at many points this game he had been a passenger, letting the game play out without actually influencing it. I needed to hear from him about how that was not the case, and how the game would have looked different if he hadn't been around and influencing the game strategically.

I had not ruled out the possibility of voting for ermine but I thought she needed quite a FTC performance for me to see her social game as better the fennecs and her strategic game as better than either of the other two options. It really felt as if she had just gone with the flow and been carried by stronger players the whole game. I would need her to conclusively demonstrate to me that this was not the case, and that she was behind some of the strategic moves made by her alliances and behind the connections that tied them together. This would be a particularly hard sell for me as a person who had been a part of many of those moves and alliances who had the impression that she was not really the driving force of either.

During the questioning I chose to focus in on these weaknesses from the players and their answers to me were what I based my vote on. In particular, I was frustrated with dolphin's inability to engage with my questioning and I wasn't able to get from him what I needed, which was an acknowledgement of the inactivity as either an intentional or unintentional advantage, and a concrete argument about why I should overlook it. I really needed to hear that understanding of how his position was shaped by his inactivity and I needed him to be able to tell me why I should overlook it to vote for him over the others despite it. I never got that. Instead I got told that I was being disingenuous and constant attempts to reframe the question as if I was being completely unreasonable for thinking that someone who missed two important deadlines (which he had 24 hours to complete) was not inactive compared to the other players in the game.

I wrote this before dolphins last message so I will edit this in to talk about it. It was a better answer than his previous ones and if we had had more posts or if it had happened earlier in the process maybe we could have interrogated it more, but at that point in the process I had already basically decided to vote fennec because of his answers to my questions about strategy and didn't really feel like there was enough there to change my vote. 

Fennec on the other hand impressed me with his answers about strategy. In particular I liked his answer about how his strategy was to use me as a shield and take me out pretty much the whole way, and I had been missing the context the whole game about exactly how close his relationship with ermine was, and keeping that information from me was also a strong move on his part that ended up being critical for him getting here. I think he played a beautiful middle of the road game, and his answers to my questions helped shore up what I saw as the weak spots.

It's therefore with great pleasure that I cast my vote for Fennec Fox to win Adorable Critters survivor.